New Bonds, and a New Direction
Toxic Turrets. For a streamer of modest size, they were nothing short of a malignant tumor.
Crushing new viewers, clique-forming, multi-accounting, stirring up fights — the usual repertoire. They would dig into a small stream and, through relentless sabotage, choke off any chance of growth.
Fail to cut them out in time, and the stream's lifespan would suffer. That much was obvious.
In that sense, Menchi is a pretty unusual case — a massive corporate-scale streamer who still has Toxic Turrets hanging around. Maybe she just stopped caring once the stream lost its spark…
But the finer details of her situation weren't something I needed to know, and I had no particular desire to find out.
What mattered wasn't how things had gotten this way. It was what she wanted to do about it now.
And in that regard — whether she'd planned it or not — Menchi had been the one to propose a collab first. She clearly had no intention of hanging up her stream anytime soon.
Maybe all these first-time experiences had shifted something in her. Because right now, sweating buckets as she poured everything into her recorder in front of countless viewers, she was shining brighter than I'd ever seen her.
Hmm, a guitar or a violin would've made for a better picture… but the only instrument she can play is the recorder, so it can't be helped. …Ah. She flubbed a note.
My consciousness, drifting along in idle monologue, suddenly snagged on Menchi's mistake.
In this place, playing an instrument wouldn't leave you short of breath or sore in the muscles. So it was probably just a simple slip — the kind of finger-fumble you get when a support program is feeding you notes like a rhythm game.
Nothing serious. My role right now wasn't to step forward. It was to be the solid support holding her up from behind.
Even without any great musical instinct or years of experience, with my LP raised high enough to grant me superhuman senses and body control… it wasn't that hard.
A piano isn't just about the notes — you can control dynamics by how hard you press the keys. So if I deliberately push the piano's presence forward hard enough to stamp down the recorder's tone…!
The moment I focused my awareness into my fingers and drove the notes harder into the open, the piano's presence surged forward as if forcibly crushing the recorder's existence underfoot.
For a piano that was supposed to be accompaniment — never the lead — it was a complete violation of harmony and balance. But that overwhelming presence was more than enough to bury my partner's mistake behind it.
I felt a prickling stare boring into me from somewhere behind Menchi, as if she'd caught on to what I was doing. But she seemed to realize her own slip almost immediately, and she recovered her original stance in no time.
So I pulled back again, returning to my place behind the recorder, pressing the keys in quiet support.
And just like that, Menchi and I finished the performance without another mistake.
Right as the music ended, I banned the entire Toxic Croquette Gang — who'd apparently swapped to fresh accounts and started crawling back into chat — in one clean sweep.
No matter how deeply they'd buried themselves among the spam flood, Noise was the one checking the logs. And Noise was no ordinary human. The Toxic Croquette Gang had nowhere left to run.
Anyway, that was the end of our second prepared song. I slowly lifted my fingers from the final key, cleared my throat with a somewhat awkward expression, and faced the camera.
"Ahem! How was that? Our second piece was Yumi Matsutoya's Haru yo, Koi. Haha… we didn't have that much practice time, so I feel like there were quite a few rough spots…"
The viewers' reactions were surprisingly warm. Most of chat was positive — some even saying it was impressive we could pull this off at all.
Well, neither Menchi nor I were the type who led with music. Our faces were the main draw. Hitting a clean average was probably more than enough to satisfy the audience. Low expectations working in our favor, I supposed.
It felt good all around. This kind of response meant that as long as we didn't completely tank it, they'd look on us kindly.
And Menchi, sitting right beside me and staring openly at the chat, seemed to have reached the same conclusion — her face looked far more at ease than before.
Well… suddenly trying to perform an instrument she barely touched even on her own stream, in a collab with me, after a single day of practice — of course she'd been nervous. But the results had been good, and she looked genuinely satisfied.
As I watched Menchi and quietly pieced together her state of mind, that kind of conversation was already circulating through chat.
The reaction wasn't strange at all. The same people who'd been spamming chaos right up until stream start had vanished as thoroughly as if someone had sprayed pesticide.
But they probably had no idea that I'd timed a mass ban of every problem account to land the exact moment the performance ended.
Well, no need to say anything. And no real reason to, either.
Now then — a question might occur to someone here.
If I was just going to ban them all at once, why bother asking the regular viewers to spam-flood the chat? Why not just wipe them out from the start?
But that was the kind of thing you'd only say if you didn't understand the complicated mechanics of a stream. There were things you could only gain by going through this kind of tedious process.
A troll's ultimate goal isn't to make the streamer feel bad. It's to make the audience feel bad.
Think of it like trying to ruin a restaurant. Terrorizing the owner is less effective than flooding the place with malicious reviews.
Imprinting an unpleasant experience on the people watching so they decide they never want to come back — that was the troll's final destination.
So under normal circumstances, when trolls swarmed in numbers like this, a streamer would have to deal with them while carrying serious risk on their shoulders…
But if the viewers themselves get to have a "fun experience" of driving the trolls out…
And I wasn't the kind of streamer mired in controversy. I was just a pitiful independent broadcaster being unilaterally bullied by some shady faction.
With the moral high ground already on our side… if I could take the unpleasant experience of trolls wrecking a stream and flip it into the fun experience of burying them under a spam flood?
Well. You get this.
I put on a perfectly casual face — the look of someone wondering what all the fuss was about — and beamed at the chat.
Right on cue, the ones who'd slipped back in on unbanned accounts started dropping their first-message aggro in droves.
Subtle, deliberate troll forces that could easily have dragged the whole chat's mood off a cliff.
But to an audience that had already tasted the fun of the fight, it didn't register as unpleasant. It just looked like a fresh starting line.
