Chapter 11
The chat was a battlefield of blame.
"That's all you can do in a team fight?"
"We lost because you kept feeding, dumbass!"
"The guy who got first blood is obviously the culprit."
If there were people raising a toast to victory, there had to be others chewing on the bitter taste of defeat. That was just how competitive games worked.
"You stay out. Jaeseop's calling you in."
"What difference does it make if you swap me out for him?"
"Obviously a difference, that's why we're swapping."
"XXX XX XX."
These guys had never cared much for order or rules to begin with. When things went south, the profanity flew thick and fast.
"Are you out of your mind? You want to blow all our smurf accounts?"
Finally, some sane feedback popped up in the group messenger. They were in the Challenger tier, sniping pros and famous streamers for match-fixing gigs that brought in serious cash. In other words, those accounts were their livelihood. Risking them just because one female streamer rubbed them the wrong way? The return wasn't worth the risk.
"Shut up. If I say we're doing it, we're doing it. Who's the one bringing in the jobs every time?"
But their relationship wasn't equal. There was a de facto leader with connections to a Chinese match-fixing syndicate. And that man just so happened to be the one completely obsessed with Kim Haru, spewing his inferiority complex all over the place.
From the start, his inferiority and need to show off had sent him into overdrive. Now that the losses were being broadcast and mocked by viewers, he couldn't see straight anymore. His determination to crush Kim Haru at any cost had reached a fever pitch.
In the end, a few more people were drafted in for another round of sniping. And they lost again. The roster shuffling continued.
"If we keep changing parties and still lose, doesn't that mean the guy who hasn't been swapped yet is the problem?"
"What? You're saying I'm the culprit now?"
The man drowning in inferiority complex kicked the person offering sound advice out of the messenger server.
Meanwhile, the Peace Games operations team running I Am Hero was watching Kim Haru's stream and quietly cheering.
"They're crawling out on their own like this. I'm so grateful I almost want to bow."
Originally, each member of the match-fixing crew had been pretty cautious. They barely even added friends inside the game. And of course Peace Games couldn't monitor external messengers. So even with strong suspicions, catching them was never easy.
But isn't it just illegal activity and a clear violation of the rules? Why not sue them all and ban them?
That was the eternal headache for game companies. You needed evidence strong enough to win a lawsuit before you could move.
But today, their leader had gone full throttle. Thanks to that meltdown, several accounts connected to the match-fixing ring that they'd never been able to prove before were now exposed. Five of them had grouped up and run a pre-made five-man team. An obvious connection.
The operations team's goal was to wipe out the match-fixing organization, ban the accounts, and eventually take legal action. Right now they were in the information-gathering phase, holding their breath and collecting as much as possible to nail as many criminals at once as they could.
In that stage, the leader's sudden obsession with sniping Kim Haru was the perfect golden opportunity to harvest evidence.
"Thank you so much, Miss Kim Haru."
The junior employee asked the smiling man a question. He still had doubts about her.
"Don't you think she's using account pilots or smurfs? My brain can't comprehend a two-day newbie solo-killing Challengers."
"If you can't comprehend it, what are you gonna do? She's showing us over and over."
There were geniuses in this world that ordinary human understanding simply couldn't reach.
"Look at this fight footage."
I Am Hero was a third-person back-view real-time action game. Most skills were non-targeting, and the only way to learn their actual hitboxes was through painful trial and error. Yet in just a single game, Kim Haru had perfectly memorized every enemy's skill range and was always positioned to dodge every lethal blow during team fights.
Stuns. Knockdowns. The core skills that crippled one side while giving the other a golden chance. Kim Haru moved like a master of jujutsu, staying in the perfect spot to slip past those dangerous abilities with the tiniest adjustments.
"Her spatial awareness is insane. She'd be great at math. Or driving an oversized truck."
"With those tiny, cute hands?"
"That's exactly what makes it ridiculous."
