Explanation Stream?
Jaemin had given up a solo kill to Teemo.
But Jaemin’s suffering did not end there.
“It’s fine, I can still make it up. Vayne’s tumble auto hits harder than Teemo’s blind, right? So just do it like a poke-and-back—tumble auto, then immediately disengage. I’ve got the sustain rune, so if I just hold on with that… Wait, why is the auto getting cancelled? Normally when you tumble and auto, even if the blind is flying at you, if you fire first before the projectile lands the damage still goes through. What the hell!”
“Who the hell even plays Teemo ADC?!”
Every play Jaemin tried with what little know-how she had was completely dismantled by Teemo’s bizarrely fast reactions.
“Come gank. That’s it, good boy, our cougar friend. Once that thing hits six and starts planting mushrooms it’s going to be a nightmare. You don’t want that either, right? …What? I didn’t even show anything, how did it know to run? Did it spot the pathing from somewhere else?”
The ward Teemo had planted after taking the kill and backing should have long since expired. The vision ward’s duration had already run out, and throughout the entire subsequent laning phase Teemo had never once left the lane to place more vision—as if other lanes intervening was nothing to fear.
Teemo had been pressuring Vayne without even knowing where Jaemin’s jungler was. Come if you dare; if I die, I die. That had clearly been the mindset.
Yet the moment Jaemin’s team actually moved to intervene, Teemo fled without so much as a glance back, scampering away on tiny legs.
From everything up to that point, it had looked like Teemo had been picked solely to make Vayne’s life miserable with no regard for anything else. After making Jaemin’s teammate waste the trip, Teemo somehow even knew the jungler had crouched in another brush out of pure spite at leaving empty-handed—and simply watched from afar, vacuuming free experience.
Feeling a twinge of guilt toward the jungler who finally left after burning even that extra ambush time, Jaemin grumbled,
“Wow, I honestly thought you’d at least try some rope-walking. You know, pretend you have no idea I’m here, wiggle the bait a little, burn more jungler time. Your game sense is way too good. Ugh, now Teemo’s just going to set up a whole mushroom farm top…”
Deep down Jaemin wanted to blame the team for not coming to help sooner. Of course the one actually tormenting her was Teemo, and of course she herself had been the one who refused to dodge even after seeing Teemo appear. But the human heart is petty; she wanted to aim that arrow at the easier target—her teammates.
No—before that.
It was that blond, untanned thug’s fault for not even yielding the ADC role and flirting with her support in bot!
And why, when she had queued as ADC, had she been thrown into top?
This damn game’s fault, all of it!
That was how completely the blame-circuit had already finished wiring itself inside Jaemin’s head. But she was live, so none of it could leave her mouth. The best she could do was transmute even this misery into content and make the viewers laugh.
“Uuuuugh. Fine, picking Vayne was my mistake. My sin is deep for not dodging when Teemo showed up!”
Yet circulating through the viewers’ chat was material that made Jaemin’s blame-shifting even easier.
Hacks. Unauthorized programs that made humanly impossible plays possible. Ones that made reactions absurdly fast, skill accuracy unnaturally high, even displayed enemy cooldowns or revealed enemy positions that never appeared on the minimap. Jaemin knew of all sorts of bizarre hacks beyond that.
Naturally, in a situation so ripe for blaming someone else, she was tempted.
“Teemo was hacking…? Nah, for that level of claim they still haven’t shown enough. The level-one kill angle is something any one-trick can pull off, landing blinds on every tumble could just be tunnel vision on me, and dodging the gank with no vision could be coincidence…”
But a streamer can be ruined by a single careless word. For now Jaemin kept a cautious stance.
Even among pros there were players who had abandoned being human with their reaction speeds, or who read enemy movement with near-precognitive prediction. Just look at the pros’ solo queue games. There was Joker, who dodged every single skillshot from a hacker and then beat them to death. There were players who sensed with ghostly instinct that the enemy was ambushing in a brush and simply path around. ADC-origin pros who casually sidestepped skills cast from fog of war.
So in Jaemin’s eyes, the only thing among Teemo’s plays that even invited suspicion was noticing the jungler’s approach.
Still the viewers kept suspecting Teemo. Jaemin simply nodded along and kept playing.
“Alright, once the game ends I’ll friend request and ask.”
The viewers even teased that passive attitude of hers. Yet Jaemin still couldn’t bring herself to charge straight at Teemo.
It happened in League of Champions and in other games too, didn’t it? People who just piled abuse on someone who was simply good, screaming “hacker,” only for it to turn out the person was just skilled. Especially common in FPS titles. There were people who showed reaction speeds past the human limit, or hit rates so high aimbot was the first suspicion. Of course real hackers existed too. But every so often, rookies appeared who smashed those suspicions head-on. Wild talents who debuted into the pro scene that way and swept every tournament.
Jaemin did not want to become the sacrificial lamb of such a debut.
If Teemo really was hacking, the community would bury them on its own. If not, they would climb to high elo or not—none of her business.
