The First Week of January
I was pinning a lot of hopes on this Purge Day.
As far as I was concerned, it was essentially our last real chance to raise our profile through raw force.
Other companies already had several people fully geared out in endgame sets, and potions were starting to hit the open market. On pure specs, we'd already been caught up.
The problem was that matching specs still left us with no real odds of winning.
No matter how decent Mayo and I were at controls for female streamers, how were we supposed to stack up against former pro gamers? We might hold for a bit at the start, but we'd get steamrolled soon enough. That much was obvious.
A person ought to have a clear-eyed sense of their own limits. So I made a call.
At this point, what did we still have over the competition?
For one, every single one of us is running a full endgame gear set. O-Wang Company, currently the hottest act around, only has… three, was it? Wang-ko, Oh-ha, Su-ppi…
On paper that looked like six-on-three, but the truth was that a properly enchanted diamond set didn't fall that far short of Netherite. Which meant the rest of O-Wang's roster could still pull their weight just fine. In the end, the numbers were basically even.
The real problem is Wang-ko, Oh-ha, and Su-ppi's control. Wang-ko and Su-ppi I can probably cover somehow…
If Mayo and I each took one, we could stall them out and hold our own well enough. Wang-ko had only just joined the server, so his Minecraft mechanics still had gaps.
But Oh-ha?
She was already fully adapted to Minecraft, and her former pro-gamer physicals were still very much alive. Even throwing both Lucy and Miho at her wouldn't be enough.
No matter how I run it, a straight fight has no answer.
Which meant we had to lean on our company's other advantage…
And what was that?
Money. The kind of money that crushed every other company flat. And in a capitalist world, money could make a whole lot of things happen.
Alright. Time to throw out some bait.
Ideas kept circulating through my head. Somewhere in that mix, there had to be a path that would let our company win.
Rena-ttang posted an announcement.
It covered the results of last week's My House inspections and the follow-up measures. Five people were listed for remedial work and re-inspection, and — surprisingly — two streamers had been expelled outright.
Yoo Da-woon. Seo Ra-young.
The first name was one most people had already expected. Seo Ra-young was a slightly more unexpected pick. But there was no real controversy.
At this point, Rena-ttang's momentum was punching through the sky off the back of successive big-corp streamers joining the server, and public sentiment was riding high with her.
Seo Ra-young? Who even is that?
The grievances of some no-name small-time streamer most people had never heard of barely registered as a blip in the communities. And so the My House inspection content left nothing behind but a bitter aftertaste.
But while community sentiment stayed silent on the surface, something was shifting underneath.
Unflattering rumors about Rena-ttang had started circulating among the streamers themselves. The spark came from Mercury — formerly Rena Universe.
On paper, the relationship between the company and Rena-ttang had been declared over. But the streamers still contracted to Mercury remained bound by their deals, and for women who had joined the crew and even transferred agencies purely on faith in Rena-ttang, the situation was pure absurdity.
They wanted out, but their contract terms still had time left, and the company was using every lever it had to keep Mercury under control. Candy cash-outs, for instance — delayed and restricted under every excuse imaginable. "Corporate tax" used as a pretext to clamp down on collabs with other virtuals. And that wasn't even the worst of it.
Anyone who pushed to leave was forced to abandon both their existing virtual avatar and their nickname. All of it was in the contract, the company insisted, so there was nothing wrong with any of it.
The Mercury streamers who had followed Rena-ttang on pure trust all felt like they'd been stabbed in the back. That sentiment started among the Mercury roster and slowly spread outward through every streamer they were friendly with.
Rena-ttang expelling two people from the server this time also became a serious talking point among the small-time streamers. More and more people were starting to have things to say about her character.
Before, everyone had been falling over themselves to stay on Rena-ttang's good side just to get into Rena World. Now a speed bump had appeared in the middle of that road.
And for the small-time virtuals, a new alternative had just shown up.
That alternative was Seona Land — the Minecraft server mid-tier streamer Yu Seona was currently recruiting for.
On the surface, Yu Seona looked bigger than Rena-ttang in stature, longer in career, and — as the face of V-topia — like a decent person overall. Applying for a slot in Seona Land started spreading like a trend, not just through Mercury but among small-time virtuals in general.
