Things Don't Always Go as Planned

It was four in the morning, four hours after Dora had taken her final break. Eight hours had passed since she started playing Pandemic Village. Finally, a triumphant shout erupted from inside the soundproof booth.

Dora had triumphed over the final boss after thirteen attempts, successfully clearing the game. Normally she would have done her usual story dubbing right about now. But the clear had moved her so deeply that she could barely speak through her tears.

“Huuung… huuuuuh… hiiiiiiik.”

Of course her reaction to the donation was nowhere near human speech either.

“Huuheohe… iyeuu huuaaeeo, hiaeeuuuuuu…”

It was cute, sure. But if she kept reacting like this to a hundred-thousand-Cloud donation, someone might accuse her of phoning it in. So I stepped in and translated her babbling for the viewers. Normally I would have waited, but after watching her suffer up close in the booth, I didn’t want any misunderstandings. Plus, if I left her alone she’d spend even more time cleaning up and my own quitting time would get pushed back.

“She says, ‘Huueo, Anonymous Donor has given ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠ten thousand Clouds.’”

“Heunghii… haaaau…! Heunghii haaaa!”

“She says, ‘The air is paaaainful. The air is paaaainful.’”

“Eeeu haaeo!”

“She says, ‘Do it properly.’”

What was strange was how the chat atmosphere had completely shifted after that. The majority of comments had been comforting Dora for her hard work, but suddenly a ton of people were sympathizing with me instead.

It wasn’t as if I was exhausted just because I’d been awake this late for one or two days. The only real strain was that my ears felt a bit muffled after listening to Dora’s dragon-like roars and screams nonstop. Still, seeing the viewers being this considerate for once felt oddly touching. If they’d been like this normally, I wouldn’t have had to do the knife dance with the ban hammer.

Yet in this otherwise warm and friendly atmosphere, only one person had damp eyes. Dora still hadn’t escaped the flood of emotion.

“You guys… seriously. Why are you only taking care of the staff… What about me! I suffered the most…!”

When a streamer gets emotional, the viewers turn into little devils. After all, there’s no better time for maximum entertainment. Sure enough, it didn’t take long before everyone was busy teasing Dora.

…She was already worked up. Stimulating her any more right now seemed dangerous.

“Yeah. I messed up… It’s true it took a long time because I was bad. That’s fair. But the kids really run around too much. Even if the staff had done it, I doubt it would’ve been much different?”

As expected, things were heating up. Dora’s lips were trembling; she looked like she was about to burst into tears again. The mood felt bad, so I was watching for the right moment to intervene when—

Thankfully that cheerful donation made Dora let out a small, involuntary laugh. But dear anonymous donor, are you aware that the anonymous donation feature isn’t actually anonymous? Streamers can see the nickname of every donor. Throw cheap punches from behind the anonymity shield and eventually you’ll get punched back. I learned this the hard way when I first started watching streams and got dissected by the boss myself. Though at least my nickname hadn’t looked like that.

Dora pinned the capture image up for the viewers to see and asked me, still looking half-annoyed even though she’d laughed despite herself.

“Staff, can you really clear it in three minutes?”

I blinked, trying to convey with my eyes that I just wanted to go home, but what followed was an adorable provocation.

“Are you scared? Are you afraid you’ll clear it slower than me, so you’re pretending you didn’t hear?”

…She was literally crying until just now. What even is a streamer?

Of course, after struggling for eight hours to clear it, having a donation like that fly in would put anyone in a bad mood. Especially since it wasn’t a normal situation—it was one where I was suddenly being praised for suffering. After all her hard work, the spotlight had been stolen and the viewers were taking care of me more than her. It would be weird if she didn’t get angry. In a way, it was only natural for her jealousy to be aimed at me.

…But if I actually cleared it in three minutes, wouldn’t everyone end up looking only at me?

