Just Praise Me
A thought struck me out of nowhere.
Haven't I been working really hard lately?
I stream almost every day, I haven't skipped school, and if you count the fact that I talk to Koga and Akabane every single day, I'm being ridiculously diligent. So I kind of want someone—anyone—to praise me. Fiercely. Enthusiastically.
If I take stock of the people in my life, there's Mom, my sister, Koga, Akabane, and the Iztomo. That's about it.
Mom's out. She's overseas on a business trip and busy, and family praise isn't what I'm after anyway. My sister's out too, obviously. She already messages me on LINE almost every day and drowns me in more affection than I know what to do with.
Koga's out as well. Honestly, praise from Koga would be the best thing in the world, but she isn't that gentle with me.
...It's not like I already asked and got turned down. Koga just has moments when she gets embarrassed. That's all.
Akabane is complicated. She's kind to me, and our personalities are similar, but we diverge hard where it matters, so it feels more like we're frenemies. My pride would never survive her showering me with fierce, unprompted praise for no reason at all. If I'm going to be praised, it has to come after I beat her head-on, and it has to feel like worship.
Which leaves, in the end, only the Iztomo.
To my face they tease me with complete sincerity, but the truth is they love me more than anyone. So how do I get those guys to praise me? They've felt a little softer lately, but if I come out and ask, there's no way they'll actually compliment me. The abuse faction basically fills the Iztomo to the brim.
Which means I have to nudge them into it. Subtly.
"Hmm."
Let me think. When I'm streaming, when do the Iztomo actually praise me? When do they hype me up? When I played BN with Kurokami-senpai, and when I cleared Arcana Shooter on hard in three tries.
So the answer really is games. Otaku, in the end, just like a girl who's good at them.
But games are already the main content of my streams. Playing one the ordinary way probably wouldn't mean anything.
Which means—
"Guess it's time."
Mini-Game Survival.
Up to eighty players join, and random minigames split them into winners and losers. Losers can't enter the next game. Only the winners remain, and it keeps going until a final champion is decided. People call that a last-man-standing genre, or so I've heard.
Anyway, my reason for picking this game was simple. Right now, I wanted the viewers to praise me fiercely, for no reason at all. I didn't care who did it. I just wanted someone to hype me up. Looked at that way, this game really was perfect. I could casually appeal for them to just let me win, and if I did win, everyone would hype me up no matter what. On top of that, a membership-only stream makes even the abuse faction that usually bullies me a little gentler.
I'd never even played a game you could do as a big group before, and aside from TLQ, I'd never done viewer participation at all. In other words, this was a plan that absolutely could not fail.
"I don't really mind, as long as it isn't a h-horror game."
Games, for me, are murder—no. A hobby. As long as they're fun, I don't care. I like this kind of minigame in the first place. One fierce battle, and at the end only a single winner left standing. Don't you think just surviving until the very end would be a thrill all by itself? I do, at least.
"...S-sorry about that."
Honestly, I'd started the stream on impulse, driven by nothing but the urge to be praised, so I hadn't thought that far ahead. I'm sorry to anyone who saw I had nothing on the schedule and made other plans, and to anyone who doesn't own Mini-Game Survival. But Iztomo, you've been watching me for over three months now, so you know, don't you? I have a habit of doing streams like this on a whim. So I'm not actually in the wrong, am I? I do mean the apology, though.
"I-I already made the room. The number's 532, th-the title is Someone to Play With Me, and the password is s-somewhere between five hundred and s-six hundred."
The moment I finished, other people's characters started pouring into the room I'd set up. Cute default cats, and even slime characters you could only get by spending a decent amount of money. The eighty slots filled in no time.
Why isn't the slime the default? Don't ask me. I don't know either.
"Th-then we start right away?"
A message announcing that the match was ready flashed up, a crackling sound ripped through the audio, and the waiting-room screen flipped.
