Just This Once
“Ahhhh~ I burned myself out white-hot again today!”
Average concurrent viewers: over ten thousand.
The stream of Hina — a living legend among indie VTubers — was racing toward its close.
For her final segment before signing off, a lighthearted little bit called “Exploring Zero-Viewer Hako Streams,” she scrolled casually through the platform’s live list.
“Let’s seeee~ Everyone’s just playing games. Hmm, any VTubers with actual avatars?”
Her finger skimmed the list — then stopped dead.
All That Exists Is Suffering
Unknown
Huh? What kind of title is that? The thumbnail’s a pink cat, so why does the title sound like that?
Curiosity tugged at her.
The mismatch between a cute cat-eared magical girl and the word “suffering.”
“Unknown? Weird name, too. Kids, should we hop in?”
The title was so bizarre that her viewers seemed curious as well.
Hina clicked the stream.
And the moment the screen opened, the voice pouring through her speakers made her suck in a sharp breath.
— Calling something chuunibyou. The habit of labeling any statement you don’t understand as “eighth-grader syndrome” and simply stopping thought… well, it certainly is comfortable for the mind.
Holy crap. What is this voice?
A seductive mid-low register that seemed to melt straight through a person’s eardrums.
As a major-agency streamer, Hina had heard countless voices — but never a tone like this.
She’s a full-on professional voice actress.
No — her diction and presence felt better than most actual voice actors.
While Hina sat stunned, the cat-eared magical girl on screen was expressionlessly dismantling a troll.
— …Unable to grow stronger themselves, they tear others down for consolation. A textbook case of slave morality.
“Pfft—”
Hina couldn’t hold it in. She collapsed face-first onto her desk, laughing.
The avatar was an adorable pink kitty, the expression a pure rotten smirk, and the things that overwhelming voice was saying…
Having dealt with countless VTubers, Hina knew it instinctively.
This wasn’t a bit designed to be funny.
This was genuine insanity!
“Ahahahaha! Kids, I can’t breathe! What even is this stream?! Is she a professor?!”
Hina’s laughter set the chat of over ten thousand viewers ablaze in an instant.
Viewer response was excellent.
Her streamer instincts were screaming a signal at full volume.
This VTuber… had a very real shot at blowing up!
Time to get dibs early!
“Haa, haa… my stomach hurts. Tonight’s raid coords are going HERE, no question! Kids, was Professor Pink Kitty’s form not completely unhinged? Everyone, let’s go register for class!”
Without a second of hesitation, Hina dropped the coordinates — and twelve thousand viewers poured with her into the pink cat-eared magical girl’s stream.
“Fuck, what is all this.”
The words were out before I could catch them.
A curse had slipped free without my noticing.
But given the situation, who could blame me?
Viewers had suddenly surged past ten thousand, and the chat was climbing like a rocket…
Was this a bug?
Were random masses flooding into my room because of some platform glitch?
What?
Hina?
As in the Hina — Miss Jeong Eun-gyeol’s absolute favorite VTuber?
And what the hell was a “raid”?
Was the jump past ten thousand viewers because of this “raid” thing?
So much had happened so fast that my brain felt completely numb.
I forced myself to steady my nerves and cleared my throat.
“Ahem… I apologize for the language… A sudden stampede of ten thousand people is a form of violence against a small streamer… Please consider it a defense mechanism. I’m fairly certain Carl Jung himself would have let an unconscious string of curses fly in this situation…”
“…Uh, well…”
What now?
I’d planned to stream only today and be done with it — and in the blink of an eye I’d already made two hundred thousand won.
Still, actually continuing as a VTuber was a bit…
And there was no guarantee donations would keep rolling in like this today—
Ding! Dinging! Ba-ba-ba-ba-bam!
As if to mock my expectations, electronic chimes began bursting from the speakers without end.
The screen began drowning in multicolored donation effects.
From amounts in the ten-thousand-won range down to the thousands…
The sums were wildly varied.
TTS voices stacked over each other until the noise was deafening.
At the same time, I could feel the gears of reason that had been spinning so furiously begin to grind slowly to a halt.
In under five minutes, the total that had already exploded was easily in the hundreds of thousands of won.
Miss Jeong Eun-gyeol’s bank balance shimmered before my eyes.