Of course, public opinion still overwhelmingly favored Rena World. The heavyweight virtuals were already there, two big-corp streamers had joined, and even the NS Male God was in Rena World. Talk about Seona Land got buried the moment it appeared — it simply wasn't in the same league.
Even so, the small-time streamers kept grinding out applications to Seona Land. Like the comments said, Rena World had no idea when a slot would open, and even if one did, the odds of actually getting picked were basically zero.
And then there were the people who couldn't even bring themselves to apply in the first place. The Mercury roster, now in an awkward relationship with Rena-ttang. And Ori-koong, whom Rena-ttang had once explicitly told people not to get close to.
That whole mess set the Pocotin crew's internal fandom on fire all over again. Their youngest, Hiyori, had solid name recognition, and with the Decrescendo members who'd been on the same team during the Poko Server days, a well-placed word could have given her a real shot at getting into Rena World — the same way Park Na-na had once asked Rena-ttang and gotten Oh-ha into the server.
Hiyori had even left an application comment and climbed high on the upvote rankings. But whatever came out of the crew's internal meetings, she ended up canceling the application and heading to Seona Land with the rest of her crewmates. Naturally, Hiyori's personal fandom was furious. How many times was she going to take a loss just for being tangled up with Pocotin?
On the other hand, there was a crew that had disbanded and somehow ended up doing even better.
The stars of that story were the former Decrescendo members.
First, Elsa had taken full charge of the Do-zney Castle construction, earned Kim Hak-do's trust, and risen past architecture lead all the way to company president.
Seol Pyo-woo wasn't about to fall behind. With her outstanding farming ability she'd been the first in the company to finish a full endgame gear set, then stepped into something like Kim Hak-do's secretary role and started pulling casual viewers' favor her way. What made that possible was the cheerful, punchy energy she'd shown in her apology stream after the sniping incident and in every broadcast since.
Toxic viewers still came around to dig at her mental state by bringing up the sniping. But Seol Pyo-woo handled them with practiced, good-humored comebacks, and that only won her more goodwill from the casual audience. More than anything, Elsa spent all day silently building — which made for a boring stream — while Seol Pyo-woo ran a communication goldmine of mining sessions and secretary work that kept her constantly tangled up with Kim Hak-do, delivering genuinely entertaining broadcasts.
So despite the sniping history, the two of them ended up running neck and neck in public favor. A dead-even rivalry with no clear winner. Both of them were regularly hitting three to four thousand viewers just off the runoff from Kim Hak-do's audience.
In the underground galleries, whenever the two streamers went head-to-head in viewer counts, people even coined a nickname for it: the Elsa-Pyo Clásico.
Baiyo, meanwhile, was in the same Lethal Company but wasn't pushing hard on anything, keeping a quieter profile. Even so, Candy donations from her loyal fans were still formidable, and by steadily running League of Legends streams alongside everything else she was carving out her own territory.
Next was Muyo, former Decrescendo's youngest. In some ways, she'd pulled off the biggest success of all. Without any runoff from a big-corp streamer, she'd seized the casual viewers' attention and hit ten thousand concurrent. After that she formed the Akatsuki club with Oh Yeong-jun and Jisuni, and her popularity was running extremely high. Viewers and Candy donations were both in peak form.
Park Na-na, who'd been in the same stray-cat position, was quieter on the viewer side. She still refused to get tangled up with anyone and just wandered around on her own. Even so, she was still marking the absolute top tier among virtuals in Candy donations. That was the power of the core fans she'd built up over the long years since the Seolleim Club days.
And so the former Decrescendo crew, even after disbanding, was somehow doing better than ever.
But separate from all of that — they still didn't survive in the end.
January's first week was almost over. The remaining issues on the board were this week's Purge Day, plus the application deadline for Freeca's additional member audition. That fell on Sunday the 8th.
Just how far can our crew actually go?
Watching the post-disbandment trajectory of Decrescendo — the crew I'd once thought of as our strongest rival — left me with more thoughts than usual that day.