The first stage was Sticky Jump. For one minute, players dodge obstacles, climb, and reach the goal. Simple enough. But just as the name suggests, sticky obstacles—stickies, for short—rain out of the sky, and getting hit slows you down hard. A slower climb is bad enough. The real problem is that you can no longer fend off the other players. There was already a famous clip on Ontube of a first-place runner getting tagged right in front of the finish, shoved by second place, and dumped all the way to last.
A bell rang out to mark the start. Maybe because it was the first stage, the number who could finish was a generous sixty. I could have asked them to send me through in first from the very beginning, but that would wound my pride. A request like that is for when things get truly dangerous. That's when I say it, watch an Iztomo throw the game for my sake, and let my self-esteem climb.
With a cute little cry, my blue slime leapt for the sky. It was still early, so almost nothing was falling from above. I was in thirty-first. Comfortably inside the top sixty, or so it seemed—and the instant I thought that, a sticky dropped from right overhead. It wasn't even fast. I could dodge it with room to spare.
"Eh?"
The moment I jumped left, someone shoved me back to the right. Of course I ate the sticky.
The slime's wilted little wail rang out, thin and pitiful.
"Wh-wh-what are you doing...?!"
No answer came back, of course. You can't chat mid-match in this game, and there's no voice chat either. All I could see was the stream chat sprouting like weeds. Character after character blew past my slime where it sat, plastered in sticky. Thirty-eighth. Forty-fifth. Sixty-second. By the time the effect wore off, I was seventy-first.
"W-wait!"
I shouted, but the characters far above me showed no sign of stopping. Slowly, the end of the match began to close in. Eleven out of sixty. Twenty-seven out of sixty. Forty-five out of sixty.
"H-h-hold on..."
No—this game only means something because they're playing it with me. If they clear it and leave me behind, there's no point at all! A joke, right? It has to be a joke. They're timing it on purpose so I slide into exactly sixtieth, aren't they? Just to mess with me? For the bit?
Spinning that happy little fantasy, I hurled myself upward as hard as I could. And just as I'd hoped, the count stopped at fifty-nine out of sixty.
"Whew..."
Before I knew it, the finish was in sight. The Iztomo love tormenting me, but when it counts, they really do look after me. I almost actually got disappointed there.
"Th-thanks, every—"
Wait.
Why had my slime been shoved to the left? And why was there sticky all over it? Why, of all things, did it look like my slime was falling toward the floor?
It didn't take long for the rank on the right side of the screen to become eightieth. And at the same moment—
That message rose over my screen.
"Why? Why?! Why...?! Why are you t-tormenting m-me like this?!"
I'd told myself the first round could happen. I'd turned the stream on with no notice and announced I was playing Mini-Game Survival, a game I'd never once mentioned. If I thought of it as a petty little revenge from the Iztomo, I could accept it. But now I'd been eliminated on the first stage three rounds in a row.
"Th-the whole point of the game is to play with m-me, isn't it? If you k-knock me out there, it doesn't mean anything anymore..."
"Th-that's not what I m-meant...?"
Something's wrong. It was a perfect plan. How did it end up like this?
Fretting over it, I hit the start button again anyway.
Was there no helping it? Did I have to burn that secret plan, even on the first stage? It would wound my pride, but what else could I do? The sixty out in front were sprinting so they'd never be overtaken, and the nineteen lagging behind were desperate to sabotage me however they could. In a situation like this, even I—whose skill at games is frankly incredible—couldn't win. This game demanded an absurd amount of luck on top of pure ability.
This stage was Spinning Platform. All you had to do was not fall off a platform that spun in a random direction. The most common ways to die were the platform suddenly reversing, or getting shoved off by someone else. In other words, for Iztomo determined to make me finish last no matter what, it was the perfect stage.
Sure enough, the instant the stage began, every Iztomo character charged me at once.
I naturally claimed last place.
"There are way too many of you in the abuse faction...!"