Watch the Broadcast as a Broadcast
- Open the door, boss!!!!
- Bang bang bang bang bang
- FBI, open up!
- Open the door!!!!!
- What’s the collab? What’s the collab? What’s the collab? What’s the collab? What’s the collab?
- Wow, Hazy’s doing a collab now too. Who’s on it?
…After I turned on the broadcast and went to get some water because I was thirsty, the chat had already gone up in flames in an instant. In streamer slang, you’d call it getting absolutely cooked, but…
So why was everyone freaking out like this?
“Whoa, whoa. I’m here, so calm down.”
- Ding-dong ding-dong
- Downstairs
- Downstairs! So what’s today’s collab?
- You dropped the announcement out of nowhere and ruined our hopes of being prepared
“Nothing special. Just a pretty big collab got booked.”
Big was big, all right. In scale, and in popularity. If you measured it against my viewers, it was probably five times—wait, what?
“Guys, is Watch bugging out right now?”
- ?
- What bug?
- Something not working?
- No bug here. What’s the problem?
“The viewer count is bugged?”
Sure, my traffic had been steadily growing ever since that first winning clip, but even so, it shouldn’t have been this many.
Looking at my broadcast stats, my average viewers usually hovered around 250 to 300, but right after I started the stream, I was already at 500.
- If someone who doesn’t know the stats saw this, they’d think you bought viewbots lol
- fr lol
“Hold on. These are not viewbots. I know nothing about this!”
- Gasp
- GASP!
- Hazy, Hazy… go in peace
- I came from the clip where you ate the potato. This stream tastes good.
- Traffic really exploded after yesterday lol
- Hey! You saw my potato, didn’t you!
“Anyway, welcome, new viewers. Hope you enjoy the broadcast today.”
I had expected the traffic to rise, but I never thought it would blow up this suddenly. This was dizzying.
[1,000 won donation!] So who’s the collab with today?
“Sia.”
- ?
- ?
- Sia? Luccia?
- What, it’s a collab with Luccia?
- Wow, a solo collab with a major streamer, whoa
“...and the six people who are always with her.”
If I said “the six people who run around with Luccia,” most people would know who I meant without me having to list their names.
The kind of friends who, as they say, are always each other’s streaming material. Except now they were real-life best friends too.
[1,000 won donation!] Huh? I thought Saengsam was taking today off.
“If Saengsam says he’s taking ten days off, nine of those are fishing, and you still believe it?”
- fr lol
- Saengsam just loves streaming lol
- Watching him do a 24-hour stream and then actually end up in the ER last time made me think he was insane
- Someone tell him to rest.
Saengsam was famously obsessed with streaming. He liked broadcasting so much he’d keep going even when he was sick.
If he said he was taking ten days off, nine of them were bait. And the remaining one?
That was the real break. The day he’d actually ended up in the hospital, with a photo of him on an IV and a post apologizing for not being able to go live, the comments were always full of people begging him to take care of himself.
It was an old tradition, a long-running piece of WWE, but even I had to admit he really did need a proper rest once in a while.
- Are Naguri and Yuki coming too?
- Is Yura showing up too?
“I said six people, didn’t I? Naguri, Yuki, Saengsam, Radachi, SnowMap, and Yura.”
Even as I said it out loud, it didn’t feel real. That lineup was savage. How the hell had I ended up in this?
Well, they must’ve included me because they thought I’d fit in. Let’s do well.
After spending some time chatting through the usual daily banter, I joined the voice channel right on time for the collab.
“Ah, can you all hear me?”
“Yes! We can hear you perfectly.”
The familiar voice that greeted me the moment I joined was Sia’s.
But she wasn’t the only one in the voice channel.
“Wow, there are a lot of people today.”
“Isn’t this combination kind of new?”
“If there’s a newbie, of course it’s new. Are you stupid?”
“I am stupid though?”
“Want to die?”
Voice channel participants: 6
Yeah. I’d known this beforehand, but it was already making my head spin. It felt different from watching a neatly edited video.
I muted my mic and took off my headphones.
Why am I so nervous…
It was just a collab. We were just playing a game, just talking. I’d been fine a minute ago.
Feeling my heartbeat thudding so hard I could practically feel it in my throat, I forced myself to settle down again.
In more ways than one, this was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. I just had to enjoy myself like usual today. Thinking that, I put my headphones back on and turned my mic on.
“All right, the newbie has arrived.”
“Here comes the new challenger!”
“I’m sure some of you know him already. He’s the star of yesterday’s Watch clip that set the platform on fire, Did You See the Potato?—Hazy!”
Even someone without any sense could tell what was happening here. If I didn’t walk down the red carpet they’d laid out for me and make at least one flirtatious move, it might be rude instead.
Thinking that, I fired off the killer line I’d been praised for earlier.
“Hmm. A whole room full of familiar faces.”
As expected, the chat was instantly plastered with laughter. Even though it wasn’t a new joke, the others reacted so well that I didn’t feel awkward. Still, there was one thing I had to correct.