“Ahem. It’s hard to reason properly on an empty stomach. I’ll gratefully accept the donations…”
This VTuber thing…
Might actually be doable…?
Acting cute was absolutely out of the question, but…
I dropped my voice low and leaned into the mic.
“Shall we push today’s lecture as far as Schopenhauer’s pessimism? Everyone, please open your textbooks to page one hundred twenty-five.”
The moment my voice rode out through the speakers, the already frantic chat climbed even faster.
Dropping my voice was easy enough…
Money made a salesman of anyone.
“…Schopenhauer put it this way. ‘Life swings like a pendulum backward and forward between pain and boredom.’”
I read on with my voice still lowered, then closed my mouth.
Chat was still flying, but I could feel it instinctively.
If I kept going like this, the energy would sag.
No matter how good my voice was or how fresh the concept, nothing but reading from a book would eventually bore the audience.
I shut the book.
“That concludes the theoretical portion.”
Question marks flooded the chat.
I looked into the camera and continued.
“Philosophy trapped in print is bound to be tedious. Isn’t the true philosophical text the living, moving chat window of yours right before us?”
“Shall we take an example? Just now, user NunnuNanna. You typed, ‘Haaah nuna I’m dying. Please step on me,’ didn’t you?”
“One could dismiss it as a pervert’s nonsense, but my perspective is somewhat different. Beneath this bizarre desire lies the extreme loneliness of a fragmented modern society. A modern person who has lost all true connection with others, seeking belonging and security through total domination by a cat-eared magical girl — a masochistic escape mechanism. A superb and thoroughly perverted specimen of what Erich Fromm called Escape from Freedom.”
A fairly heated reaction.
Riding the momentum, I swept my eyes over the chat again.
“Next, user OneShotLife. You asked, ‘Professor, I got wrecked by crypto today — can that be interpreted philosophically too?’”
I cleared my throat once and spoke in a voice that was barely holding back a laugh.
“Getting rekt by coins isn’t a philosophy problem. It’s an intelligence problem. Pfft.”
The response was pretty solid.
I was starting to feel a little good about this.
One more?
“Hmm… next… user RellIsADisease. You said, ‘Professor, what do I do when there are no human beings on my team in ranked? Please teach me how to control my anger.’”
“Jean-Paul Sartre said it well. Hell is other people.”
“But keep this in mind. To those four teammates suffering in that dreadful hell… you, too, are ‘other people.’ Before you blame anyone else, check your own KDA first.”
“…Thank you.”
How much had even come in today?
As I roughly ran the numbers in my head, the corners of my mouth lifted on their own.
I brought the mic back to my lips.
“Next patient — that is, next student. Questions, please.”
For roughly an hour after that, I kept the stream going, doing my best to keep the banter with chat as tight as possible.
The chat window was wallpapered in lmao’s, and the donations from Hina and several other viewers never stopped.
But no matter how sweet the money was, a live broadcast in front of ten thousand people burned through far more energy than I’d expected.
“That concludes today’s lecture. There is no homework. Everyone, please log out.”
“Tomorrow… I’ll go live at nine p.m.”
I said that much, then shut down the streaming software.
The noisy notification chimes from the speakers cut out, and silence settled over the one-room apartment.
The cat-eared magical girl on the monitor no longer moved with me; she simply smiled in her default idle pose.
“Hoo…”
I leaned back against the chair.
I’d only been talking for about an hour and a half, yet my back was soaked through and my mouth was bone-dry.
“I’ve lost my mind…”
Spouting nonsense with my meager philosophical knowledge in front of ten thousand people.
So fucking embarrassing…
But.
I clicked over to the platform’s settlement tab.
“Holy shit.”
In just one hour and thirty minutes, I’d earned an ordinary office worker’s monthly salary.
The platform would take a hefty cut, of course — but it was still an enormous amount of money.
I looked at the empty boxes for the VTuber gear piled in the corner of the room.
Today’s stream had been a memorial rite for Miss Jeong Eun-gyeol.
Tomorrow, I’d planned to list all this equipment on the secondhand market without a second thought.
…That had been the plan.
I stared at the pink cat-eared magical girl smiling brightly on the monitor and muttered under my breath.
“Miss Eun-gyeol’s will… maybe I’ll carry it on…”