The Insane Rant

On most internet sites where you can write posts and leave comments, you can also look up a user's personal activity log.

The League of Champions community was no different.

You could browse not only your own history, but other users' logs as well.

Originally, the feature might have been meant to make it easier to find the game guides each person had written.

A Garena main's counter picks and item builds.

A mid laner with thirty thousand games on how to dodge ganks by the minute.

A retired pro support's guide to vision control after laning phase ends.

Jungle Xin Zhao's delightful one hundred and eight mid ganks.

A deceased Vayne's insane montages rolling perfectly on beat…

You could dig those up through a search engine, sure.

But if you didn't know the exact title or contents of a post, the flood of related results made it genuinely hard to find something you'd written in the past.

You might search half-sure of yourself and end up with a dead man's last dance, swaying in ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠time to the music.

That was why the user log and nickname search functions existed.

They were clearly built for that purpose.

The people searching Noel's ID, though, almost certainly weren't after anything of the sort.

Noel had never really written game guides to begin with.

Whatever their reasons, they still couldn't get the result they wanted.

The ID NoelNongreu had already been fully deleted.

The posts she'd written were still there, so a nickname search would surface them—and that was exactly the problem.

Once the money I've saved runs out, I'm ready to die.

The water or the electricity might get cut first.

That was what her last post had said.

Naturally, most people panicked, terrified that Noel might have made the worst possible choice.

Even among them, though, there were people who treated the whole thing as nothing serious.

Maybe they were drunk on the thrill of proving that everything they'd said so far hadn't been wrong.

Maybe they were high on the victory of finally driving out a cheater who'd been fooling naive community users.

Or maybe they were proud of themselves for dismantling the underdogma of someone who'd used disability and poverty as a shield just to avoid getting cursed out.

Other users in the community were hurling stones at them, calling them less than human.

But to people intoxicated with their own righteousness, that was nothing more than the howling of fools who still hadn't seen the light.

So when a reasonably well-known League of Champions streamer announced he was going to Noel's house, they sensed at once that this would be the final battlefield.

Celesty was a streamer who found getting tangled in controversy utterly exhausting.

If Noel were a fraud, he'd shut the stream off on the spot and turn it back on from his own place like nothing had happened.

And Noel, after all, had refused a free phone in the community and turned down having her home photographed.

In their heads, Noel was already nothing but a deceiver.

Disabled people got support payments, so they wouldn't go hungry, and crutches or wheelchairs could be bought cheap.

And yet Noel had been hobbling around on a cane that snapped on the bus, getting by on a single small cup of instant noodles a day.

It didn't make sense.

So the house that appeared on Celesty's stream had ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠to be an ordinary home.

A little poor, maybe—but not a shantytown shack or a cardboard box.

Even the place Celesty was heading as he went live looked like a fairly decent apartment complex.

He'd waited until he reached the neighborhood before turning the stream on, probably so he wouldn't expose Noel's address—he even kept the bus stop name off-mic—but the walking paths and playground laid out through the complex still made it clear this wasn't a hard-up place to live.

DoReMiserable and DioSonover's shoulders swelled without limit.

Other viewers, the closer Celesty got to Noel's door, started typing chat in genuine confusion—had Noel really been playing them all along?

And then, just as Celesty arrived at Noel's door and everyone had their curses locked, loaded, and aimed at the girl who'd supposedly lied to them—

Noel opened the door.

Even after eating pizza, her face was still gaunt.

Behind her, the camera caught a living room so bleak you had to wonder whether anyone actually lived there at all.

Aside from the few spots where feet had worn a path, everything was a pit of dust.

The strangely askew sofa and the papers scattered across the floor looked like the aftermath of a break-in.

Among viewers who still couldn't quite grasp Noel's circumstances, speculation ran wild.

Some claimed Noel had staged the whole look for a bit.

Others guessed it had once been a well-off household, and that after losing her parents she'd become a shut-in wreck.

The theory that won the most support was that Noel had lost her parents in an accident—and in that same accident, her left eye and right ankle.

People called it a devilishly clever take and piled on praise, but even then the chat stayed warm and lively.

Mostly it was just people telling Celesty to hurry up and buy the kid a wheelchair and get some real food into her.

Now and then someone ribbed the ones who'd completely missed the mark, but that was about it.

