A Hawk Needs Wide Space to Spread Its Great Wings
Three full days had already passed since the end of my first outdoor stream.
Looking back on it now… yeah. I could honestly call it a successful finish.
Maybe it was because I'd warmed the audience up with a vlog first before dropping the outdoor broadcast, but the average concurrent viewers had hit nine thousand — a number that smashed right through my previous all-time peak. And when I'd cut down that Virtual Beast in a single stroke near the end of the stream, the count had spiked all the way to twelve thousand, as if the whole thing had gone viral somewhere. Anyone with even a passing interest in indie streaming would never call that a failure.
"Still… I didn't think it'd be this much."
Sitting in front of my computer, I muttered to myself with a faintly dazed expression.
What I was staring at was the channel analytics page for my personal Olive channel, Nia_7 — and tucked into one corner of it was a figure that blew every expectation I'd had clean out of the water.
That was it… my subscriber count, which had been stuck hovering around seventy thousand, had vaulted clean past one hundred thousand off a single stream.
To be precise, it wasn't that thirty thousand people had all subscribed in one go. I'd seen a fifteen-thousand jump on the day of the broadcast itself, then roughly ten thousand more each day after that until I crossed the hundred-thousand mark. But the result was the same: in three days, I'd secured about thirty thousand new subscribers and hit one hundred thousand. That was an undeniable fact.
And the even better news was that the momentum didn't look like it was about to break anytime soon.
Of course, how long this atmosphere lasts… that's entirely on me. I can ride this wave and grow even bigger, or I can get comfortable and shrivel up right here.
I closed my eyes for a moment, letting possibility bloom in my mind like flowers opening one after another… and then, with a face that had already settled on a decision, I took hold of the mouse and navigated to a certain page.
Without a single moment of hesitation, I clicked the text that read Apply for Plus Streamer!
I'd already met every condition. So really — what was the worst that could happen?
Click.
After the Great War ended, the world had been carved into three great pieces.
On the American continent where the former United States once stood rose the AUE. The New European Federation, which had somehow survived the war and managed to carry a thread of its history forward. And last of all, the Human Union — a single consolidated power that had expanded out of eastern Asia and swallowed every neighboring faction whole.
It almost felt neat, the way the three powers lined up cleanly by continent: Americas, Europe, Asia. But in practice, free exchange among them was anything but smooth.
Every major cable and satellite the pre-war world had installed had been rendered useless by the war's aftermath, making the old methods of communication impossible. In recent years, relative stability had finally allowed a project to surface — a plan to build a brand-new network linking the entire planet — but the time it would take for that to become practical still felt like a hopelessly distant future.
And so, in District 21 of the Human Union — a place you could call the Asian Union without the slightest sense of dissonance — inside a certain building in a district so wealthy, thanks to its physical proximity to the Virtual World, that it rivaled even the capital-like District 1…
…a woman was clutching her head and wailing.
"'We Are the World' is a complete joke at this point. Ugh, why were the people of the past so desperate to wreck everything they built? The environment, knowledge, technology — all of it!"
"They were probably terrified of information falling into enemy hands. Better to destroy it myself than let the other side take it, right?"
"No — then just wipe the high-value tech! Why erase culture and common sense too? What was this, a worldwide Cultural Revolution? Are they stupid? Seriously!"
The woman was a beauty with long, ink-black hair cascading down her back. Her name was Visk — and she was also the team leader of the Streaming Management Team at Olive's District 21 branch.
"…Senior. You know you could actually get arrested if you go around saying things like that."
"Shut up! Don't just stand there dithering — try coming up with a solution!"
"Isn't that the team leader's job to— ow, ow!"
Visk scowled as if she'd just been handed the most aggravating task in existence, and jabbed the tip of her shoe into her subordinate's rear. The force itself wasn't much, but she was wearing pointed heels — and the sharp little stabs were more than enough to wring a shriek out of the junior staffer.
Unable to endure Visk's assault any longer, the subordinate collapsed onto the floor, clutching her backside, and muttered through a teary pout.
"Hiiing… why take it out on me… is there a hole in my butt now…?"
"There's already a hole in your butt."
"…Senior. Even between women, saying that could get you charged with sexual harassment, you know?"
"Then I'll just grab you and drag you to prison with me. Sounds like a nice vacation."