The viewers’ temptation was certainly appetizing. But Jaemin was someone whose motto was thin and long. If she had wanted thick and short, she would already have been streaming with full makeup, face and chest on display. A beautiful woman who’s good at games? Impossible not to be popular. But more viewers meant more toxic ones. And female streamers who used looks as a weapon attracted weirdos at an even higher rate. Real cases overflowed. People who didn’t just act up on stream but harassed them in real life too. Of course not every viewer was like that. But the rare incidents that did happen could, if things went wrong, actually hurt her.
So Jaemin liked her current stream atmosphere. Bickering lightly with viewers, modestly friendly. Most of all, she was making at least minimum wage just by gaming at home.
So when another streamer showed up, Jaemin was not particularly pleased either.
Canchona. A streamer who covered all the various incidents and accidents that happened in League of Champions. Thanks to the reputation for staying neutral while talking, a whole “Kan Mooncheol” content style had even sprung up recently. When people argued over differences of opinion while playing, they would put money on the line, take it to Canchona, and have the rights and wrongs judged. The origin was actually another League of Champions pro gamer, but that pro had their own schedule and couldn’t keep running the content forever. So various famous streamers copied it, and Canchona—who was said to maintain neutrality—ended up becoming the face of that content.
Jaemin simply didn’t care for that kind of arena content. Why should she watch other people fight? It was more fun when she herself held a gun or a bow and fought in-game! Ah, of course she would never hold a sword. She was an ADC.
“Ah, sniping streams are a bit… I need to play another game in that time. I’m climbing to Grandmaster!”
But Canchona did not give up. Well, modifiers like “first” made anyone greedy. Canchona had probably been browsing the hacker-suspicion posts floating around every game community, hopping streamer to streamer, spotted Teemo, and contacted Jaemin.
Jaemin had no desire to walk into the middle of a controversy. But if it was just a proposal, responsibility probably wouldn’t bounce back to her. And with everyone calling Teemo a hacker, even Jaemin was starting to feel those movements looked like scripts.
“Alright, well. Then I’ll at least try talking to them. Do I need to make a pledge too?”
In the end she caved to Canchona and the viewers’ coaxing. Crossdressing girl? It felt like complete nonsense, but the other way around—because she was a girl to begin with, something like crossdressing wasn’t even embarrassing for Jaemin.
“Fine, whatever. If Teemo isn’t a hacker I’ll crossdress. Ah, seriously, if you’re that fed just group with your team! Your team is losing! Why are you only coming to the side lane to torment me!”
And because she was getting completely dismantled by Teemo right that moment, she ended up blurting out the pledge in the heat of it.
The game ended.
As expected, allies and enemies alike were busy mocking me. Lost even with hacks, didn’t know how to play the game so never grouped, and so on and so forth.
But so what? Was I under some obligation to win the game for them? If they threw and lost, that was their responsibility. I just had fun tormenting only Vayne. Wasn’t that enough?
Even the rumor that I was using hacks, even the abuse over it—I no longer cared in the slightest. Just bark. What’s it to me?
I reported every single one of those countless insults one by one, and also reported the ally who had died way too many times under the pretext of intentional feeding. The moment I queued for the next game, a friend request arrived from the Vayne who had not typed a single word the entire match.
One of the three people from the previous game I had not reported. One was me. The other two were the enemy support and Vayne who had simply stayed quiet.
But well—getting completely dismantled the whole game, wanting to flame but not wanting the chat ban from a report. Petty, cowardly trash often added friends like this, so I immediately started capturing the screen. If they dumped a load of abuse and then deleted the friend, the chat log would vanish. I planned to record the flaming and report it.
Yet contrary to my expectations, the other party didn’t seem particularly malicious. Well, by “pledges” they probably meant those posts people uploaded to the communities while mocking me. Thinking I was a hacker and saying if not then they’d do such-and-such. Those pledges never got kept anyway. Wasn’t a pledge just an empty promise?
So I rejected the annoying request on the spot. Clarification stream? To do something like that I’d have to go somewhere in person and play. Whether I filmed a handcam or whatever, people wouldn’t believe it anyway. Even if I proved what programs were installed on the computer, they’d claim it could be faked. Especially for FPS games with lots of hacker suspicions, computer shops sometimes even sponsored the whole thing—setting up a brand-new PC with zero programs installed, turning on the game and stream for a clarification stage, and getting advertising out of it. If I was going to go out and only do favors for other people, I’d rather just play another game.
When I refused like that, Celesty didn’t push further and instead asked one question.
So this person was still suspicious of me after all. Even if it was the same suspicion, compared to the people who just blanketed everything with “hacker this, hacker that,” this was still quite gentlemanly. So I answered kindly.
Why couldn’t they understand?
I looked something up and checked the match history; Celesty’s main role was ADC.
Ah, over there two people share the experience, so that kind of calculation would be hard.
Sutgarak, I swear.