Not One Scrap of Glory
Under the handle Keysmash, Jeon Gyeoul had clawed her way through a brutal scramble and actually won a spot in the viewer round, and while she waited for her turn she kept Märchen's stream up on the screen. Focusing on it, however, was another matter entirely.
She had been handed a crushing responsibility: look at a drawing, and guess the prompt that started it. Six orders of chicken were riding on her shoulders, hers included. Wanting not to be nervous was a luxury she simply didn't have.
Someone who liked Water Gun Melt Down and liked watching Märchen might have been easy to misread, but the girl named Jeon Gyeoul was upright by nature and almost painfully diligent. She hated being a burden on anyone else. If her own mistake cost them the chicken? There was a very real chance she'd be so swallowed by guilt she'd start sniffling. Assuming, of course, that people actually blamed her.
The drawing flipped again. That made five. Which meant the next one was hers.
Her heart started thumping a little harder than it had a moment ago.
And then—
"AAAAAAAHHHHH!!!!! How am I supposed to choose between theseeeeeee!!!!!!!"
Märchen screamed.
"Eep?!"
The sudden shriek jerked Gyeoul's shoulders up. Startled, she snapped her eyes to the broadcast. What on earth could make someone yell that loud?
"Uh..."
From the look of it, the Raider CBT Day 1 video and the Raider CBT boss Furcle video had just been pitted against each other. Both sat near the top of Märchen's YouTube by view count, and she'd enjoyed both of them.
Both of them are popular, so she can't pick, and that's why she screamed? While Gyeoul was turning that over, Märchen launched into an extra explanation for the newcomers flooding in.
"Whoa.... This one's the first video of mine that ever blew up, and this one's currently my most-viewed video on YouTube, you know? Neither of these is in a weight class that ought to be dropping out here. Is this actually rigged? Did somebody fix this thing?!"
Hearing that, the videos suddenly looked different. Like she'd just been given the gallery label beside a work of art, maybe?
I'll have to watch them again later. While Jeon Gyeoul was entertaining that perfectly calm thought, the chat caught fire.
"When you put it like that, I do feel myself starting to lean..."
"Ah, that? Once I put 'boss' in there it started feeling a little long. And I did get the Furcle medal, so calling it CBT Furcle Owner isn't actually wrong, is it?"
The truth, of course, was that it had simply been Märchen's mistake. There was even a behind-the-scenes story in which she'd wavered over secretly ordering a corrected version of the text, then given up because she was sure she'd get caught. Sadly, that particular behind-the-scenes story did not look likely to ever see the light of day.
Anyway, while Märchen kept talking, the drawing flipped again.
Gyeoul's turn had finally come. She muted the stream at once and locked onto the picture———
"Ack."
The little death-rattle slipped out of her before she could stop it.
It wasn't because the drawing was bad. It was good. It was extremely good. The time limit must have been brutally short, and yet they'd even managed to color it.
The problem was that the picture was lewd.
To describe it briefly: a girl in a pink outfit dripping with elaborate frills, and a magic wand in her hand. A magical girl, no question about it. And it was lewd. The kind of lewd that made you suspect the prompt had not, in fact, been simply "magical girl."
For one thing, the outfit showed an awful lot of skin. Enough that if someone in real life told Gyeoul to put that on, she would refuse without a second's hesitation. For another, the girl wasn't even finished getting dressed. She was in the middle of putting it on. To be blunt, she was caught in that awkward half-crouch of stepping into a skirt. Which was probably why the proportion of bare skin was extraordinarily high.
Lewd. This was definitely lewd. Playing Water Gun Melt Down had built up a certain tolerance in Gyeoul, so she wasn't about to fly into a full panic, but lewd was still lewd.
So is the prompt "lewd magical girl"? Or "magical girl (not for viewers under nineteen)"?
While she was turning that over, she noticed something off.
"...Isn't it strange in the first place for a magical girl to be putting the magical-girl outfit on herself?"
A magical girl and her transformation sequence were a set. You didn't sell one without the other. Even Gyeoul knew that; it was closer to common sense than trivia. But no matter how she looked at this picture, it was a hundred million light-years away from a transformation scene.
Which meant it was fair to assume there was some intention behind it.
And in that instant, a single word flickered through her head.
"Cosplay?"
She said it out loud, a word she'd only picked up from keeping up with Märchen's YouTube and the streams. Yes. If it was cosplay, the scene stopped being strange. Excessive skin, too, was the sort of thing you could accept once you decided it was a cosplay costume.
