This Bastard! I've Finally Caught You!
“You. Come to my office for a moment.”
The moment the boss finished greeting Karen, she called me over.
The reason was extremely simple.
“You really didn’t get anything weird done to you by Karen?”
“Y-yes……!”
There was no way I could admit I’d been forcibly scrubbed clean, so I put everything I had into denying it.
“……Really?”
“……Yes.”
“……Alright. Go on.”
“Yeees……”
Thankfully, the boss’s interrogation ended quickly.
“Haa……”
Instead she just let out a long sigh, looking like she had a headache, and stared at me.
“Hawawa……”
I fled straight back to my room, flopped onto the bed, and unlocked my phone.
What I really wanted was to sit at my computer, but the bath I’d just shared with Karen kept replaying in my head. I needed a distraction to cool my brain down first.
Otherwise I had zero confidence I could hold out.
Zero confidence I wouldn’t start searching for Hiiro Karen nudes……
“……So what do I even do?”
Back in the old days I would’ve just fired up a mobile game.
Unfortunately, ever since I got hired at Star Live and finally understood the value of money, I’d deleted almost every gacha game I owned.
Even if I reinstalled them now, I had no faith I could keep up with the brutal power creep unique to phone games.
Buying a new game was out of the question too.
“YouTube, I guess?”
The best friend of every modern person with nothing better to do.
YouTube.
It was pretty much my only option right now, so I tapped the app.
“Wait, Jinwoo’s video is already up?”
The thumbnail that greeted me the second I opened the app belonged to Seong Jinwoo.
Jinwoo was famous for polishing his videos before uploading. Even when he had the raw footage ready, he never posted until the edit was actually funny, so there was usually a decent gap between stream and upload.
This one, though, had dropped so fast it might as well have been live.
Which meant the video had already been finished enough to get the green light.
“Hmm…… might as well watch it?”
I hit play.
Obviously the ?? was pointing at Woo Yeonha. I’d already braced myself for that much, so it shouldn’t have been a shock—
[Hweeeeng……!]
“Cough……!”
The second the video started, a painfully familiar voice filled my ears.
[Hieek?!]
[Hieeeek?!]
[R-right-click, right……?]
The intro was just Woo Yeonha farming alone during her very first experiment run.
There she was, staring into empty air all by herself and freaking out with everything she had, while—
[T-this is what Rice is all about! This is the reaction I was waiting for!!]
From a safe distance, Seong Jinwoo and the entire chat were snickering among themselves.
“W-when did you even start recording……!”
The video had captured every single second of it.
Once the intro wrapped, the boss and Bangbang—both famous enough that they barely needed introductions—got a quick rundown.
[I brought her. Woo Yeonha.]
An image that looked suspiciously like a cropped screenshot from Yeonha’s debut stream appeared, and my introduction began.
Star Live’s Youngest Staff Member
『Woo Yeonha』
“Y-you put way too much effort into this……”
The strangely elaborate intro for Woo Yeonha finished, and Jinwoo moved on to a quick game overview.
They split into fair teams—three versus one—and then:
[Ah, think I saw an item. Gonna grab it real quick.]
[Sure.]
[If you’re late you’re dead.]
Pretending he’d spotted something in the dark, Seong Jinwoo slipped away, looped around through the back gate, and quietly tailed me the whole time.
……And that was when hell began.
[H-heh! Easier than I thought! This game!]
[Ahh!! This newbie is actually so fucking cute!]
“AaaAAAaaa!!”
Woo Yeonha, a total newbie, had picked up two whole items and was strutting around like she’d conquered the world.
[Spare meee! Spare meee! I won’t even taste good if you eat meee! I barely looted anythingee!]
……Only to collapse the second a spider appeared and slip straight into full Ttyuttya mode.
Her wailing filled the entire audio track for the whole spider chase sequence.
[Ahh!! This is it!! THIS is what Rice is!!]
[Obviously I’m chasing!]
And everything that followed was exactly as I remembered.
Thud!
“Huh?”
Woo Yeonha’s character failed to clear the railing and plummeted straight down.
[She was a very good employee.]
“Waaaaaah!!”
I slammed YouTube shut without thinking.
There was still more than two-thirds of the video left, but I had zero courage left to watch the rest.
“Woo Yeonha is doooomed…… The viewers are gonna eat her alive……”
All the tough-girl image I’d carefully built up had crumbled in a single video.
Just looking at the comments……
……The entire comment section was just people sharpening their knives for Woo Yeonha’s next stream.
“Hing hing……”
The boss told me to get ready to go live soon……
There was no hope like this.
