Yorumi (3)
The first defeat. Followed by a torrent of four straight victories.
Ascendant Tier Promotion Achieved!
[Whoa…]
“Pfft…”
And then, the promotion. At Yorumi’s dazed exclamation, a quiet chuckle slipped out of me before I could stop it. I’d dug through memories of giving feedback to my old trainee teammates, offering advice that was just a little more detailed than usual. What had felt both short and long—our training session—finally came to an end with Yorumi’s rank climbing one step higher.
[Ah! You just laughed! You were totally thinking something like, “Look at this country bumpkin who’s never even breathed the air of the heavenly realm!” Weren’t you?!]
“No? I was just smiling with you because I was happy too.”
[Aaaah!]
I couldn’t exactly call her a fast learner… but she was the kind of student who carried out every instruction perfectly. The more consecutive wins she racked up, the more she bounced around in disbelief, yet the moment she entered a match she stayed calm and executed every single order without fail.
How should I describe this feeling? I’d never really taken any interest in teaching anyone before, so it was hard to put into words… but maybe it was similar to the moment your dog finally succeeds at a new trick for the first time.
“You still don’t know exactly how much time is left, right?”
[…I only know that everything wraps up before the Prelude. I don’t have the exact date, but they’re gathering all participants without qualifiers for a team auction. Then about a week later they’ll run a double-elimination bracket over two days… something like that.]
The Spring season would end next week. The Prelude was roughly a month after that. If the entire streamer tournament was scheduled to last about a week, then the window I had to train her was roughly one month. Still, since this was the first official international event the company was sponsoring, they probably wouldn’t have crammed the schedule too tightly around the highly anticipated Prelude…
“At most… two weeks.”
Once the event was officially announced, participants confirmed, and all the procedural back-and-forth was settled, two weeks was probably the generous maximum. It was a strangely ambiguous length of time—short if you thought of it one way, long if you thought of it another. Without realizing it, my brow furrowed.
Since I’d already decided to help, it would feel great if she just went and won the whole thing. But in only two weeks…
[I can do it.]
“Huh?”
The sudden sound of Yorumi’s voice yanked my drifting thoughts—lost in an imaginary schedule—back to reality. At some point she had switched the camera back to third-person view, and her gaze felt like it was staring straight at me.
[I felt the potential today. If I’m with you, Han Seol, I think I can win—even if the opponent is a heavenly realm ranker or a former pro.]
The young assassin, fists clenched tight, spoke with eyes sparkling in a way that didn’t quite match her mature outfit. While I wondered if the promotion had made her that happy, another thought quietly rose alongside it: She’s right.
I was a failure who had given up after my spirit broke, but she was different. She was someone who was already shining brightly. What right did a defeated loser like me have to judge her path with such lukewarm eyes?
“…How far you can go will depend entirely on you, Yorumi.”
[Yes! I’ll work hard, Coach!]
Was an awkward salute cute precisely because it was awkward? The smile that formed on my face carried that silent thought.
I thought our first meeting would end on a nice, pleasant note, but it seemed Yorumi had no intention of letting me go so easily.
[Oh, if it’s around there, you can get here in no time by car! When are you free next week?]
“…I’ll match whatever time works best for you, Yorumi.”
I couldn’t exactly say I was a complete unemployed gaming shut-in sniper ghost who didn’t need to worry about schedules, so I gave a vague answer. I couldn’t brutally reject her words—spoken alongside the joy of promotion—about “wanting a chance to repay the favor,” and before I knew it, the vague promise of “let’s grab a meal together” was gaining concrete shape.
When I factored in Woojin’s parents visiting on the weekend, my stomach started to ache a little.
“You’ll need to eat and prepare for your stream too.”
[…You’re not going to snipe me, right?]
“During the regular season the pros don’t do solo queue streams, so it gets boring.”
[If you actually do it I’ll die?!]
With a giggling laugh and a bit of light chatter, the voice call ended with a deflating sound effect. The time displayed in the corner of the monitor had somehow crept close to 2 p.m.
“Haa…”
The sudden silence felt strangely unfamiliar. If it had been a normal day, I would have been getting up around now. I’d probably have washed my face roughly, wondered what to eat for a late lunch, and scrolled through the internet.
