Because There Are Too Many
Young Lily hated owing anyone anything.
She was at an age where she could have thrown tantrums and taken whatever she wanted, yet she always sought to repay her debts.
And I was no different.
Granted, I didn't go so far as to repay people with everything I had, the way Lily did — but I still made a point of giving my best within the limits of what I could offer.
'You lent aid to the beggars of the Northern Kingdom… no, to those poor souls. So now you'll treat our people, won't you?'
'Once you've finished there, there are wicked monsters in the West as well…'
'You've done all that? …Well, if you have a little time to spare, then attend to me…'
"I refuse."
The only repayment I allowed myself was the duty of a saint, and the obligations I owed as a fellow human being.
I never once stepped beyond those two boundaries.
Instead, whenever a debt proved too great to settle, I simply poured more of myself into saving humanity.
…Looking back on it now, I suppose I was a little foolish.
Beep-beep! Beep-beep! Beep-beep!
……
The alarm was going off.
Ever since returning to the modern world, I hadn't once broken my waking hour — except for the nights I'd come home drunk.
I sat up in a tangle and switched the alarm off.
The newly bought alarm clock wailed its frantic little cry, then fell silent the moment a pale white hand stroked its head.
Well, look at that. It's calmed down.
7:05 in the morning.
My usual wake-up time.
"Hnnngh…!"
What time had I stayed up until last night, again?
After that greatsword couple, we'd run a few more matches, chatted briefly with Yena, and then ended the stream.
Setting aside that first-match archer-and-shield duo — almost certainly an account hired to throw the game on purpose — it hadn't been much fun. The moment people ran into us, they either got all chummy about being fans, or forfeited the match the second it looked like they might lose.
Were they here for a duel, or for a fan meet?
I had nothing against meeting people who liked me, but when you show up for a match and your opponent has no intention of actually fighting, the excitement dies on the spot.
Maybe it really was time to try a Siege War at least once.
"…Hmm."
I got up and casually opened the cabinet in the kitchen.
I poured the cereal I'd bought a while back into a bowl, opened the mini fridge, and added milk. Carrying the bowl — the cereal not yet gone soggy — back to my desk, I took a spoonful.
The crunch and the coolness of the milk bloomed fresh across my tongue.
Delicious.
The closest thing to this kind of cooking back in the world I'd possessed was plain millet porridge.
And it tasted like absolute garbage.
"Tw… Twitch."
I opened Twitch.
The message inbox was as jammed as ever. Whether that +999 was really 999 messages or actually 9,999, only the Twitch admins probably knew — but one thing everyone knew for certain was that nobody wanted to open it.
Leaving the inbox alone — neglected, as always — I clicked into my own channel, the one I'd been letting sit without so much as a profile setup.
"Whoa."
A channel that had existed for, what, five days? Six? Its follower count had already passed eighty thousand.
The channel, bare of any banner or profile image, carried just two words — Lily — with a row of past broadcast VODs lined up beneath it.
"The view count is… five hundred thousand?"
Why so high?
These were raw seven-to-eight-hour broadcasts with zero editing or effects slapped on.
Then it hit me — the NewTube videos that had once lined the site, all featuring my old broadcasts. Even with no editing whatsoever, they'd rack up several hundred thousand views as a baseline, and Yena's had climbed past ten million.
Back then, I'd taken it all for granted. The village painters and writers had built their careers off my face and my stories, and it never struck me as strange.
"…My money?"
Copyright as a concept barely existed there, and those people led hard enough lives that I'd simply let it be.
It wasn't as though my face wore down from being sold around.
But things were different now.
Some of the people uploading NewTube videos were struggling in their own right, sure — but at the very least, those ones had come to me in person and asked for my blessing.
In other words, nobody had ever just hawked my face and my stories to the masses without a word of permission.
After some deliberation, I placed the call through the Discord contact Yena had given me. When it came to streaming-business matters like this, she'd know far better than I would. Might as well ask her opinion.
"…So anyway, it looks like we'll have to stretch it out to five parts—"
"Why? Unni?"
"Hold on, everyone, it's Lily calling. Take five."
Yena had been deep in a meeting about the NewTube videos featuring Lily when Lily's Discord call came through.
The meeting was important, sure — but the subject of the meeting was Lily.
When the subject herself calls, of course you pick up.
She moved the call into a private Discord room, and a blank circular avatar with no profile picture appeared on screen.
