Get Out~~!! It's My Broadcast~~~!!

A peaceful Saturday evening. A single post went up in one gallery.

At first, everyone treated it like a fake. Quit lying. Get lost. The usual disbelief. But the poster got heated and brought out the stream VOD. It had only run for about ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠fifteen minutes anyway, so there hadn’t even been any real need to edit it.

Once things got like that, the name Rusty spread through every corner of the community, and one reporter caught the scent and rushed out an article. The piece, headlined something like, “Twelve People Won First Place in the Lottery with Numbers Called by an Internet Streamer?” kept spreading and spreading until it even made it onto the evening news.

*****

“Heh... that’s going down real well.”

Watching the galleries lose their minds was oddly entertaining.

“I’m controlling their emotions now.”

He muttered nonsense to himself and posted an announcement on the stream. If he didn’t, one of his viewers was going to get publicly flayed online for sure.

Right. The friend who had posted in the gallery and kicked all this off.

But honestly, he’d expected this much. Content was something you did when you could predict how your actions would bounce back and you could live with it; a problem was what happened when you couldn’t. He’d known someone would post about it eventually, so now it was time for damage control.

Ugly or not, he was still one of his own.

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After posting the announcement, he picked up his tablet and headed for bed.

“Might as well binge One Piece again while I’m at it.”

After that, all that drifted out for a long while was the sound of him snickering.

*****

“...Should I just rest for another month or two and come back?”

Staring at the monitor with unfocused eyes, the absurdly swollen follower count was impossible to miss.

- Followers: 8.376 million.

Yeah. Maybe he’d been too casual about it. He’d expected a few hundred thousand at most, not several million. At this point, had even people who didn’t normally watch streams just hit follow out of curiosity?

He thought it over for a long time, then shrugged. He wasn’t actually quitting streaming, and after spending days cooped up in his room watching only anime and dramas, he was dying to talk to people again.

Whatever. Might as well shake the money tree hard and see what falls out. What else am I supposed to do?

He moved his mouse over the stream start button.

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The moment he started the stream, he froze the chat first.

Look at how fast the viewers were piling up.... absolutely ridiculous.

And... the others are already appointed as managers.... good.

Once he’d finished his suppression prep, he waited a moment for people to trickle in, then opened his mouth.

“Uh... way too many of you have crowded into this shabby little place. Chat’s locked for now. You’ll only be able to hear what I say.”

“First, that lottery incident from last time was pure coincidence. It was just a number put together from the stream date, time, viewer count, and so on.”

“The reason I ran that mission in the first place was that a friend was going through a rough patch, and I wanted to cheer him up a little by treating him to some chicken.”

“But rather than just giving it away, I also wanted some stream fun, so that mission stream happened. In the end, I gave out ten chicken gift cards per person.”

He hid the lie inside the truth. Luckily, the numbers from that day could be forced into a plausible shape, so it was possible. In the end, the only thing he could do was keep pretending not to know anything.

What else were they going to do if he insisted it was all coincidence? What could they do to him?

“So if you came here hoping for something like, ‘Maybe he’ll do it one more time?’ then please leave now.”

“I’m never doing it again. I’ve had it with this whole thing.”

“And I’m adding new chat rules too. Lottery tickets, lotto, and things like that will be instant bans.”

“This is a proper, civilized stream where a dozen or so people hang out together in peace. If that’s not your thing, please leave.”

After finishing what he had to say, he started typing up the rules in plain sight, as if to make a point.

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1. Any behavior or language that makes others uncomfortable will get you banned.

- The streamer is exempt. Why? Because it’s my stream.

2. Please don’t ask the streamer personal questions, like where he lives or how old he is. If those questions come up, they’ll be ignored.

3. Don’t ask for lottery numbers. The moment you do, you’re banned, and I don’t know them anyway.

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After typing out the ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠rules and leaving them on the stream screen, he went straight into chat settings.

He showed that words like “lottery ticket” and “lotto” would trigger instant bans, then saved the settings.

“There. You saw it. If possible, let’s just not do the things I said not to do. Once I ban you, I never unban you.”

“And.... by now a lot of you probably noticed this too, but I’ve turned off donations as well.”

“I didn’t start streaming to make money in the first place. I started because I wanted to chat and mess around with people.”

“So no, I’m not exactly thrilled about my viewer count going up.”

He’d explained his position, all right... but there was no reason to expect people would just obediently listen.

Hah. What else was there to do? Time to shake the money tree. All right. Let the war begin.

*****

After that, a brutal war broke out between the people who wanted to stay somehow and him, who wanted to drive them out somehow.

For the opening act, he crushed them with racing games for three straight days.

He kept the chat locked the whole time.

Luckily, viewers were dropping out by the truckload.

But there was a problem... because he kept playing racing games, his body adapted.

By then, he could win first place as casually as eating a meal even while doing other things, and that only made people more curious.

So he ditched it. No, he had no choice.

Before long, the racing-game lunatics started swarming in, and instead of shrinking, his viewer count actually went up.

His next card was Romance of the Three Kingdoms.

“...Honestly, even I don’t find Three Kingdoms all that fun...”

Still, he had no choice. For the sake of his little stream, he had to sacrifice a bit too.

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