Please Be My Teacher
"Huh? You're going full-time?"
Five years before now, they met and became friends—not in the real world, but in a virtual one.
The broadcasts had not been started to make money. They had not even believed money was something they could make. The legend began when the guild took turns going live, just so the members could talk a little among themselves.
"Streaming isn't some easy thing. You'd be lucky to scrape minimum wage."
Im Nayun had announced, out of nowhere, that she was taking streaming full-time. Chae Ichae tried to stop her. Internet broadcasting was already a red ocean. It was not a market you walked into with your eyes half open.
"I'm not even hoping for minimum wage. I get to make money without leaving the house. How is that not the best?"
"Good grief."
Im Nayun was a teen who refused school. Her house was a divorced one. In this era, that was hardly rare. Even so-called twilight divorces—people in their sixties splitting up—were common, and people in their thirties, old enough to go their own ways, walking out on a marriage was far too common.
"I don't have any road but this one!"
Im Nayun had a phobia of people. There was no job she could even picture besides streaming. What pushed her toward going full-time was a viewer's first donation.
Stuttering at school, acting like an idiot—that was a sin. An absolute taboo, the kind that got you ignored by your own classmates and bought you their laughter. On an internet broadcast, even that could be turned into a weapon.
"Thank you for the five dollars. But I'm a loser, right? So what exactly did you just contribute?!"
"I am not a loserrr!"
Two donations of five dollars. Ten dollars in all—and for Im Nayun, that was enough money to make her think seriously about the rest of her life.
She was a victim of child abuse. Violence is not only the kind that leaves a mark. Her mother, the adult responsible for raising her, had given up the raising and drifted out of the house. She said she was leaving to find a new love. She did pay the rent, and a thin stipend to live on. That was all. She never scolded her sharply for not going to school, and her coming home at all was a rare event.
The living money was not generous. Order delivery on a whim and it vanished, and then you starved, so most meals were cup noodles. Bad nutrition put weight on her. Her looks fell apart. The house became a garbage dump. Her confidence sank. She could no longer step outside, and she could no longer take care of herself. A hell cycle that ruined a life. She knew it was wrong. She simply could not see a way out of a life that had no exit—and inside that life, streaming was the first thing she had ever thought she wanted to try.
"Yeah? Then do it well. I'll be rooting for you."
Unlike Chae Ichae, who tried to hold her back, Killer cheered Im Nayun on.
Killer0109. She went around under an ID too grim and heartless to pass for a girl's handle, and she was someone who would not even give them her name, claiming she didn't like it because it wasn't pretty. You could have called the reaction indifferent. They would soon learn she had meant the cheer with her whole heart.
"I don't know. I want to die."
"See? I told you to look into it properly."
"I'm already falling apart. Why are you yelling at me?"
"Because something actually terrible happened!"
Why was the world this cruel. The more unfortunate and weak a person was, the more easily they were laid open to crime, and the more easily they were fooled.
Im Nayun auditioned to debut as a VTuber under a corporate agency, passed, and signed a contract. Then she was scammed. Every month a bill arrived demanding rental fees on the broadcast gear, and folded into it was an absurd charge for a worthless avatar. The company had never meant to earn money from broadcasts. From the start, the plan was to trick naive girls and bleed them.
Im Nayun truly thought about dying. It seemed her classmates had been right.
You're stupid. Stupid again. You don't just ruin yourself—you ruin everyone around you.
"Curse the scammers. Why are you cursing the victim."
"Because! It's suffocating!"
That was what Killer0109 said. The bad one was not the victim. It was the scammer.
It wasn't that Chae Ichae hated Im Nayun. She pitied herself, the one who couldn't fix a single thing. That suffocation came out shaped like anger, and turned into the worst thing she could have done: screaming at the victim.
"I'll ask a lawyer I know to help."
"I don't have money to pay a lawyer."
"Don't worry. We just have to wring it out of them."
"That's possible?"
It was possible. On a large case, it wasn't unheard of for a lawyer to jump in without insisting on a retainer. This, though, was small change—enough money to destroy one person's entire life, and still, under the law's sorting, small change. There was no world in which a lawyer's fee came back out of it. No world in which anyone stepped up to do a thing like this for free. But Im Nayun and Chae Ichae were both just starting out in the world, and they fell straight for Killer0109's unruffled lie.
