A Run of Bad Luck
The roulette wheel had all sorts of missions on it, including the coveted instant clock-out prize.
Since it was essentially a prize wheel for someone who’d already placed first, it was packed with good stuff.
Things like a rest coupon, or a stream-shortening pass, or other little perks that made playing more comfortable.
And yet, out of nowhere, a drunken binge stream had popped up on that roulette wheel.
Of course, there had always been things like eating tasty food on there, too.
If you landed on one of those when the broadcast ran long, it wasn’t a bad way to change the mood, lift morale, and dive back into the game.
But alcohol was a different story.
Drinking in a situation like this?
He was supposed to stay focused, snag first place, spin the wheel, and pull the clock-out ticket—but instead he’d be chugging alcohol that would only get in the way. It was obviously a net loss.
So why on earth was that even on the roulette wheel?
“The Byeolsu kept throwing a fit, saying there had to be at least one trap in there….”
The culprit was the editor who’d been in the studio helping with the broadcast and handling the editing work.
“I snuck it in while Yura wasn’t looking, but… I had no idea it would actually get hit.”
Well, what were the odds of it really landing there?
It had been little more than a token gesture to calm the Byeolsu down after they’d been making such a racket over the lack of traps.
But it had landed.
At this point, blaming the editor felt a little cruel.
If anything, the real culprit was Kim Junsu’s rotten luck for actually rolling it.
With that shocking result, the chat room naturally turned into a festival for the Byeolsu.
Seeing Lee Harang—who they’d assumed might just be a trap card—turn out to be a surprisingly competent gamer had put everyone in a good mood.
At this rate, they’d keep steamrolling the competition, keep taking first place, and maybe even spin the roulette enough to clock out early—but then that drunken stream had barged in.
Anyone could tell that if he drank now, his focus would tank and his performance would go to hell.
It felt like the sound of a prolonged broadcast was ringing in his ears already, and the world in front of him went black.
“Ah, this is… so, uh….”
If they’d already been broadcasting for hours and it was obvious early clock-out was a lost cause, he probably would’ve just done the drunken stream and called it a day.
But the stream had barely started.
Getting drunk in that situation was enough to make his vision swim, so Kim Junsu stepped forward to clean up the mess.
“How about this?”
Once the roulette had spat it out, there was no avoiding it.
But starting a drinking session right this second was another matter.
“If we’re doing a drunken stream, we’ve got to mark it 19+, and there are still underage viewers here, right? It’s not like we’re several hours in already—we just started. Slapping on a 19+ tag out of nowhere is kind of….”
He decided to negotiate by leaning on the minors as leverage, more or less.
And it wasn’t wrong.
On Twinkle, anything involving drinking or smoking had to be tagged 19+ by platform rules.
And accounts without adult verification would be kicked out automatically.
Given how many underage viewers were watching, doing a 19+ drunken stream right now?
That would be a little much.
“Let’s just keep going for now. Once midnight passes and the date changes, I’ll switch the broadcast to 19+ and do the drunken stream then.”
“If clock-out gets pulled? Then we’ll celebrate with a drinking stream, chat a bit, play some more games, and call it there. Roughly speaking, that’d still be drinking until four or five in the morning, so by then I’d say we’d have streamed long enough, right?”
So let’s compromise at that.
With that intention clear in Kim Junsu’s voice, the Byeolsu, though disappointed, decided that was good enough.
The situation was starting to settle down.
As the finishing touch, if Kang Yura did a little fan service, things would probably wrap up neatly.
Fan service wasn’t anything special, either—she was just going to tie up her hair.
The viewers watching Kang Yura’s stream loved it when her waist-length hair was gathered and tied back.
It naturally emphasized her chest.
The nape of her neck showing between the strands, the underarms visible when she lifted her arms, all those poses full of forbidden territory—it was exactly the sort of thing the perverted degenerates known as Sinsa would go crazy for.
Well, that much isn’t a problem.
She’d been thinking of retying her hair anyway after taking it down while changing clothes, and if doing what the Byeolsu wanted helped settle the negotiation, all the better.
