Other Side
9,251 people.
That was the number floating beside a brutally simple stream title — Harmony & Dark Zone Collab — four digits, teetering on the edge of five, representing every viewer currently parked in the room of a streamer named Eugene.
They were a kind of loosely gathered collective intelligence under her banner — not that this made them particularly useful — and they had come, one way or another, to watch her broadcast.
In short, they possessed a certain shared direction. Of course, "loosely gathered" also meant there were exceptions. And here was one of them.
"…What am I supposed to do about this?"
Explosions and shouting erupted from every direction on screen — more than enough to snag any viewer's attention — but to one person among those nine thousand, or rather, to the man who as of yesterday had been hired as Eugene's official YourSpace editor, none of it particularly registered.
The reason was simple: he was extremely busy. He had only been running the FanSpace for less than two weeks, yet the channel's subscriber count and video views had rocketed upward with a force that could only be described as vertical.
Naturally, now that he would be operating as the official editor going forward, the FanSpace needed to be cleaned up.
There's a channel merge function, sure, but…
The problem was that using it required a subscriber vote to confirm majority approval, after which the results had to be compiled into supporting documentation and submitted to YourSpace. Even after a merge was approved, the two channel managers still had to negotiate the layout, decide which videos to keep and which to delete, and then handle everything else that followed… Of course, that was still a long way off — but that didn't mean it wasn't already weighing on him.
In any case, the moment he was confirmed as Eugene's official editor, he finished several rounds of discussion and posted a notice about the whole matter to the FanSpace community.
That was the first reason.
The second was the necessity of wrapping up his existing part-time job.
He had become one of the very few people to exchange numbers with Eugene, and beyond that, he was about to become the first editor managing a channel on a terrifying upward trajectory. There would be no room left to care about anything else.
If he didn't keep his head on straight, the worst-case scenario was the channel collapsing into something truly ugly. A fan ruining a star's YourSpace channel — that was the kind of black mark that would be immortalized on TreeWiki for all eternity.
So ever since accepting the offer, he had spent the entire day turning over methods to grow the channel, and contingency plans for managing it if operations went so well that it exploded in size…
It might not even have been his area to worry about. But thoughts, as always, were the sort of thing that drifted and scattered like smoke — impossible to cut off cleanly with a single dismissal.
That was the second reason.
And the third?
Click-clack. Click-clack.
It wasn't that he had never watched Harmony's streams. If anything, he had been a viewer of hers long before Eugene ever started broadcasting. But now the questions ranged from the small — fonts, editing style, cut distribution, runtime allocation (though since this was Eugene's YourSpace, her footage would take priority) — all the way up to revenue splits.
Sinking deep into his chair, he sighed and opened Harmony's channel while everyone else was busy enjoying the stream.
Money was genuinely hard to earn, and the storms and waves still left to cross were endless.
It was his first day on the job as an editor.
You're not gonna play Dark Zone all day today, right? Say it. Guarantee the editor's human rights!! (shakes carrot)
Meanwhile, on the other side of things, Harmony's editors were naturally drowning in similar anguish.
Their direction of suffering was different from Eugene's side, though. Specifically: every time Harmony played Dark Zone, her editors had no choice but to tense up.
Harmony's adamantium mental fortitude, tempered by years of garbage games, combined with Eugene pouring out lectures so brutal that anyone without steel-grade nerves would hit GG and quit on the spot. The chemistry between the two of them produced a reaction so violently entertaining that the resulting footage was dense enough to leave editors completely lost on what to cut.
Talk segments? Situational comedy? All of it.
And when the raw footage was excessively good, editors got nervous. One wrong move and the fallout could land squarely on them.
At any rate, the stream was nowhere near finished — it hadn't even properly started. Later problems could be dealt with later. For now, all they needed to do was keep the clip and memo functions open, occasionally pinching out the moments too funny not to include.
But Harmony's endearing denseness — she was their meal ticket, after all — simply had no comparable spectacle next to Eugene's raw physicality. Especially when—
────BOOOOM!