“Ah, but I need to correct one thing.”
“What is it?”
“I’m not a challenger. I’m a bronze rat.”
Specifically, a perennial bronze rat.
My solemn tone set the chat off all over again.
- Hazy, you’re embarrassing us.
- lolllllllll
- The perennial bronze rat anthem is so hype
- Yeah, bronze rat is right lol
- If you don’t do this, people start arguing about ranks again lol
I wasn’t sure rank drama would even come up, but judging by the reaction, this was a pretty good gag too.
“Seriously, you even found a way to use that.”
“Then welcome, rookie bronze rat~”
“Please take care of me today!”
*
As discussed beforehand, the first segment of the broadcast was Karider.
Naguri and Saengsam drew lots and took turns picking team members.
Naguri, Yuki, SnowMap, and Sia were one team.
Saengsam, Radachi, Yura, and I were the other.
Since the captains’ skill levels were so far above the others, every match started with us using practice cars.
Naguri’s team won the speed race, and our team won the item race.
The score was 1 to 1.
“It’s 1 to 1, so we’ve gotta do captain battle.”
And so the captain match between Saengsam and Naguri began.
Watching the two of them compete made one thing clear: everything we’d done up until now had been nothing more than child’s play.
Whenever one of them pulled slightly ahead, the other would overtake him at the next corner, and then the same thing would happen again after that, over and over. It was like watching the finals of a pro tournament.
But as if to prove there was a reason they’d trained for this professionally, the one who crossed the finish line first by a hair was Saengsam.
“Wow! I lost by 0.4 seconds!”
“Damn, that was intense. I’m sweating.”
“Man, when you two were crashing into each other at the end and wrestling for position, I thought I was the one going to lose.”
“That was a close one.”
Maybe because it had been such a nail-biter, the viewers’ reactions were hot too.
“But hey, doesn’t the winner get anything?”
At Saengsam’s words, everyone suddenly went quiet. In streaming, the standard bet was a subscription gift, of course.
“How about five gift subs? Simple.”
“Let’s make it ten.”
“How about the person picked in the same turn gets it?”
“Wouldn’t that be less confusing and better?”
“All right, everyone! Santa doesn’t come around every day!”
If it was the person picked in the same turn, did that mean I’d be getting one from Sia?
Just as that thought crossed my mind, the gift subs arrived.
[Luccia has gifted 10 subscriptions!]
- The moon
- The rice cake
- Isn’t receiving it the good part?
- Gotta win the mental battle if you’re not getting any anyway…
- Let the stealth gifting begin~
“Yes, thank you to everyone who received one. I hope you enjoy it.”
“Gift subs are tasty. Give me more.”
“You should give me some.”
“Yeah, if you don’t like it, win.”
“Hey!”
Even here, Saengsam and Naguri were keeping the energy up with banter, trying not to let the mood die.
After things settled down for a bit, we moved on to the second segment, the mafia game we’d planned in advance.
“Can you explain the rules real quick?”
“Anything different from a normal mafia game?”
Compared to the classic version divided into citizen, doctor, cop, and mafia, this one had a lot more roles.
There was the detective, who could learn someone’s identity exactly once during the game, unlike the police.
There were lovers, where killing one person caused their partner to die in their place.
There was even the mental patient, who didn’t know whether the role they got at the start was real or fake until they died. Apparently, the mental patient role could even come with an explanation saying they were the mafia.
Strictly speaking, there were three factions trying to win.
The citizens, the lovers, and the mafia.
“I don’t really get it.”
“If you don’t get it, you learn by getting hit.”
Citizen, doctor, cop, detective, mental patient, mafia, and two lovers.
And so the first game began. But of all things…
Your role is Lover.
On the first night, lovers could check who their partner was.
While the mafia chose who to kill, I sent a message in the lovers-only chat asking who my partner was.
[Hazy: Who are you?]
[Lucid: Hazy, are you my lover?]
My first partner turned out to be Sia. Should I say I was relieved she wasn’t the cop or the mafia? She was just too damn good at games like this.
[Hazy: If someone asks what role we got, what should I say?]
[Lucid: Should we pretend we’re both mental patients, say we got cop, and insist we’re not mafia?
[Hazy: Sia, are you actually a genius?]
And that brought the first night to a close.
When day broke, Yuki was dead.
[Yuki has died.]
Maybe because we were playing a version that didn’t reveal roles, it felt like the difficulty had gone up even more.
“Cop! Any hard evidence?”
“Hey, doctor or cop, say something!”
“I’m the cop, and Yuki isn’t mafia.”
Since the cop could only determine whether someone was mafia or not, Yuki had to be a citizen. And yet, of all people, he’d been killed.
“Any doctor?”
“Hey, if there’s a doctor, you can’t say it out loud! If the doctor comes forward now, we’re just gonna get tangled up again.”
“I’m the doctor.”
In the middle of the discussion, someone declared they were the doctor.
“I self-healed.”
But why was Sia the one saying that…?