She was just about to reach into her pocket for the hair tie when—
Chat comments started rolling in telling her to get out of the way because they’d already seen YuraYura plenty of times.
When else would they get to see an otokonoko act cute?
Even if it wasn’t today, Kang Yura did stuff like this for fan service once in a while, and she’d already shown it earlier during the joint-stream standby, but Lee Harang was different.
They wanted to see a tomboy acting adorable while they still had the chance.
But he’s still a guy underneath, right? Wouldn’t it be better to just watch Yura’s service scene?
“Idiot! That’s exactly why it’s good! A man with that face? Ugh… I’m losing my mind.”
There were dissenting opinions, of course, but they were crushed and trampled in an instant beneath the rampage of raw Sinsa energy.
Kang Yura and Kim Junsu were both flustered by the chat’s feverish response.
“If you want stuff like that, go find a reaction-special channel. Why are you doing this in a gaming stream?”
Kim Junsu was worried that Lee Harang might feel uncomfortable, especially since he’d heard about the past earlier in the day, and Kang Yura—
……Somehow, that stings my pride.
She’d been pushed aside by a man and tossed out of the Byeolsu’s field of interest, and that left a dent in her ego.
That was when Lee Harang, who had been quietly observing the situation, stepped up.
“Sure, why not.”
If he was going to keep doing internet streaming from here on out, he’d probably need to know how to handle reactions like this.
It wasn’t exactly a reaction-special stream, but if a huge donation came in, he’d need some way to thank them in return. If he thought of this as practice for that, there was no reason not to do it.
“So what exactly do you want me to do?”
Lee Harang had already prepared himself to pull off anything they asked.
He was ready to weaponize his looks and make the Byeolsu lose their minds if that’s what it took.
He’d already been doing that ever since he invited Kim Junsu over as a repairman, so what was there to suddenly get shy about now?
At that point, the Byeolsu began arguing fiercely among themselves over what exactly they should ask him to do.
And then the verdict came down.
Honestly… wasn’t that the very definition of a Byeolsu request?
Every so often, hearing donations like this made Kang Yura question the origin of the nickname for Twinkle viewers.
Twinkle + unemployed = Byeolsu, supposedly, but honestly… maybe it wasn’t unemployed at all. Maybe it was Twinkle + negative numbers.
Anyway, the Byeolsu had spoken.
Seeing those requests, Lee Harang—who’d only just stepped into the world of internet broadcasting—could only tilt his head in confusion.
“My underarms?”
And at that, the two streamers who’d been rolling around with the Byeolsu on Twinkle were embarrassed to their bones.
“What’s so great about the armpits of a grown-ass guy like me…. Jeez. Fine, look all you want. Is this what you mean?”
Lee Harang shrugged, fully prepared to throw in a little dance like a talent show performance, and lifted his arms without a hint of hesitation, as if showing his underarms was no different from any other trivial little trick.
The Byeolsu went wild at the sight of the pale skin exposed in front of the camera.
Seeing those comments, Kang Yura couldn’t help thinking, Tch. Perverted bastards.
At the same time, she couldn’t suppress the complicated feeling that came from looking at Lee Harang—who, the more you knew him, somehow seemed even more feminine and more perfectly beautiful than an actual girl.
He doesn’t even grow useless body hair that ruins grooming?
Is that a man? Is he even human?
Through Kang Yura’s doubts and Lee Harang’s noble sacrifice of underarm exposure—if you could call it that—the situation finally settled down.
The three of them returned to their usual BlackStar Crew posture and went back to playing the game.
As if first place in the opening match had been a lie, stream snipers started swarming in after word got out, and it became harder and harder to place first.
No matter how good their shooting was, this game wasn’t like other FPS titles where all you needed was aim.
With luck on your side, you could land good gear and bulldoze people with it, or turn the whole match around with a skill or ultimate in one shot.
That was part of why the game was popular, but in a situation like this, that game design worked against the BlackStar squad.
“Our looting is really not going well, is it?”
“The snipers keep swarming us…. We can’t even loot properly.”
“Would’ve been nice if we could loot people instead.”
It wasn’t easy to play properly when stream snipers were gathering around them with one goal only: to rain garbage on the BlackStar squad’s parade.
