Editor
Haa.
He sank deep into his gaming chair, but the fatigue refused to lift.
Juggling university and FanSpace — a portmanteau of "fan" and "YourSpace" — was, no matter how much affection he held for Eugene, an extraordinarily difficult undertaking. In a way it felt like walking a tightrope. One wrong step and he'd have no choice but to abandon one side or the other. And now, with weight loading onto one end of the parallel bars in real time, the whole situation was tilting in an increasingly headache-inducing direction.
A thought welled up, thick and sticky: Maybe I never should have touched this in the first place.
He shook his head hard and forced his eyes open. YourSpace analytics settled across his retinas.
Eugene — a top-grade log of firewood shoved onto the hot plate that was Dark Zone — had a way of bringing everything connected to her to a slow, rolling boil. Even a FanSpace was not exempt from that process. In short, the view counts on the edit videos he'd produced for his fan account were climbing at a truly steep angle.
Naturally, there was no revenue. It was a pure fan space. Even with subscribers past ten thousand and average views on a modest number of videos clearing a hundred thousand, not a single scrap of profit fell his way.
The comment section was always a refined kind of chaos. People who knew Eugene, people who'd never heard of her and had simply washed in on the algorithm, and — starting recently, one by one — foreign reactions from who-knew-where. Sometimes fights broke out, and personally stepping in to shut them down was its own quiet chore. He'd thought about finding someone to help, but hiring a manager to run a fan space… what kind of insane idea was that.
Either way, it was never entirely a good thing when work grew beyond what his own hands could manage. Not from a management standpoint, and not from a content standpoint either.
"How many terabytes is all of this…."
How much material could a streamer who'd only been live a little over a month possibly produce?
Ten solid hours a day, without missing a single one, would still only come to about three hundred hours. Virtual reality's time acceleration pushed that number higher, sure — but even then it barely scraped five hundred.
And yet the clips and super plays alone already numbered in the hundreds. Factor in appearances on other streamers' and YourSpacers' broadcasts — not that he strictly needed to — and the total was beyond imagination. All of it kept piling up day after day without fail. Whether or not she ate, whether or not she did nothing but shoot and drill small-unit tactics, Eugene demolished everyone equally, whoever the opponent happened to be.
Of course, he couldn't deny that just watching was a feast for the eyes.
If even a fraction of those endlessly swelling view counts funneled people into Eugene's actual stream, that alone was good. The occasional comment thanking him for the edits, or saying they wanted to send a gift or a donation, gave him comfort and a little hope.
He was a Eugene viewer himself — a Tail Corps member, as the joke went — and simply watching her broadcast was genuinely enjoyable.
But every so often, desire would well up in thin little threads.
Condensing a day's exhaustion and the wish he'd buried deep in his heart, he let out a long breath and muttered,
"Ah… I just want to get all coiled up in Eugene noona's tail…."
There was no special reason the Tail Corps was the Tail Corps.
As always, things around Eugene were running on routine.
Taking on something new was, in a sense, like partially dismantling a puzzle you'd already fitted together under the name of "routine" and assembling it afresh. She hadn't deliberately set a direction, but when people spoke of such things in general terms they usually meant a kind of task or job — something that paid a salary to keep you alive, or that developed your own capabilities.
And so, the way a rolling stone knocks a settled one free, you start by snipping away the lower-priority pieces. Snip, snip, like scissors. If a routine that includes an afternoon nap suddenly has an exam-study puzzle piece jammed into it, the nap portion gets cut away without ceremony.
Usually that happens against your will.
Judging by that standard, the life I was living now was truly different from the one I'd had on the first night after returning to this place.
One new choice. Then, with a soft pop, a schedule called Dark Zone filled part of my evenings. Another new choice. Streaming was added. Sometimes these puzzle pieces overlapped in the same time slots.
But I hadn't stopped there — I'd also grabbed at the next opportunity that reached out. The coaching position SSM Entertainment had offered, short-term though it was. I hadn't strictly needed to take it, but the world has never run on pure self-interest alone. Sometimes the mere thought of gaining experience is enough to make you put your hand to something.
Once you've pressed the pedal and built up speed, though, a plateau arrives on its own.
When you try something new, work pours in during the early days. Once you've digested all of it, a stage of familiarity sets in. Regardless of how hard the work itself is, you acquire a kind of approach — a method. Like heated iron cooling slowly, growing denser, it hardens.
"…."
Three minutes until stream.
By now it had solidified to a degree. Around seven in the evening, real-world time, I would go live unless something unusual came up. How to put it — turning on the stream made my rather impoverished web of communication feel like it was expanding.
The bed was comfortable even inside virtual reality, and the algorithm — having somehow analyzed my interests — was floating up assorted articles and stories that looked intriguing.
Rather than going into a broadcast with a completely empty head, I preferred to check what was happening outside first and share some of it with the viewers. I saw this news today. Do you all know about it? The world is turning like this. Or here's an interesting piece of information… Reading through things like that, one by one, you could feel how the world was made of so many interlocking gears.