"Speak of the devil, I guess. We were literally just talking about you, Lily."
"Oh? What were you discussing?"
"Ah, the NewTube stuff. The videos with you in them, so—"
Yena stopped mid-sentence.
Wait. Does Lily even know she's on NewTube?
The newdlebak content had been NewTube material from the start, and Yena had already paid her the content fee, so she'd never bothered to bring it up separately.
"Ah — do you happen to know you're on NewTube?"
"Yes, I watched one of the videos."
So she does know.
Then she could ask the editor about borrowing Lily's footage, too. Yena's screen alone made the edits feel loose and thin; they needed footage of Lily's many highlights from the matches.
Yena fired off a quick Discord message to her editor — 'should probably be fine' — and asked,
"So, what's this about?"
"There are a lot of people uploading my face to NewTube without my permission."
Flinch.
The coffee halfway to Yena's mouth froze in place.
A chill ran down her spine.
"If it were one or two people, I'd let it slide. But there are just too many."
"Uh…"
No way. Is this… is she asking me why people keep uploading her without permission?
Like, what gives them the right?
Yena's hands began to tremble.
No matter how close she and Lily had become through streaming together, Lily was still a household name — the kind of star whose inbox flooded with offers from every guild and every broadcast. Right now, she was likeliest to join the guild she was closest to, Yena's own -Ye-. But what if things turned sour between them?
Guild membership would go straight out the window, and she'd wander off to some powerhouse with angel-guild-level sponsorship and a top-tier ranking instead.
'Absolutely not!'
With shaking hands, Yena barely managed to set her coffee down on the table without spilling it.
This was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
It pained her to give up views in the millions — but to win Lily, some things simply had to be sacrificed.
"Th-that… on NewTube, um. If you don't want them up, they can be taken down. I wasn't just going to upload it without asking. Uh. I was planning to ask first, and…"
"…Pardon? Why would that matter?"
"…Huh? You don't like the fact that people are uploading you to YouTube without permission?"
Isn't that why you called?
After roughly three seconds of silence, Lily burst out laughing.
Not a laugh of mockery or amusement at her expense — a genuinely delighted one.
How can even her laugh sound that good?
What an unfairly fraudulent human being.
"Yena, you've already streamed with me, haven't you? You paid me, and you just got my permission. You don't have a single problem here."
"Oh… then, it's really about the other people…?"
"Yes. I'd like to handle it myself, but I know absolutely nothing about this side of things, so I wanted to ask your advice."
Yena let out a long breath and took another sip of her coffee.
'Well, if that's all it is.'
Honestly, it was a problem Yena had been keeping an eye on herself. However oblivious and uninterested in NewTube Lily might be, the sheer volume of her footage being lifted was downright excessive.
Yena at least had streamed with Lily, paid her, and — just now — secured her permission.
But total strangers with no connection to the woman whatsoever were happily farming views off her content.
These days, roughly thirty percent of all Korean Deoën videos uploaded were Lily clips.
"I'll look into that with my company. Deoën has pretty deep ties with NewTube and Twitch, so if we go through the copyright route, it can be sorted out."
"That actually works?"
"Yes. Plenty of other famous streamers and NewTubers do it too — either getting videos taken down through copyright claims, or claiming the lion's share of the revenue."
"Claiming the revenue?"
"Some of the people who lift your clips edit them out of pure fan devotion, putting real effort into the edits. With those people, it's usually split something like nine-to-one."
In practice, most NewTubers preferred the nine-to-one revenue split over an outright takedown.
The NewTuber got to keep churning out their top-earning content, and the original creator walked away with ten percent — everyone won.
And when that ten percent came off a celebrity's channel, it dwarfed a small-time NewTuber's entire earnings by tenfold. No — closer to thirty or forty times over.
Editors with skills that good sometimes got scouted as official channel editors, too.
"Anyway, don't stress over it too much. Honestly, this might be a good chance for you to start your own official NewTube channel. The reason there's so much floating around is precisely because you don't have one."
"Thank you. And Yena — if you ever need anything from me, just say the word, any time. I'll help with whatever's in my power."
"I wasn't fishing for a favor when I said that, you know…"
But as it happened, there was that Black Moon request.
Yena recalled the favor she'd received two days prior — the one that had come with the location of a god's dungeon and a pile of guild materials, asking nothing more than that she pass the question along, whether Lily accepted or not.
"By any chance… would you be interested in trying a Siege War?"