Lulu Is a Mega-Corp!
“Thank you for a whole month of hard work!”
““Thank you for everything~!””
The server that had hosted Lulu’s first major collab stream came to a triumphant close.
As it wrapped up, they held a brief awards ceremony of sorts—part celebration, part after-party—covering a handful of categories.
For the awards proper, they first recognized the streamers who had cleared the most raids, the ones who had scored first clears on specific bosses, and the streamer with the highest combat power.
Most raid clears went, as expected, to a streamer who’d come up as a pro gamer. Among the first-clear awards, Aris and Elia showed up more than anyone else.
And as for highest combat power…
“Woooah! Lulu is the strongest!!”
…Why are you up there.
Still, Lulu had earned it. Once she’d piled up a decent nest egg, she’d kept right on earning—but she’d also started tagging along on plenty of raids and dungeons.
So how had Lulu managed to clear those raids without dying?
That’s right: overwhelming money. An absurd, ridiculous amount of money.
She’d poured that cash into grinding her gear upgrades so hard that, before long, she’d built a combat rating no one would ever believe belonged to a crafting class.
Of course, her mechanical skill was still trash, so once she was inside a boss room all she could really do was run around drawing aggro. But still.
Beyond those awards, there were also things like a Popularity Award decided by viewer votes, and a Mansour Award for the streamer who’d made the most money…
And every last one of those? Our Lulu swept them all.
“Lulu is the best! Hehehe.”
The Popularity Award, in particular, had been a surprise—though it made sense once you remembered she’d invented brand-new content like “Lulu Fight” and coined the catchphrase “I’m so wronged!”
Everything else aside, that “Dik Farmworkers’ Movement” really had been peak content. It even got its own separate page on Treewiki.
Thanks to some capable viewers who’d actually majored in economics, the consensus that emerged was, “Actually, Lulu paid pretty well from the start,” which only boosted her standing further.
She wasn’t some evil boss after all—she was the big-hearted employer who’d wrapped up labor talks cleanly and even thrown in a raise on top.
Anyway, once Lulu’s popularity really took off…
“Hiii~ my little sacrifices~ Lulu’s here~”
Even when she just opened a normal stream, her viewer count started sitting at a baseline three to four thousand.
How many streamers grow that much in a single year? In my opinion, almost none. You could count them on one hand.
I was genuinely moved. I’d been watching Lulu since before she even hit a hundred viewers. I never could have imagined she’d get this big.
And Lulu herself didn’t seem to have expected to grow this well, either.
“Whoa… there’s so many of you now!”
“That’s right! Lulu is a mega-corp now!”
The era had arrived when calling Lulu a small-time streamer—or even a mid-tier one—would get you decked on the spot.
Lulu was, in every sense of the word, a true mega-corp streamer now.
“So everyone! Today~”
“Should Lulu grind some of your teeth for you?”
…But that tooth-fairy bit of hers apparently wasn’t going anywhere.
The newcomers flooding in from the Dik streamer server probably thought Lulu’s whole concept was razor-sharp competence and cleverness—plus being ridiculously cute on top of it.
But Lulu’s true essence had always been catastrophically bad mechanical skill.
And she was about to prove it in full.
“Today~ we’re going to play Myeongshin, the game Aris unnie recommended~!”
The game Lulu was playing today was Myeongshin, a subculture title I enjoyed plenty myself as well.
It was also the game where I’d used Lua as a lucky charm for my pulls and somehow managed to land a jackpot.
“Apparently this pickup is for a character called Route…!”
“What’s wrong with a male character! He’s handsome! Look at those arm muscles—aren’t they super sexy?”
“A face reveal…! Well, honestly, yeah—I would look good on camera.”
Lulu was going full shameless confidence.
Come to think of it, would Lua Im ever do a face reveal? When she was streaming as Lulu, there were enough little differences from real life that it got confusing.
“Anyway! After the tutorial, I’m gonna pull on the gacha too! He’s gonna come home!”
Lulu said “he’s gonna come home” with an absolutely brazen lack of shame.
She thought she was a jackpot magnet? With that cursed luck of hers?
Thinking that, I settled in to watch her stream in peace.
Lulu ran the broadcast pretty well, all things considered. In particular, she’d clearly done her homework on the game—she made the executive decision to skip every last bit of the story, which was widely considered mind-numbingly boring.
“I heard Part 1 is boring, so I skipped all of it!”
That was most of the chat’s reaction. Of course, there were a few trolls mixed in.
Absolute trolls. Why were they trying to feed the kid weird stuff. Our Lulu needed to grow up on good content only.
Anyway, once Lulu punched through to the gacha, she started pulling right away…
“Kyaaaaaah! Route! Route! Rouuuuute!!”
She actually pulled Route in ten pulls flat.
“Heheh~ this is all~ my power! It came home because I’ve been living a good life!!”
Lulu was shamelessly taking full credit, and the chat started protesting—well, not really protesting so much as mock-protesting.
After that brief little WWE segment, Lulu finally started playing the game for real.
And before long, just as she’d promised, she began grinding her viewers’ teeth into dust.
Route was a current-version character, which meant he could flex on monsters designed around older kits purely through power creep.
On top of that, the developers had clearly compensated for him being an unpopular male character by making his kit extremely strong.
Under normal circumstances, you almost never failed to kill a monster with Route—or got yourself killed by one.
But, ta-da. There is no such thing as absolute.
Parting… once again.
“No! Why is he dying! Why is he dyiiing! I’m so wronged! I’m so wronged, I tell youuuu!!!”
Watching Route die to Lulu’s abysmal mechanical skill, chat started roasting her.
Yeah—for now, the mood was pure teasing. Lulu had even steered it that way herself, to some extent.
But some of the viewers were already starting to grind their teeth.
Watching those reactions from a slice of the chat, I was sure of it all over again. Lulu was aiming for exactly this.
A lot of VTubers would ban chats that killed the vibe like that. Laughing and having fun while you play was kind of the VTuber brand, after all.
But Lulu was deliberately leaving them up. She’d only delete the handful that actually crossed a line. Why?
Simple. She wanted people to get mad and grind their teeth a little.
Even the terminal… is this quiet.
Am I… going back there again.
Dying two more times in a row only made Lulu crankier.
“Aaaaaaah! Why am I dyiiing! I dodged it! I dodged iiiit!!”
“Kyaaaaaah! Aaaah! Why am I so weak, I’m supposed to be strong! I’m strooong!!”
The viewers… more precisely, the new arrivals… were slowly beginning to grasp the catastrophic depths of Lulu’s skill floor.
Lulu kept dying and dying as she played, and somehow, against all odds, she managed to take down the first story boss.
Except that first story boss was designed so the playable character literally couldn’t die. You just mashed the attack button and it went down.
“Heheh…! I beat it somehow, right!?”
But Lulu didn’t care about any of that. What mattered was that she had beaten it.
The veterans were laughing at the newcomers grinding their teeth, and the newcomers were grinding those teeth for all they were worth.
Really—even after becoming a mega-corp, she was sticking with this bit.
Should I call that consistency a good look?
Yeah. Let’s go with that.