Countless tragedies and comedies, irrationalities and absurdities, laughter and happiness… There had been a time when I'd shared things like this with the members of the same task force.
Time was a truly frightening thing. Barely a month had passed, my schedule had only just started to get a little busier, and yet — bit by bit — the pain and longing I'd carried with me into this world had begun to thin.
…Can all of this time become the foundation that brings me closer to the truth?
I still couldn't be sure of that much. I stared blankly at the screen, then rose and sat in the chair.
The display came on, and viewers began flooding in.
A microphone materialized in response to my will. I tapped the tip with a finger, and a holographic input-signal meter on the right rose and fell.
Mic test: normal. I drew a small breath and opened my mouth.
"…Hello, everyone. Quite a few of you have come by the stream again today. September is almost here, and yet the weather is still this gloomy. At least the temperature is dropping little by little — that's something to be grateful for."
When I didn't have much to say at the start of a broadcast, or when nothing unusual enough to push everything else aside had happened, I usually opened with the weather.
A simple topic that invited common ground without ever spiraling into argument. Toss out a subject and related comments would string themselves along like fish taking the bait — real-time chat, for all practical purposes.
It's hot, the air-conditioning bill is brutal. The humidity is so high laundry won't dry. You can shower several times a day and still feel sticky… Unfortunately, these were things I found hard to relate to.
Sorry. I haven't turned on the air conditioning once since coming back here. Laundry goes in the dryer.
"ReadyMixSorry, thank you for the thousand won. In that case, starting tomorrow I'll try to move as stealthily as possible… Of course, I'm joking."
The qualifier ranks had started yesterday.
Perhaps I should have anticipated this kind of reaction. Lately it had become another source of quiet concern. Being an ordinary person whose every word and action got twisted into something else would be bleak in its own right.
In any case, my sudden appearance in Unreal's casting stream yesterday had, of course, spread in every direction. Fully predictable — but absorbing the direct hit was still my job.
Whether this counted as a positive side effect I wasn't sure, but these days my viewer count crossed five thousand even without launching a game. Inflow from every direction, most likely.
Lately I'd been experiencing life in day-sized units rather than longer stretches, and I could see everything around me growing at a steep pitch. Everything except my own perception, that is.
It didn't seem like a topic worth chewing on for long, so I decided to talk a little more.
"…Today I was browsing around online and skimmed a short piece about how streaming has changed over the years. Apparently stream sniping has decreased a lot compared to before. Is that still a thing these days?"
Right.
So it hadn't completely disappeared. I'd thrown the topic out fairly at random, but with this many people you could still pick up information like this — that was nice.
Meanwhile, in the back of my mind, I was replaying the article I'd read before going live. According to it, stream snipers only proliferated when certain conditions aligned — the tone had been almost like a field guide to mold.
If it's a team game that emphasizes cooperation, if the role expected of one person carries heavy weight, and if at the same time anonymity is strong and finding the person who trolled you is difficult — that place, apparently, is sniper heaven.
Below the article, a great many viewers had dug up examples from every corner and posted them to my personal community. In just a few minutes, every incident from the past three months had blanketed the page.
"…That's quite a lot. Even after decreasing, if the numbers look like this, I might get sniped myself someday, don't you think?"
"…You're right. Thinking about it, that checks out. So please stop hitting me now. Your words deal way too much damage."
The metaphors were so richly crafted that I simply threw up the GG.
No matter how much I'd trained this body and crossed over with it, beating tongues refined by the internet was a tall order. Besides, I was one person and they were five thousand.
In the end it wasn't even a Pyrrhic victory — I'd just gotten thoroughly beaten up.
After that, idle small talk continued. How today's matches had gone, what content was coming up… I answered each one and kept the chat stream going.
These days, with the personal community active, all kinds of humor posts were going up, along with content suggestions, game recommendations, and proposals or requests for possible guest-appearance segments. I read through them one by one. No guarantee I'd actually do any of it, but still.
How to put it — it was a little like growing a plant. I'd only sprinkled a moderate amount of water, and it was thriving on its own.
On top of that, an illustrator recruited through this very community had started producing thumbnails in earnest — even if the videos themselves were twelve hours long — and YourSpace accessibility had ticked up a little further.
By a mouse dropping's worth, but still.
And in the middle of all that, there was one post that had gone up yesterday and claimed the most recommendations.
The tab was Promotion — a space that normally filled with strange or useless-looking products and information — so curiosity stirred about what kind of post could have appeared there.
The title was….
"…Ah."
A short sound that wasn't quite an exclamation.
It wasn't the feeling you get from seeing something innovative. If I had to classify it, it was closer to the psychological state of a postponed task finally arriving — or of realizing, long after the fact, that you've lost your wallet.
So.
If you asked what it was….
Right.
It might be time to start poking at this part after all.