The moment a drone drifted close enough, Eugene snatched it out of the air, smashed it against the wall to destroy the propeller assembly, and hurled the wreckage into the drone trailing behind it. Leaving the fallen strike-drone to lose balance and plummet, she opened up with Lapua Magnum rounds at $2.20 a shot, reducing the quadrupedal turret to a literal cripple.
Between the thunderous reports, only the mechanical chirps of the Icarus Device broke the atmosphere.
"…Damn."
How to put it? Watching Eugene play was never boring. That was why even when she poured a dozen-plus hours a day into Dark Zone, viewers didn't drop off easily.
Rubin, Waltz, and Luddite — who also happened to be Harmony's editors — were old hands who had cleared every main mission in Dark Zone ages ago, and had even rerolled new characters multiple times just to play through them again. At least ten thousand of the roughly twenty thousand combined viewers between Harmony and Eugene were in the same boat.
And yet, beyond the banter between the two of them, the stream kept producing endlessly bizarre situations that none of them had ever seen — even on paths they themselves had walked long ago.
On top of that, Eugene carried herself like someone who had the real-world tactical movement and small-unit doctrine burned into her bones. Unlike players who just sprayed everything down with raw firepower, she used hand signals, sound discipline, and every scrap of terrain to create the illusion of an actual battlefield.
And Harmony was doing a solid job of following her lead.
Which was precisely why, at some point, Eugene and Harmony's streams had become some of the most passionately watched content among AP pro gamers in recent memory.
…Some of these look familiar.
TreeKey had a handful of features that let people signal who they were. Font styles, slightly different nickname formats — or, more conspicuously, various emoticons and effects attached in front of a username. Some of those were rare. They never appeared on donations, streamers couldn't see them, and only fellow viewers could confirm their presence — but a few of them could tell you a person's track record or group affiliation.
And today, visible to the editors who were also sitting in chat as ordinary viewers, a few of those had started to appear.
Or,
With the start of the preliminary rankings, every pro gamer active on TreeKey — streamer or viewer, no exceptions — was required to use affiliation effects and nicknames that publicly identified their team. Put bluntly, it was a system designed to stop them from hiding behind anonymity.
Names that anyone with even a passing interest in AP would have heard at least once were sitting in chat typing things like that. The pros silently spectating without saying a word were almost certainly far more numerous.
Meanwhile, Eugene and Harmony's footsteps never stopped.
They tore through the underground levels, scattering pure incarnations of violence in every direction — and rather than showing any intention of stopping, they pushed deeper into the facility.
Unfortunately, this particular mission did not end well. The Artemis-affiliated PMC personnel, desperate to secure their own survival, had ultimately handed over company-produced weapons and access credentials to Chinese and Russian interests. The operators had no choice but to extract the data from the servers, smash everything, and get out.
As time passed, the truth drew steadily closer — and the two of them finally ran headlong into it.
Residual network logs detected. Traces of large-scale data transmission identified.
Harmony's disappointment was visible. Eugene, as always, checked her gear without so much as a shift in expression.
A semi-scripted story sequence played out — more specifically, an in-game FOV cutscene. The content was simple: the information had already been compromised, contact had been detected, and automatic defense systems were deploying.
Special enemies in reinforced exoskeletons and every variety of murder-robot poured in. The objective was to temporarily disable them with pre-planted EMP charges, then run without looking back.
That was the story, more or less — for ordinary players.
The EMP fired. For a single instant, everything went dark. Then came a sharp pop — the sound of a button tearing free — and a sonic crack that briefly seared every viewer's eardrums.
Crunch.
Snap.
An ugly sound arrived first. Moments later, the backup power kicked in and light flooded the space.
A considerable catastrophe lay before them.
To summarize: even a state-of-the-art ballistic helmet couldn't stop a tactical hammer.
Viewers who had only recently found the stream kept rubbing their eyes, asking themselves what they had just witnessed. Those who had been watching this chemistry for a while — or from the very beginning — simply sat back and laughed through it.
Naturally, Ruin, Waltz, and Luddite belonged to the latter group.
And so, only a single message appeared in their Engram channel.
If even the people who had seen this multiple times were still surprised, what chance did the recent arrivals — or the ones who just dropped in to watch the gameplay — have?
As always, Eugene was forcibly raising her viewers' standards.
The stream was still a long way from over. It was early September.