Chapter 5: By TS Streamer Canon, My Gaming Skills Should Be Insane
In two weeks, I would be meeting my first summer vacation of high school.
I was the very person who had set every VTuber community on fire yesterday, and still, one thing refused to change.
"Miss Kayano?"
That one thing was simple. In real life, I was an ordinary high school girl. An ordinary high school girl wouldn't remember having been a man in a past life, of course—but that wasn't the point. What had I been trying to say?
"...Yes?"
No matter how enormous a sensation I'd become on the internet, in reality I was still just an ordinary high school girl. An ultra-loner, at that, without a single friend. ...Put that way, I didn't sound very ordinary at all.
"Have you been getting along with your friends lately?"
My homeroom teacher was watching me with a gentle smile. It was that stretch before summer break when the teachers sat down with students one by one, and today my turn had finally come.
"I-I'm getting along j-just fine."
The faculty office of a high school was still an unfamiliar sight. I'd be seeing plenty of it from here on, so I might as well let my eyes get used to it.
"I'm glad to hear that. But if something's hard, I hope you'll tell me the truth."
Teacher, I'm sorry, but the only place a loner can unload their troubles is the internet. I couldn't actually say that, so I had to nod in silence.
"I underst...st-stand."
"The kids in your class are all kind. I hope you'll lean on one another. You'll be seeing them for three years, you know."
"Yes."
The teacher already knew exactly how I spent my days at school. I came in, sat down, and spoke to no one. At lunch I went out to the school grounds and ate alone. The moment class ended, I was the first one racing home. The small mercy was that this teacher didn't dig. Last year's middle school homeroom teacher had said it to my face and made a whole production out of fixing my personality. Thanks to that, I learned for the first time what it felt like to hate someone.
"I'll be counting on you from here on, Miss Kayano."
"Y-yes. I'll be c-counting on you too."
Today, in real life, I had spoken to another human being twice. A heroic effort. I deserved a reward once I got home. Two of those fancy macarons Mom had said I was allowed only one of a day. Then a little rest, and the stream in the evening, just as planned. Doing whatever I wanted, alone at home, really did beat school. Lately I could feel it with painful clarity: all that in-crowd business was pointless. Painful enough to bring tears to my eyes....
...I just wanted vacation to start already.
Let me talk, just for a moment, about my past life. Not a VTuber's "past life." My actual one.
I'm sick of saying it, but I was a loner then, too. Ah—unlike now, I did have one friend, so maybe I wasn't a real loner after all? Or maybe I was. Whatever.
Anyway, loner that I was, I was—if anything about this is obvious—an otaku. A severe one, the kind who tried almost everything without bothering to be picky. Manga, anime, idols, games, light novels, webtoons, web novels. What I want to talk about now is the web novels. Korean web novels, specifically.
There was a genre called TS Internet Broadcast fiction. Exactly what it sounds like: stories in which the protagonist wakes up one day as the opposite sex and starts streaming online. And the works in that genre share a cliché.
For example, the protagonist is staggeringly beautiful. A prime specimen: me. An incredible pretty girl, with a voice so gorgeous it could knock you flat. I even do a little exercise at home, so even if I'm short, the figure is pretty worth looking at. Sadly, whether it was the genes or not, a huge chest was never going to happen.
...That wasn't what I meant to talk about.
So what is one of the clichés of TS streamer fiction? For reasons no one ever explains, the body's reaction speed is absurd. And using that absurd reaction speed to stand out through gaming skill, then ride it all the way to fame, was quite literally one of the genre's royal roads. Which is to say: I must have incredible reaction speed too, so if I stream games, I ought to be able to go on an unstoppable rampage. Right?
Of course, I'm not a simple gender swap. I'm a complete reincarnation, and a VTuber besides, so I'm a little different from the protagonists of those novels. But in this life, before my VTuber debut, I had played all kinds of games and posted pretty good results in nearly every one of them. In other words, the evidence was already more than enough...! I had too much else to do to dig deep into any single game, but still.
"Haa."
It was almost six. On the monitor, the waiting screen for the stream glowed, and two thousand people were sitting there live, waiting for me.
"I have a bad feeling about this."
Yesterday came back all at once—the Calamity I'd caused to my heart's content before running away. No matter how I turned it over, two thousand people waiting live had no other explanation. The chat was going to catch fire the second I went live, wasn't it. But that, too, was a consequence I had to swallow. I had chosen to be a VTuber, so I would hold on through sheer grit and stubbornness.
So, a resolution before I started. Today, I would keep my RP as far as I possibly could. First rule: absolutely no polite speech!
Five. Four. Three. Two. One.
The instant the clock struck six—
Shouting the greeting we'd all settled on together yesterday, I started the stream. It hurt that more of what came back was about Calamity than hello, but still.