"Thank you. Really, thank you. But."
"?"
"You're really not going to tell me your name? All the way to the end?"
The lawyer Killer sent saved Im Nayun. The contract, void. The claims, void. A complete victory. And still, even then, Im Nayun did not know the name of the woman who had saved her.
"The ID's enough. Don't get too attached to someone you met on the internet."
"Killer isn't cute enough. I'm going to call you Kira."
Kira was Japanese for sparkle, and kirakira meant sparkle-sparkle. And inwardly, Yu Yuna thought:
That's the alias of a terrifying mass murderer.
The moment I connected to the collab voice chat, a voice came bursting out to welcome me.
"Kiraring! You came to save me!"
"No. I got caught too."
The internet has a rule. Even if a bit looks like it came out of nowhere, if a template can be used, you use it. You share a template you both know, confirm that you and I are both creatures of the internet, and thicken the friendship that way.
"We can't get caught together! Kiraring is my teacher today!"
The collab Mina had begged me to save was that Chinese politics game. Five against five across a battlefield, and whichever side destroyed the enemy base first won. Cooperation and competition were both supposed to live at the heart of it. Play it for real, though, and it degenerated into an advanced game of politics—psychological tricks, demagoguery, and a hunt for whoever had thrown.
Ordinarily, if one person flaked and the headcount broke, a collab simply switched games. This one was a scrim to prepare for a tournament, so the game could not be changed. They had called in a fill-in.
"You want me on support?"
Mina's current rank was Silver. You could tell from Silver being allowed into the tournament that it was mostly low tiers playing. And even among tournaments that low tiers entered, Silver sat especially far down.
"You want me to go bot, play support, raise a Silver ADC, and teach the game while I'm at it?"
"Yeah!"
"Okay. Request received."
ADC was short for ranged dealer. The champions who went there were miserably weak early, but built around auto-attacks, so the more items came online, the harder their DPS exploded. A support was the babysitter who raised that ADC—the one who spooned baby food into the mouth of a marksman too weak, at the start, to feed herself, so she could eat and grow up sturdy.
The grab support I had picked could do more than freeze an enemy in place. She could drag them toward my side, or shove them the other way.
"I stick you on support, and you're missing the cannon right now?!"
"I'm sorryyy!"
"Penalty. CS confiscated."
"Huh?"
"The second a minion hits forty health, I eat it. You last-hit faster than that."
I tried drilling her to fight her own ally as well as the enemy, so she might be reborn as a true ADC. If that had been possible, she would not have been Silver. Mina panicked, and whiffed even more last-hits than before.
Mina's channel was famous for barely banning anyone. I was the same. People could live in my chat with a swear welded to every sentence, and I mostly let it slide. Even so, Mina's room had a taboo. You did not insult Kira.
Yes. Me.
Back when Mina had been scammed, I had set a lawyer on the case and settled it. I told her it was nothing, forget it. She, apparently, went on remembering. People say you shouldn't take in a black-haired beast—but Mina's hair was mint, in twin-tails, so she must have been a different species.
"Nice! Nice!"
"This counts as nice?"
"The result's good. The result's good, but..."
Mina, shouting nice. The teammates, distinctly uncomfortable.
"Our ADC just got a pentakill. Of course it's nice."
"You... were the ADC?"
"If the auto-attack is ranged, you're an ADC."
The important teamfight, in the end: four allies dead, five enemies dead. The allied ADC takes the pentakill, and the fight is won. Except that ADC was not our Silver ADC, Mina. It was me, after I had suddenly built damage.
"Mina. You get it? This is how an ADC does it."
"Yeah!"
"You need to experience variables like this, too."
In this game, supports did not always come out as utility supports and tank supports. Damage support was perfectly major in its own right. So it would do them good to feel a game in which the support was stronger than the ADC.
Of course, all of that was an excuse.
This was preparation for a tournament, and it was also a broadcast. If it was a broadcast, it had to be fun first. And how fun it was—the sight of a support sweeping five enemies all by herself. The fun part was how furious the side taking it got, each in their own way.