I either had to go all-in on running away or something.
“……Might as well play a game.”
At least the video had successfully distracted me, so I sat down at my computer.
Not the streaming rig the boss had given me—my original PC. I pressed the power button.
In the corner of the desktop sat a painfully familiar icon.
『Eternal Survival』
“EterSurv……”
Seeing it brought Seong Jinwoo’s proposal back to mind.
He was going to host an Eternal Survival tournament soon and wanted Woo Yeonha to participate.
Given how he’d told me to practice until then, he was probably thinking of Yeonha as low-tier filler for the bracket……
『NemuiNene』
Mithril — 332 points
“I, uh…… actually know how to play EterSurv……”
I was a veteran of Eternal Survival.
Not just any veteran—I’d been grinding since the early days people still called “early access hell.” I was a full-blown fossil player.
Sure, Mithril was a high tier if you looked at it one way, but the community still loved to dunk on it……
“But in a streamer tournament? That’s a whole different story, right?”
Among famous streamers who could actually enter an Eternal Survival tournament, that rank was basically top-tier.
Even the guy hosting the whole thing, Seong Jinwoo himself, topped out at Diamond.
And the reason my EterSurv nickname happened to be the same as one of our second-generation girls, Nemui Nene?
‘I love Eternal Survival more than anything!’
One of the second-gens I was managing—Nemui Nene—had introduced herself before debut as an absolute Eternal Survival fiend.
‘Well then I better snatch the Nene nick first!’
So I’d immediately name-changed and eaten her username whole.
For the record, Nene still didn’t know.
She just thought some random viewer had claimed it first.
Who the hell brags about being an Eternal Survival addict in front of another Eternal Survival addict? Heh heh!
“Hmm…… maybe just one quick game?”
Eternal Survival was a game where brainpower mattered way more than pure mechanics.
Which meant it had terrible synergy with Woo Yeonha’s Ttyuttya brain, no question……
“But there’s no way I’m that bad, right?”
I’d poured more than five years into this game.
Even with Yeonha’s brain I probably couldn’t hold Mithril, but I was still confident no one would call me a newbie wherever I went.
Matching complete!
“Oh? Is this a god-tier game now? Look at that queue speed.”
For the record, Eternal Survival has no accept button.
Once you’re matched you’re forced in, so unless you dodge you can’t requeue.
Totally different from that other Chinese game people call “Chinese EterSurv”! Completely different!
Weather: Clear / No Wind
After the weather forecast that had been added to the game at some point scrolled past, the pick screen appeared.
「KDW」
“Whoa!!”
We’d gotten a current pro player on our team.
KDW was the bruiser for a team more famous for tripping up other teams than for actually taking first place.
I’d heard the current meta didn’t favor his main, so he’d been grinding other characters—and apparently that had tanked his rank pretty hard.
And the other teammate next to him……
「SleepyNene」
“……Huh?”
I rubbed my eyes.
Reading that Japanese nickname in Korean would clearly be……
Nemui Nene.
In other words—
……It was the real Nene, the one whose nickname I’d stolen.
“It took forever to finally meet you…… you little shit……!”
Having fired up Eternal Survival for the first time in ages during her stream, 『Nemui Nene』 let out a cheer the moment she saw the nicknames next to hers.
「KDW」
A player from the pro team she personally rooted for had landed on her team—she cheered at the thought of free bus rides.
「NemuiNene」
And she cheered for an entirely different reason at finally meeting the damn fan who’d stolen her ID at impossible speed.
“Should we?”
Judging by chat, they were dead serious.
“I’m kidding. If I did that the boss would murder me.”
“Plus I’ve gotten attached to this nick now. Pretending to be Japanese is actually cracked.”
“That’s why I don’t chat.”
“Ah, right……”
Seeing the pick timer almost out, she hurriedly locked in a character.
「Katia」
One of the longest-range auto-attack ADCs in Eternal Survival.
A character who shredded people from a safe distance with overwhelming auto range—her most-played pick by far.
Watching the situation, KDW locked in right after.
「Ahn」
A Black kickboxer-style character.
Hard to play, but in the right hands it pulled off technical plays with absurdly high peaks—KDW’s main.
A pick that practically screamed “I’m busing you.”
Had she seen the chat?
A single character appeared on Fake Nene’s pick screen.
「Magnus」
A blond Western thug with solid muscle.
Aside from his ultimate motorcycle ride he had zero mobility skills, so the higher you climbed the fewer people picked him outside of one-tricks—a pure braindead pick.
The moment she saw it, her fingers flew across the keyboard on their own.
And right after that, two more lines of chat appeared.