Chapter 19
The order of events got a little mixed up.
Buljang was a streamer who used to be a pro player in I Am Hero. It had been three years since he retired. His best achievement was runner-up at the World Championship. He wasn't quite a legend, but it was still an impressive enough record for a pro gamer.
After retiring, he started a second life as a streamer. His skills as a broadcaster were... decent, I guess. Right after retirement, a ton of people tuned in, but he never really grew beyond that. He was barely holding onto his viewer count. These days, he sat somewhere between a big company streamer and a mid-tier one, pulling in an average of about 1,500 viewers.
Everyone says it's basically impossible to maintain your form after retiring. The guy who once shined as World Championship runner-up was now struggling at the wall of Challenger. Of course, focusing purely on the game and juggling streaming at the same time are two very different things. Still, it was a sad story that a hero from the world stage was stuck at the Challenger barrier.
His current rank was around 400th in Korea. Three straight wins would easily put him inside the top 300. It was such a tiny gap, yet for some reason he just couldn't climb. That was why his temper was running pretty hot right now.
"It's not that I don't want to go. It's all because of ghosting and stream sniping."
His game continued today as usual. The team composition was two tanks, two carries, and one support. Looking purely at the hero picks, there was nothing to complain about. High-tier players usually picked solid heroes with good win rates. That was just common sense, right?
"Beetle Master pick? Is this a troll?"
It was strange. His current placement was high Grandmaster. The players he got matched with ranged from mid-Grandmaster to low Challenger. In this bracket, it was rare to see a hero with a rank win rate below 45 percent—the so-called trash champs—get picked. But Beetle Master wasn't even below 45. It was sitting at 38 percent. In pro terms, that was a troll pick.
Beetle Master was a summoner-type hero. At skill level 3 and hero level 5, it could summon up to three battle beetles. The problem—as people had been saying constantly—was that I Am Hero used a third-person back-view perspective. You played while staring at your own character's back, with full x, y, and z axes in play. If it were a top-down view, commanding multiple summons would be easy. But in a back-view perspective, it was anything but.
At this camera angle, it was impossible to keep all the summons in one field of view at once. Yet you had to control three—no, four if you counted the ultimate—summons with such limited vision. Naturally, the character got shoved from trash champ straight into full troll-pick territory.
So why didn't they buff it? That was the thing with summoner characters. If you gave them decent performance buffs and improved the AI, they'd completely dominate the beginner brackets. Beetle Master, which once boasted a 47 percent win rate in the celestial ranks and nearly 59 percent in the abyss, had eventually been hit with countless nerfs and received its death sentence.
"Why is the game starting? Aren't they dodging?"
Despite Buljang's confusion, the game began. A Beetle Master had been picked and no one dodged? Were the enemy teammates busy trying to one-up each other?
'Works for me.'
It was good news for him. One of the enemy team's heroes had a 38 percent win rate. If he could snag an easy win, that was fine by him.
I Am Hero had three lanes. Buljang, who had headed to mid, ran straight into the Beetle Master. The hero he had chosen was Cannon Sniper—a perfectly standard long-range carry.
"Wait, what were Beetle Master's skills again?"
It had been so long since he'd seen the hero that he couldn't even remember the skills.
After reading the chat's helpful advice, it vaguely came back to him. Really, if it had been a top-view perspective, Beetle Master wouldn't have had any problems. But in a 3D back-view where even basic combos whiffed for some people, having to individually control four summons? Buljang thought there was no way that was possible.
"What the—why is this thing so tanky?"
He tried to recall how to deal with a Beetle Master from his hazy memories and put it into practice. The method was to keep sniping the beetles with long-range attacks. Since the summon cooldown was fairly long, you had to keep cutting them down so the opponent couldn't gather all three.
But the enemy Beetle Master was farming and fighting while somehow protecting the beetles and carefully collecting them.
"Is there actually a Beetle Master main...?"
Up to Master rank, people figured you could climb with any hero. But from Grandmaster onward, the hero's performance had to back you up. That was the common knowledge in Buljang's head. Yet the enemy Beetle Master's movements were way, way too strange.