Women generally showed weaker spatial awareness than men overall. But Kim Haru kept displaying inhuman spatial perception, like a bat using echolocation, a whiskered cat, or a submarine with radar.
"If she went to another world, she'd become a Sword Master for sure."
Those slender wrists, small dainty hands, adorable fingers. Even though her transparent hand cam showed every keystroke clearly, it was still hard to believe those little hands were the ones controlling the character on screen with such precision.
The fried zucchini—no, the spicy pork special—was over.
Kim Haru had achieved a perfect record of thirty wins and zero losses against the sniping team. The minimum number of games required to queue for ranked.
"I don't really know either. But our team played really well too."
It wasn't a complete solo carry by Kim Haru. The fact that the enemy was the Villain Alliance was crucial. Challengers who'd been fed up with abusers for a long time and had built up plenty of resentment jumped in aggressively to crush the match-fixers.
Several times during the games, players who looked like unranked, Silver, or Diamond suddenly revealed Challenger-level skill once the masks came off.
Anyway, justice had won. Could there be a clearer evil than this? The opponents were the cancer of ranked games. Demons who ruined the game's ecosystem just to make money for gamblers. No one knew why those bastards had suddenly fixated on Kim Haru, but the evil spirits had been exorcised.
And that wasn't the end of it.
Once they'd gathered enough information, Peace Games brought down the hammer. The malicious snipers involved in match-fixing received the full gift set: account ban, IP ban, hardware ban. The ultimate goal was lawsuits, police investigations, and finally dragging them into court.
A professional abusing team wasn't hated by just one or two people. After sniping famous pros and streamers for so long, the number of people who found them repulsive had reached hundreds of thousands.
Not all hundreds of thousands had watched the stream, but Kim Haru's exploits were being relayed across every corner of the community. As a result, victims of abusing and viewers who'd always hated it flocked in to donate.
And then the one-million-won donation exploded.
BombRobot, the mega-streamer with two million YouTube subscribers and an average of over ten thousand live viewers, who lived in the Grand Master to Challenger bracket, had shown up. And he dropped a cool million won on Kim Haru.
He was one of the most famous victims of toto abusing. Several of his games had been caught with open betting on Chinese gambling sites. With all that built-up resentment, when he heard the abusing team had received a proper education, he came running to drop the donation.
"Wow! BombRobot-nim! I'm such a huge fan! Thank you for the million-film donation!"
It was a lie. BombRobot was an I Am Hero specialist streamer. Kim Haru had been a hipster who only played Ultima Project for three straight years. So she wasn't really a fan. But when someone drops a million won, how could you not become a fan? Therefore, starting today, she was a fan.
When Kim Haru started acting all cute after surrendering to a million won, tons of salty messages flooded the chat. Maybe they felt defeated by the alpha male with two million subscribers, ten thousand average viewers, and an estimated monthly income of hundreds of millions. If so, that meant they saw Kim Haru as a romantic interest and BombRobot as a rival.
"If you guys donate a million too, I'll give you an even better reaction."
"At this rate, I might need to replace the whole computer instead of just the keyboard?"
Today, the total amount she'd earned from small missions and donations reached four million won. BombRobot's big donation had made up a huge chunk of it.
I used to struggle to make four hundred thousand a month, and now I'm a streamer who makes four million in a single day?
Of course, today had been a special event. A sudden war with an abusing team had broken out, a massive masked ball of Dae-jeo-bang-bu had unfolded, and everyone who held a grudge against abusers had come out to cheer for Kim Haru, causing the mission money to skyrocket.
Thank you! Abusing team! Thank you for being such wonderful villains!
Haru herself had never been directly harmed by that abusing team, so she didn't have any strong feelings. If anything, she was grateful they'd brought her so much attention and let her earn a ton of money.
But thanks to all this, she'd realized one thing.
Broadcasting really is just an endless parade of Dae-jeo-bang-bu.