But in the exchange between Celesty and Noel, the viewers realized reality was far colder than any of their ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠theories.

A child who'd lost her parents was pitiful—but she could still find the strength to keep living.

She could decide to work hard for the sake of the parents who'd loved her their whole lives and then died.

She could become the protagonist who rises from tragedy.

But looking at Noel's tone, which held not a shred of affection for her parents, and at a family situation that was pure chaos on the face of it—

You had to wonder whether she even had a reason to keep living at all.

Maybe the only thing keeping her alive was playing games all day.

And just like that, the curses that had been locked and loaded swung around toward the people who'd been writing Noel malice-soaked posts all along.

The ones who'd used anonymity as a weapon from behind a keyboard now had anonymous faces of their own coming for them with knives drawn.

No—in some ways, they might have been in a worse position than Noel.

Messages started arriving on the social media they actually used with classmates, friends, and family—screenshots of everything they'd done.

If it had only been DMs, private messages, that might have been manageable.

But the "gifts" went out in public, where real-life acquaintances could see them. That was nothing to celebrate.

Even then they scrambled—closed their accounts, claimed they'd been hacked, claimed someone had misunderstood—and moved fast to contain it.

They figured they could just leave the community, lie low, and come back once things quieted down.

They had no idea. That was only the beginning.

Kancho's side had already finished consulting a lawyer. The lawsuit was nearly ready to file.

I'm exhausted.

I want to go home.

Forget the game—I just want to lie down and sleep.

Celesty chattering away, reading chat I can't even see and talking to the viewers, is boring. The employee keeps bringing over this and that to try to sell us, and that's tiresome too.

Well. Even that has quieted down a little for now.

Stopping by the district office first, on the grounds that you should take whatever benefits you can get, I could at least understand.

If I got a disability welfare card, I'd get a discount when buying a mobility aid.

Even if we were buying it with donation money, cheaper was still better.

The problem was that it would take about two weeks to come through.

So Celesty suggested we hold off on the wheelchair until then.

"I know it's inconvenient, but for now, maybe at least use these crutches? Of course, if you'd rather have a wheelchair right away, Noel, we can skip the discount and just go buy one."

"It's fine. I don't really have anywhere to go. Occasionally buying ramen at the convenience store is about it."

"Ah—and once the welfare card comes through, there'll be a subsidy, so make sure you apply for that."

"Yes."

Up to that point, it was fine.

We'd come out under the pretext of buying a wheelchair, but Celesty probably hadn't expected the paperwork to take this long either.

If anything, I was just grateful he was thinking that far ahead.

The problem was that after all that, Celesty carried me into a phone store.

And then he split the viewers into factions.

"What new phone would be good for Noel? Five Star? Pineapple?"

For the next thirty minutes, Celesty just watched them fight among themselves.

If someone said a Five Star phone was better, he'd nod along—then someone would praise Pineapple and he'd flip, wondering if maybe that was the one.

Mention a downside and he'd go hmm, humming thoughtfully—then hear a flaw on the other side and set both phones down entirely, lost in thought.

The store employee, who'd started out kindly explaining the pros and cons, had long since given up and was only watching from a distance, worn out.

In the end, I pulled out the phone I'd stuffed in my hoodie pocket with data transfer in mind.

"Um… could we just get the phone fixed instead?"

"Huh. Won't that take longer, though…? Wouldn't it be better to buy a new one and transfer the data?"

The viewers were telling him to buy me a new one, and Celesty had clearly come with that intention, so I felt a little bad.

But at this rate, it was never going to end.

"Still. I'm attached to this phone."

"Ah… then let's just go with that."

"Yes, that's a wise choice too. It says you haven't had it long—buying a brand-new one already would be a waste. Let's see… Customer Yoon Noeul. Resident number starts with… yes, confirmed. You have damage insurance, so you'll only pay thirty percent of the repair cost. It will just take a little time…"

The phone store employee, who only wanted Celesty and the viewers' decision paralysis to end one way or another, cooperated with us immediately.

He seemed more interested in clearing our case quickly than in making a sale.

We left the phone with them, and now all that was left was to go home.

Really—it's nice when someone is cheerful and kind.

But standing next to them drains the life right out of you.

"Alright! Shall we head over and clean Noel's place?"

…Ah.

So it wasn't over.