"No, the mechanic was definitely like this. If you click on the ground, all three beetles move together, so to make them move individually you have to target each one and click."
That would be incredibly easy control if you were just clicking with a mouse in a top-down view. But doing it in a back-view perspective meant you'd have to spin the camera around multiple times. The opponent who was smoothly piloting this game that shouldn't even exist—this ultimate failure of a troll pick called Beetle Master—looked like a monster.
"I was supposed to cut the beetles but I couldn't."
In the end, the Beetle Master gathered all three beetles. Even so, the word "defeat" still hadn't crossed Buljang's mind. They were just trading in a 1v1 lane, after all. Once teamfight phase started, there was no way the opponent would be able to manage something like that.
Seven minutes into the game. All ten heroes gathered in one spot to take down a neutral monster that gave a powerful buff to the entire team, and a massive teamfight broke out. That's when Buljang encountered a situation he had never expected.
The Beetle Master's three beetles and one wasp were dodging all the AoE skills with eerie precision while chipping away at his team's health. The beetles at least only applied a light stun, but the wasp was landing full stuns. It felt less like a 5v5 teamfight and more like a 9v5.
"Does this even make sense?"
"Ugh."
These noobs. These people who didn't know anything. It was obvious, but half the chat was Silver or below. The math just worked out that way. Having to listen to their wrong advice made his blood boil.
It wasn't that he hadn't tried to check the beetles. The enemy Beetle Master had guarded them like a ghost. The moment he switched to snipe mode, the beetles would mysteriously be way off in the distance. If he fired the cannon, they'd dodge with micro-movements. At one point he even started wondering if the enemy team was actually five people—three controlling the beetles, one controlling the wasp, and one controlling the Beetle Master itself.
Once the balance broke, it never recovered. Not only the viewers, but even his own teammates started criticizing Buljang.
The worst possible situation—his in-game chat getting mocked and that mockery flowing straight into his stream chat for everyone to roast him. Buljang, now thoroughly pissed off, declared with certainty.
"It's a helper program. A helper. This is a Beetle Master helper."
The game was lost. It was a defeat for Buljang's team. The enemy Beetle Master had racked up very high scores in both damage and crowd control. Getting high damage and high CC didn't automatically mean more points, but it still felt good when you pulled it off. In comparison, the damage from Buljang, who had been laning against it, was absolutely pathetic.
Buljang opened the replay and slowly dissected the enemy Beetle Master's movements. After rewatching the objective teamfight scene five times, he shouted with absolute conviction.
"Look! It's a helper, isn't it!"
Almost no one believed him. Sure, helper programs could exist, but if someone was going to make one, why would they bother creating a helper for a niche hero like Beetle Master instead of a popular, strong one? Still, Buljang passionately argued his case.
"Look here. This area of vision isn't visible to the Beetle Master, right? But it's using skills on spots it can't even see to control the beetles."
While playing the game, you couldn't escape the third-person back-view. But spectating allowed you to watch teamfights from multiple angles. The camera had caught the beetles being controlled in areas the Beetle Master couldn't see. And it wasn't just once or twice—it happened consistently.
"It's a confirmed kill, right? Helper? Map hack? Either it's seeing invisible areas or it's automatically controlling the summons. One of the two is definitely happening."
Buljang declared victory with a confirmed kill. He was sure he had defeated the haters with logic and felt great about it.
That was when a mysterious thousand-won punch flew in.
"Of course I can take responsibility. If this isn't a hack, then what the hell is it?"
"Oh my, oh my, oh my, oh my. What is going on? Well, it's fine. People can have misunderstandings while living their lives, right?"
I had just turned on my stream and was grinding solo queue when the chat started whispering. Someone said I'd been stream sniped? I was planning to check it out slowly after the game ended, but before the match even finished, this guy suddenly showed up, apologized, and dropped a million won.
"Ah, then today's stream will be~."
"That's it for today."
Since a sudden, unplanned million won had appeared, maybe it was time to treat everyone to a dinner out.