Then the answer was...!!!
"Ah, the first group of participants just submitted their answers! So we'll pause the Ideal Type World Cup for a minute.... First, should I reveal the prompt?"
I clicked the reveal button, and the prompt I'd written went out to the participants and to everyone watching the stream.
"All right, the prompt was Märchen cosplaying as a magical girl! At a glance it's an easy one, but it's also the kind where you can completely miss the keyword 'cosplay,' right? Let's see how they drew it."
Oh. They'd drawn a mirror to sell the cosplay. That way, even if you missed the Märchen keyword, you could still walk away with magical girl and cosplay.
But the frightening thing about this game is that you never know when, where, or how it's going to fly off the rails. A participant whose drawing ability froze somewhere around elementary school can show up out of nowhere, the mirror can vanish in the middle of the chain, and nobody would even find that strange———
"...How does a picture like this come out of the one from a second ago!?!!"
It also meant that if someone fought desperately to undo the troll the person before them had committed, and the result was well drawn but somehow, quietly, a little lewd, there was nothing strange about that either.
"Yeah, nobody's getting this one right..."
I said it, and checked the answer the last participant had typed in.
"...They pulled cosplay out of this?!"
It was a little disappointing that Märchen herself had dropped out, but they'd salvaged two of the core keywords. Out of that drawing, which had been nothing if not faithful to desire.
...How did they actually get it?
Still, a correct answer was a correct answer, so I clapped several times with what I hoped was a congratulatory feeling and opened my mouth.
"This is more than enough to count as correct. All six of you participants, go straight to the fan cafe and post your proof! All right, I'm recruiting the next group right now. Everyone ready? Get ready.... Start! Done!"
The second I said it, people came pouring in, and the room was full in a flash. ...This one closed a little faster than last time, didn't it?
...If I announced we were doing three or four more rounds and then ending it, chat would actually explode, wouldn't it?
Riding the heat of the crowd, we ran a full ten rounds, and the glory of the chicken found its way to the viewers six times in all.
A sixty-percent hit rate. Definitely a much better record than I'd expected.
And after ten rounds the mood ought to have been going slack, cooling off, but the stream was livelier than I'd thought, and still piping hot.
Was it thanks to the Ideal Type World Cup we'd been running in the downtime? Sure, that deserved some of the credit. But the real MVP was something else.
"...At this point, shouldn't we rename the segment? The Lowkey Thirst-Pic Championship?"
The magical-girl-cosplay edition of sneakily filthy art that had set the very first round on fire seemed to have pried open something invisible, because quietly ecchi drawings kept popping out after that. As if everyone had made some unspoken pact.
No—saying they'd come out quietly was a bit of a misstatement. A sneakily filthy piece had shown up in every single one of the ten rounds. "Quietly" really didn't fit.
Normally the fun of a game like this is watching the prompt derail into nonsense. Somewhere along the way, though, it had mutated into a segment where you just waited to see what kind of softcore thirst pic would drop next. It had flowed in a direction that had nothing at all to do with the original plan.
Most unfortunate, really.
And the instant I said it that way—
The thousand-won punches came flying without mercy.
"No, it was kind of fun to watch, so I meant to hit the brakes, but I stomped the gas instead, and then, well..."
Saying that, I snuck a glance at the subscriber count, which I'd neglected while I was busy focusing on the lewd pics—no, on the content. Well. Still a long way off, surely. A thousand people isn't exactly some random mutt's na———
...Huh?
"OH SHIT WAIT THIS IS NOT THE TIME?! No, that's way too fast!! It's been going up like a thousand a day lately, so I figured this would take a good long while and I turned the stream on early on purpose?! Why didn't anybody sa——— Wait! Wait, don't hit subscribe, everybody stop! Let me set up the screen!!! ...Ah."
It happened in an instant.
For a moment I didn't say anything at all. I just stared, blank, at the count climbing and climbing, as if it had been waiting for exactly this moment.
"Whoa...! A hundred thousand! ...On other streams, they subscribe and cancel and subscribe again so the streamer doesn't get all antsy, and they make them hit a hundred thousand a bunch of times. Should we try that too?"
...Trying for a redo with the viewers' help was, apparently, not going to happen.
So there was only one thing I could do.
"No, my glorious, deeply moving moment of hitting a hundred thousand subscribers!!!!!"
Nothing but howling, packed to the brim with bitter regret.
It was a hundred-thousand-subscriber moment in which not one scrap of genuine feeling could be found.