The regulars were treating the trolls' attempts to sour the mood as a welcome gift.
Could anyone honestly say the trolling had worked? Probably not.
And Menchi seemed to have read the chat's atmosphere well enough — she just sat there looking slightly dazed.
She was probably thinking, Wait, this is actually working?
"Shall we do one more song, then? Menchi-nim, are you ready?"
"…Yes. I'm ready."
"Then let's do that one! The last piece we practiced."
"Ah…. I-I'll try."
Menchi looked uncertain. But that was fine. Even if she slipped up, there was a margin I could cover.
Besides, the viewers were so busy spamming that I doubted they were scrutinizing the quality too closely. Not that I really knew.
"Here we go! Joe Hisaishi's… Summer!"
I settled firmly in front of the piano again and pressed the keys alongside the support program.
And as the piano filled out the accompaniment, the toxic chats that couldn't withstand the spam flood were swept away into the distance.
Honestly, I'm grateful.
I'd only given them a brief heads-up in the pre-stream announcement, and they'd thrown themselves into the spam this hard.
Sure, from the spammers' side it was pure entertainment. But seeing everyone pull together like this to lock down the atmosphere…
It made me want to repay them somehow. Maybe throw an event later.
Holding that thought, I carried the performance forward without a single miss, every note flowing naturally.
The trolls seethed over tactics that refused to land. The viewers went feral over a spontaneous event. And Menchi and I, somewhere along the way, found ourselves genuinely enjoying the music. It was a festival in its own right.
And so a stream that had opened with a sudden instrumental performance — no intro, no nothing — settled into the classic formula: self-introductions, light banter, then a pre-planned two-player co-op game. In a little over two hours, it produced a mountain of clips and laughs, and wrapped up without a single real problem.
Trolls kept showing up throughout, tireless as ever — but the viewers, by then completely unhinged on spam, used every one of them as an excuse to flood chat with the most unhinged nonsense imaginable. Eventually, somewhere past the midpoint, the faction either ran out of accounts or simply vanished without a sound, leaving nothing to show for their efforts.
A complete and total defeat for the troll forces, then. I couldn't say I felt bad about it.
"Nia-nim!! That was so much fun!!"
Squeeze.
I was still nodding quietly to myself in satisfaction when a blue-haired beauty — a touch taller than me — appeared at my side and pulled me into a fierce hug.
Whatever had become of the awkwardness from our first meeting, her face was flushed red as if she'd just stepped out of a sauna. One glance was enough to tell how good a time she'd had.
"I had fun today too, Menchi-nim. I honestly didn't expect your game sense to be that good. Color me impressed."
"Ehehe…. But it's such a shame. If there hadn't been a time limit, I could've stayed and played a little longer…"
"Well… the Abyss isn't an easy place to enter. Being able to hold a connection for three whole hours is already impressive."
From what I'd heard about people who came down through the standard routes of the virtual world — they'd explored downward with everything they had and eventually found a gate leading to a place called Deep Purple, believed to be the stage just above the Abyss. But even Deep Purple was impassable with ordinary gear.
So even though Menchi's connection ran straight through me, a short time limit was probably inevitable. This was a place where Predator Species roamed — the kind of nightmare realm you simply didn't find up above.
"Then… please call me again next time. And if you ever need help with anything, please tell me. No matter what it is, I'll help you!"
"I should be the one asking first. I only took the hand you held out to me."
I said it to Menchi as she prepared to leave, then quietly called over Noise, who had been sitting in the corner staring blankly in our direction.
She understood my intent instantly, pattered over on quick little steps, and daintily pinched the tip of Menchi's finger — who was still standing there with her head tilted in confusion.
"Eh, eh?"
"…Sent it. The bad people."
"N-Nia-nim?"
"Ah…. She probably just emailed you a sorted list of all the IDs we banned on our end today."
Strictly speaking, the Menchi standing here wasn't her real body — she was an avatar I'd carefully crafted. Which meant we could do cyberpunk things like transfer data just by touching. Pretty romantic, if you asked me.
"Th-this is…"
"I figured you might need it."
For a moment, Menchi's face said she had no idea why I'd done this. Then the meaning clicked, and her expression shifted into a bright little Ah!
Whatever thought finished processing in her head, she soon murmured in a voice so small it almost sounded like she might cry.
"…Thank you. Really, I don't even know how to repay you…"
Then, as if steeling herself, Menchi looked at me with the face of someone who'd just made a serious resolution.
"Nia-nim. If you ever need my help someday, please tell me. No matter what happens, I will help you."
"Ahaha…. Well, someday, sure."
I hadn't done it to put her in my debt. But undercutting someone who was taking it this seriously felt wrong somehow… so I just nodded along and accepted her words as understood. Besides, no reason to turn down an offer of help.
That earnest atmosphere didn't seem to sit comfortably with her, though. After a few more rounds of ordinary banter in her usual self, she finally left — right as her time limit was nearly spent.
Well. There had been plenty of headaches and plenty of worries… but it hadn't been a day without gains.
Help, huh…. Come to think of it, there's no real reason I have to stream alone like I'm stranded on a deserted island.
A new bond, and another direction entirely.
Thinking that I might have stumbled into a rather fine connection, I turned lightly away from the spot where I'd seen Menchi off.
I'd safely sent off my first guest — but there was still plenty of work left to do.
I still hadn't fully secured the territory of the Data Trash Heap. There was the matter of Predator Species and Delics. And I still had to build a body for our newest family member, Polaris.
But among that long list of tasks, the first thing that needed handling was still…
"Maybe I should put some of this accumulated CP to use."
Sorting through the CP that had piled up unused while I'd been preparing for the stream. That came first.