It had only been three days since I woke up like this. The colorless “normal” that used to feel so ordinary now seemed incredibly distant. I still hadn’t fully accepted my situation, yet some feeling kept surging up inside me. Even though nothing about what I actually did had changed that much from before.
“…Doesn’t suit me at all.”
In the silence, a thought like Maybe I could try again cautiously raised its head. The illusion that just by standing next to a shining person for a moment, I might shine the same way. I stared blankly at the connector charging quietly by the bed, then slowly shook my head.
What was I even thinking? I forced the excited feeling down and naturally opened the “AO Streamer Channel” that I’d been ignoring for the past few days. …I’d told myself I shouldn’t use my old account for a while to avoid unnecessary talk, but I was once again reminded that community addiction wasn’t something you could just quit because you wanted to.
“A life where the only hobbies are gaming and lurking in communities is probably pretty dizzying.”
Well, even if I didn’t post, I could still read. If I really felt the urge to shitpost, I could just use a throwaway account even if the reactions were lukewarm.
With that soft thought, I skipped everything else and immediately clicked the “Featured Posts” button. Rather than scrolling through the mountain of posts that had piled up over several days, this was far more efficient—
“…What the hell.”
As I was casually flipping through the posts, one title caught my eye more than the rest.
[Title: Something felt off so I checked Yorumi’s replays and this is just another person playing at this level]
A chill suddenly ran down my spine.
[LooTubeEditor: Yorumi we have a big problem]
[LooTubeEditor: Check the fan cafe right now]
It should have been a good day. The moment the editor’s sudden text arrived while she was picking a lunch menu, Yorumi’s expression hardened instantly. The atmosphere in the “Yorumi Fan Cafe” she hurriedly opened with a sinking feeling was, quite literally, in total ruins.
Just from the titles of the rapidly multiplying posts, she could roughly guess what the issue was. But the feeling that rose first wasn’t embarrassment—it was suspicion. Why? What the hell happened?
[LooTubeEditor: (Link)]
Yorumi kept scrolling through the cafe page as calmly as possible. Another message from the editor popped up on the side of her screen. With no explanation, just a lone link. When she clicked it, a private post the editor had uploaded to the cafe opened.
“…Fuck.”
It was a compilation of posts scraped from other communities. The very first one was titled “Did Yorumi get a boyfriend???” The content was the common type—I had a day off so I logged in and saw Yorumi in town—but the attached video was the problem.
‘Ah! You just laughed! You were totally thinking something like, “Look at this country bumpkin who’s never even breathed the air of the heavenly realm!” Weren’t you?!’
A video, shot from a slight distance and therefore a bit blurry, showed her smiling and speaking those words into empty air. Because of the distance, most of the other words were inaudible, but that loud line and the way she cutely snapped into a salute right after—almost like she was acting coy—were captured with painful clarity.
Aside from the attached video, the post itself was nothing but lukewarm nonsense like “I loved you, you bastard,” but…
Content
Anyone who watches Yorumi knows her dice rolls are usually trash and she was barely clinging to Ascendant. But after seeing that featured post I got curious and checked her solo queue replays—she went on a 4-win streak and promoted to Ascendant 1. Normally I would’ve just thought “huh, dice were good today lol” and moved on, but
(Yorumi tailing the enemy main force while maintaining maximum detection range)
Her? Doing this? Her intelligence was that high? Hmm lol. It’s a replay so I can’t hear private conversations, but there’s no allies nearby and she’s clearly moving her mouth like she’s talking to someone lol
The chain of follow-up posts that caught fire afterward were the real problem.
The subsequent posts were all similar in tone. Arcadia Online’s PvP scene was, one way or another, a male-dominated space. None of Yorumi’s fellow female streamers were higher rank than her. If she was playing with the guys in her crew, why solo queue in a smurf account? She said she was in bad shape yesterday and didn’t even do a second stream. Could it be a booster?
Looking at these posts—lacking hard evidence but piling up suspicion after suspicion—Yorumi thought to herself:
“I’m screwed.”
This… looked like it had become a serious issue.