Even with hidden queueing, they were still getting this badly sniped, and all they could do was marvel at the snipers’ sheer obsession while somehow dragging the game forward.
Thanks to that, the trio gradually settled into a rhythm, and despite all the interference, they maintained a fifty-percent first-place rate.
Out of ten games, they managed to snag five wins and earn five chances to spin the roulette.
As time passed and the three-person squad kept syncing up better and better, the Byeolsu were astonished by Lee Harang’s skill every single round, even if they could accept that the other two were naturally good at games.
If you searched through his play logs, it really did look like he hadn’t played much before, and yet he was this good.
The praise was that he could’ve done well as a pro gamer, but what good did that do now?
“Why isn’t the clock-out one coming out…?”
What mattered now was pulling clock-out from the roulette, but no matter how many times they spun it, it wouldn’t appear.
In the end, the clock struck midnight, the date changed, and the stream kept rushing toward the depths of the night.
Once an item came up on the roulette, it was removed from the pool and wouldn’t appear again, so if you kept spinning long enough, clock-out was guaranteed to show up eventually.
But luck was absurdly bad, and the time had passed, which meant it was finally time for the promised drunken stream.
“I heard I might end up sleeping over today… but I guess I really am sleeping over.”
“I’m terribly sorry…!”
Seeing Lee Harang mutter blankly, Kim Junsu slammed his head down.
In a way, bringing someone he’d just met and making him go through this much trouble was a pretty embarrassing thing to do as a host.
No matter how late they’d gone, he’d thought it would end around one in the morning—but it had turned into this instead.
“It’s fine. I’m actually kind of happy about it. Staying over at a friend’s place after hanging out this late… I’ve always wanted to try that at least once.”
“Ah….”
Kim Junsu felt his chest tighten for no reason as he looked at Lee Harang smiling while saying that.
“Ahem. Should we spin one more round while we wait for the delivery for the drinking stream?”
He changed the subject with an awkward cough.
Maybe because he’d already given up on leaving early?
Once they’d accepted it, everyone looked oddly relieved, choosing casual play and chatting over sweaty tryharding.
The Byeolsu jumped in too while they waited for the drinking stream setup, showering them with questions.
The main topic, unsurprisingly, was whether Lee Harang would be joining BlackStar Crew, given the chemistry the three of them had shown today.
The people involved weren’t saying a thing, but the Byeolsu were acting like they owned the place, telling them what to do from the sidelines.
Watching the chat explode like that, Lee Harang sensed it was time to stop milking the easy benefits and finally pull out the straw.
“I still haven’t even decided exactly what kind of broadcast I want to do yet.”
He drew a line, saying that if he joined BlackStar Crew, a crew centered too heavily on games, his broadcast style would become too fixed too quickly.
It was partly a reaction against the suspicion that he was taking advantage of the crew too much, but it was also sincere.
Now that he’d decided to do this at all, Lee Harang wanted to try this and that while streaming; joining BlackStar Crew felt like too hasty a decision.
Maybe it would be best to keep doing joint streams every now and then, the way they had been.
Kim Junsu felt a little disappointed at Lee Harang’s decision, but he nodded and said that wasn’t a bad answer either.
It wasn’t like today was the only day that mattered, and if fate kept going their way, he’d probably end up joining the crew eventually anyway.
With that thought, he let it go and decided to bring up something else.
“By the way, Sangnangja, can you hold your liquor?”
“Liquor? I don’t really like it, so not very well.”
At Lee Harang’s answer—that it tasted bad and he didn’t really get why people drank it—Kim Junsu burst out laughing.
He could roughly estimate Harang’s alcohol tolerance from the way he’d said it, clearly giving off the vibe of someone who didn’t like drinking at all.
But that prediction was shattered to pieces the moment he saw—
“...You said you’re bad with alcohol?”
“Huh? Yeah, I’m not very good at it.”
—Lee Harang looking completely fine after drinking two bottles of soju.
Didn’t he say he didn’t like alcohol…?
Kang Yura, who had at least been nursing the childish competitive hope that she might beat him in liquor tolerance, sank right down with him.