The Last Queen's Crown. TLQ, for short. That was the game I was playing today—the last queen's crown, just as the title said.
It was a fighting game, made about two years ago by some tiny studio. The setting, as anyone could guess from the name, was a death match fought over the last queen's crown. And the moment word of its development got out, it drew an enormous crowd. Part of that was because every playable character was a woman. The rest was a luxury voice cast in full dub, modeling so fine it was almost unfair, and effects flashier than anything the competition had. No matter how you looked at it, this was not a game a small studio should have been able to make. Of course every gamer was waiting on it. Rumor also had it that the testers couldn't stop praising it, so not a single person thought the game could fail.
...Until launch day.
On the day of release, TLQ's reputation fell straight into hell from the opening minute. Catastrophic optimization. Server lag. Matchmaking errors. Problems that had no business existing in a fighting game were scattered everywhere, and the verdict among players was that the company had built it to cash out and run. After a flood of refunds in a single day, TLQ became the most obscure fighting game in a genre that was already obscure.
And that was exactly the game I was streaming today.
I'd picked it for a reason. After digging around in preparation for the stream, I'd learned that TLQ had not, in fact, been a cash-grab getaway. Optimization, server lag, matchmaking errors, character balance—the studio had kept patching the problems even after its reputation cratered, and the result was a pretty decent fighting game. The first impression had hit so hard that the player base never really grew, but back then it had been completely my kind of game, so I'd decided to finally act on the urge to play it. When I told my manager, they were against it. When the notice went up, the viewers were against it too.
So what. I was going to stream what I wanted to stream.
"T-today, like the notice said, I'm playing a game called T-TLQ...."
As expected, the reception was awful. Nothing to be done. This was the developers' karma. Still, I could hope today's stream would wear a little of that karma away. I'd tried the game a bit in advance yesterday, and it really had changed.
"I-I was r-really disappointed too, the one time I played it before."
"B-but I looked into it, and people said it had g-gotten pretty okay, so I t-tried a little yesterday, and it r-really had improved."
The chat was already on fire, arguments breaking out over every word I'd said. ...Whatever. I'd just ignore it. Jumping in felt like a way to make things harder only for me. All I had to do was run my stream. My manager had said not to react too much to chat unless I really needed to.
"O-okay. Then I'll start?"
As I spoke, I clicked the TLQ icon, the one painted with an ornate crown. A grand theme swelled up with the loading screen. I casually threw a cover over the display for a moment, then clicked Custom Match.
"Mmm."
Room title: Kaino Izumi's TLQ Stream. Password: 1231. The moment the room finished creating itself, the lobby's waiting UI rose onto the screen.
"I was g-going to do n-normal matchmaking, but if I'm playing anyway, doing it with you seemed more fun. After the notice, there were q-quite a few people who b-bought it because of m-me."
...About half of that was true. I simply didn't say it out loud.
"O-okay. Before we start, I'll explain today's bit real quick. What I'm doing is a first-to-ten. Any gamer who's touched a fighting game has heard of it."
A first-to-ten is a fighting-game rule in which, one on one, the first to win ten times is the victor. To win a first-to-ten is to be the absolute winner no matter what happens, and the loser may never talk back to the winner. An absolute rule. A fearsome one.
"B-but a best of three takes t-too long, so I'll set it to s-single games. And the moment I l-lose the first-to-ten, the stream ends!"
The chat plastered itself in question marks. But my manager had approved this, so it was fine.
"I-instead, since I'm a b-beginner who only just started, the people who can j-join go up to D-D-rank at most."
My goal was simple. Show the viewers how good I actually was at games, and slip even a little free of the image already hardening around me—the VTuber who specialized in Calamity. In TLQ's ranking system, D was second from the bottom, and from what I'd looked up after all this time, everything up through C was more or less the same. When the game first launched I had climbed all the way to A, and a short practice session yesterday had proved I could beat people up through B without much trouble. So: keep the first-to-ten streak alive, raise the rank allowed through the door, and let the viewers gasp as they watched. If the response was good, it could become a regular segment, and TLQ's player base would grow. Wins all around.
"O-okay. Then I'll s-start now. The password is somewhere between one thousand and fifteen hundred."
Skimming the chat as it flickered past, I slowly loosened my hands.
"H-hello, Flame of Love."
About thirty seconds later, an avatar stepped into the waiting room. Beside the name Flame of Love was the letter E. E-rank. I can win this without even trying.
"L-likewise."
A bright little chime, and the lobby slid over into the character select screen. I picked Leticia, the Blood Doll Sovereign, a character people called fairly difficult. My opponent picked Shiro, the Silver Witch, the one everyone called a beginner character. Fortunately, the matchup favored me.
Numbers flashed across the screen, and then the words that announced the fight. And I won, very easily. Without taking a single hit.
Watching the chat drown in shock, I let a small smile slip.