"Wow, I hate that. Just imagining it makes me want to throw up."
The junior shot Visk an axe-eyed glare as the conversation slid effortlessly into sexual-harassment territory. But whether her subordinate glared or not, Visk simply flopped back in her chair and stared at the ceiling, as if none of this had done a thing to relieve her stress.
"I want to quit everything… Did I risk my life getting those certifications for this…?"
Visk let out a deep, stifled sigh and covered her eyes with one hand. And maybe that was only natural. Headquarters had dumped an utterly absurd assignment on her with zero warning.
"How many people in this world even speak three languages? And they want me to just go find a creator like that…"
That was it. The absurd task she'd been saddled with out of nowhere: find a creator streaming on Olive who could freestyle fluently in foreign languages.
As the least senior team lead among all the Olive branch offices, the nightmare-difficulty job had bounced around until it landed squarely on her desk.
"It really is too much. Why would someone who can do that be streaming here? A translator alone could buy a couple of buildings."
"Exactly! And it's not even just basic conversation — natural freestyle talking?! Seriously, I want to march up to the chairman and flick him right on the forehead like— wait, huh?!"
"…I didn't go that far."
As mentioned earlier, with the world split into three great blocs, "foreign language" meant the languages used across those powers: American, as spoken in the AUE; the European Common Tongue of the New European Federation; and the Asian Common Tongue of the Human Union.
In an age where the walls of isolation between continents were enormous, even bilingual fluency was enough to have institutions fighting over you. A creator who could handle three languages? That was no different from a mythical beast.
Just hire a translator with money!
Visk felt tears welling at the corners of her eyes. And the worst part was that this order had come from none other than the chairman of Olive headquarters — meaning she couldn't simply throw it back and say she didn't want to do it.
A situation where success was impossible, and failure meant she'd be held responsible. A deep, boiling sense of injustice surged up from the bottom of her chest.
"Haa, fine… I'll just hang on until the deadline and then say there really isn't anyone…"
"Hang in there, Senior. Even if you get fired, I'll still root for you."
"Shut up."
Answering her annoyingly cheerful junior with a halfhearted retort, Visk sat up with tired eyes and settled properly at her desk. Being in a foul mood was one thing — work still had to get done. For all her rough mouth, Visk was the type who kept public and private cleanly separated. No matter how stressed she got, she never skipped what she was supposed to do.
It was a thoroughly professional mindset, and the very force that had helped her rise to team leader at such a young age… but even so, she had no confidence she could handle this one the way she usually did.
"…These the Plus Streamer applicants that came in this round?"
"Ah, yes. I filtered them down to the ones who meet the conditions and sent them over."
"Five, six… so this many this time."
Plus Streamer. It was a contract Olive offered to people who hit one hundred thousand subscribers — granting them various benefits in exchange for a promise not to broadcast anywhere else.
Olive's great strength was that anyone could stream freely without restriction… and that was exactly why so many indie broadcasters hungered for Plus Streamer status. When literally anyone could go live, landing a Plus Streamer contract was no different from receiving a badge of official recognition.
On top of that, there were entire layers of viewers who simply wouldn't watch a streamer who wasn't Plus — which meant that for anyone treating personal broadcasting as a career, it was a milestone worth setting as a real goal.
Of course, it wasn't easy. The fact that some people refused to watch non-Plus streamers also meant you were forced to grow inside a limited viewer pool. And given how low the barrier to entry was — how anyone could start — just how many broadcasters never even hit one hundred thousand?
So even on the largest streaming platform in the world, climbing out of the small-streamer bracket with its thin audience was genuinely hard. You needed a clear, eye-catching strength that set you apart from everyone else; the luck to be handed an opportunity in a hopeless situation; and the skill to seize that opportunity when it came.
In extreme cases, it could take a full year just to crack one hundred thousand… and then, once someone went Plus and spread their wings, they could hit a million in a single month.
"Huh. I've never seen this one before."
Which was why finding a complete stranger on the Plus Streamer applicant list was deeply unusual. In an internet world where a new star could appear at any moment, missing the news was the kind of fatal mistake that could cost you everything.
What Visk was looking at was a beautiful girl with silver hair and purple eyes.
Her name was Nia. A self-proclaimed virtual idol who had been streaming for a little over a month.