Even so, I couldn’t half-ass it. Since it was already known that I was a signal flare, even the slightest drop in performance would definitely be called “going easy on purpose.” And if I did go easy, it would only make Dora look worse by comparison. Once people started comparing the sincere, all-in Dora with the calm and collected me, it was obvious she would come off as childish and pathetic. Of course the people who had watched the whole broadcast knew the context, so they’d be fine. The problem was the people who hadn’t watched spreading distorted rumors far and wide.

“Staff. Be honest. You’re scared, right? You’re terrified you’ll do worse than me, right?”

Anyway, Dora kept pressing me, and since this was my first time in this kind of situation, I had no response manual. But running away like a coward didn’t feel right either. Looking at how things were going lately, I was going to keep getting entangled with the members whether I wanted to or not. There was no guarantee that avoiding it this time would prevent similar things from happening again. In other words, if I wanted to last long as general manager, I had to develop the ability to improvise and resolve situations like this.

If I wanted to get out of this without turning Dora’s broadcast into something that suited my taste… the answer was obvious.

“All right. Let’s make a bet.”

“A bet? Sure! What are we betting?”

“If I clear it in three minutes, you’ll give the viewers your big-sister voice that we haven’t heard in a while.”

Her real big-sister voice was a 500,000-Cloud reaction, so it was something viewers rarely got to hear. The chat exploded immediately.

Even Dora, whose emotions had been running high, calmed down considerably after hearing my words. After thinking for a long time following her initial provocation, she finally spoke.

“Fine. But if the staff can’t clear it in three minutes, you have to promise to play a game with me before the end of this month.”

“Deal.”

And so the bet was made. It had almost looked like the picture of me struggling to clean up after Dora’s tantrum, but because both sides of the bet offered something good for the viewers, the atmosphere flipped in an instant. Now all I had to do was win, create a cozy little moment between Dora and the viewers, and then leave. I sat down in the chair Dora had vacated, adjusted the height, loaded the save data, and fired a few shots into the air—bang, bang—while spinning the mouse around. I was checking the sensitivity and maximum turning angle.

This angle should be plenty…

After confirming the angle, next came checking the battlefield. The boss room was a tangled multi-level cave structure with shortcuts only a human like me could use scattered throughout. Inside, the boss constantly crawled toward me at high speed; if I didn’t keep using the shortcuts to run, it would catch up immediately. In other words, it was a boss that forced hit-and-run tactics.

Fortunately I had four health bars, so I could tank up to three hits. The final boss fight didn’t allow healing items, but it at least meant I could fight like a berserker while eating those three hits.

“I’m ready.”

Dora grinned and asked, “It’s really going to be hard, you know? Its weak point keeps flailing around so you can’t even aim properly, and its speed is insane—”

The boss was a spider larger than a person, with two enormous, dangling eyeballs the size of half a human head as its only weak point. Just as Dora said, the boss was fast and changed direction often, shaking wildly like crazy. Speedrunners sometimes got slower trying to hit the weak point and eventually just ignored it entirely. But avoiding something difficult when a weak point existed wasn’t my style.

“Here I go.”

The moment I entered the boss room, I opened fire on the boss that was already rushing in from afar. Every time it was hit it bounced between floor, walls, and ceiling, making its weak-point eyeballs shake violently. But that was no reason I couldn’t hit them. Even though the eye movement looked random, it wasn’t. When it moved from wall to floor, or floor to ceiling, the angle and trajectory of the shake could still be predicted to some degree.

One magazine emptied; I swapped to a new one. The boss was already right in front of me, but instead of running I fired three more shots. Bang bang bang! On the third gunshot the boss bit into my body. I used the QTE to shove it off, gaining a brief moment of invincibility. I emptied the three remaining bullets in the magazine and immediately dove into a shortcut.

I reloaded and repeated the same process until I had one health bar left. Easy, right?

I asked around in the ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠Pandemic Gallery and they said even in speedruns the meta is two minutes thirty because hitting the head is ridiculously hard. But DiHwang just drilled every shot into the head and coolly clocked out. Watching it gave me such a dopamine rush that I woke right up.

(Source: Dora (VTuber) Gallery [View Original])