According to the Canon of TS Internet Broadcasts, Yada Yada...
Inside a vast palace, two figures stood facing each other.
The one on the right was a beautiful woman. Hair glossier and redder than blood set off the pallor of her skin, and her crimson eyes shone lucid as rubies. She drew the tip of her tongue lightly across her lips and smiled.
Opposite her stood a cute girl. Brittle ash-gray hair brought a wolf to mind. Pink eyes that held no feeling at all left anyone who met them with a dread they could not name. The girl tilted her head and glared at the woman.
A bell tolled to announce the bloodbath, and the red-haired woman moved first. She swept a hand through empty air, and viscous blood spilled down out of the sky. It pooled across the ground, and with a soft pop a hand burst up out of it.
A little doll. Armored like a knight, the sight was so wildly out of place it could drag a snort out of anyone watching. That impression lasted only a moment.
The doll flared with brilliant light and showed its true shape. What stood there, clad in pitch-black plate, was a figure that could be called nothing but a black knight.
“...!!!”
With a scream that threatened to split the ears, the black knight stepped toward the girl, and in the next breath a savage greatsword came crashing down on her. A merciless blow that a slender girl’s body should never have been able to withstand.
But—
“Hmm.”
At that small sound she set a hand lightly against the greatsword. Silver radiance coiled around her fingers, and the black knight’s blade was brushed aside as lightly as a feather. The knight fell back, then crumbled into dust.
The silver-haired girl’s face stayed blank. The red-haired woman, of course, was still smiling.
“...”
“Haha!”
Light dazzling enough to pull a gasp from the throat set the palace ablaze. Blood pools surged up in numbers it was meaningless to count. The air shuddered. The girl’s body, and the stone and ground around her, rose into the sky. A roar rolled out of the earth. Dolls born for nothing but slaughter came into the world.
What could they want, to throw themselves into a bloodbath like this?
Ask, and neither of them would hesitate.
One small fragment, drifting above the palace. They were staking their lives on that alone.
The queen’s crown.
The battle to decide its owner had already begun.
“Aaand I win again!”
Chat is on fire.
My first opponent in the first-to-ten is an E-rank beginner with almost no ranked experience. This account’s rank is E, of course. But who am I? A ranker who hit A rank back when TLQ first launched, and the Owner of past-life memories—the sort of thing you could fairly call a cheat code in a web novel. A TS Internet Broadcast story usually isn’t a reincarnation story, and it usually isn’t about a VTuber either. Whatever.
What matters right now is that I am winning, overwhelmingly. Isn’t it?
I don’t particularly care that chat is burning. A few messages are already sprinkled in, praising my skill, so I take this first-to-ten from game one—perfect, not a loss in sight—and I make that the story everyone tells.
“Um, I’m sorry for winning so many in a row, Flame of Love.”
“Yes! Please take care of me right to the end!”
Sorry, but you’re going to be the sacrifice for my first real victory.
We finish trading courtesies, and I pick my ninth character.
The one I choose is Scarlet, alchemist of flame. The one they choose is Iris, the mercenary. The matchup is so lopsided you could call it a nightmare in their favor. That’s fine. Every time the matchup has favored them so far, I’ve won anyway.
The words that announce the match rise, and I immediately throw out a long-range poke. Scarlet thrusts an arm forward, and a red flash races out. Iris snaps her shield up at once and blocks it, and the moment the attack is stopped she drops her guard and starts in toward me. I give a little ground right away and poke again.
“I-if it keeps going like this, I can win...”
“Wh-what else can I do? In th-this matchup, if I want to w-win, this is how you have to play it.”
Scarlet is built for pokes. The instant Iris, who lives at close and mid range, gets a hand on her, it’s over. TLQ is a fighting game, when you get down to it. There is no world where zoning from fullscreen solves everything. But with the gap between us right now, holding my spacing ought to be more than enough.
That confidence—arrogance, to call it by its other name—has already taken root in my head, and as if to prove the arrogance isn’t wrong, it hands me my ninth win.
“Wow. Even for a couple of beginners, nine in a row. I might actually be pretty good!”
Aah, you can be as sarcastic as you like, you know? That stuff doesn’t work on someone who’s nine for nine. If you’ve got something to say, come in here and beat me yourself!
“What should I do for the last one? I might lose, so I’m really torn...”
Of course, even as I say it, the character is already decided. My main back when I used to play TLQ, and the one I practiced most yesterday.
Leticia, sovereign of blood dolls.
And the character Flame of Love picks—
“Huh?”
The same as the beginning. Shiro, the silver witch.
Leticia and Shiro are a clear matchup. Shiro is a beginner-recommended character, with good priority and especially strong guard. Leticia’s combos are fairly difficult and her priority is poor, but in exchange she is built for guard breaks. The first three games of this first-to-ten were Leticia versus Shiro, so Flame of Love has to know that.
“Did you pick that by mistake?”
Even chat is side-eyeing the Shiro pick. They even locked her in after I did.
...Are they trying to neatly hand me a clean ten wins? If that’s the feeling, the polite thing is to accept it.
“I’ll just go ahead for now. Even if it was a misclick, the world of a first-to-ten is a cruel one...”
The instant the game starts, I summon Leticia’s combo starter, the black knight. Call the knight, close the distance, and choose: the knight’s close attack, or Leticia’s long-range poke. A two-option mix. Ordinarily you use the knight’s trademark sluggish speed to catch a counterhit, but Shiro is so slow that comparing the two inside TLQ would be rude. So Shiro has excellent priority and an excellent guard—but as I said, Leticia is optimized for guard breaks. Put simply, the moment Shiro loses that mix, you may as well call the game—
“...Huh?”
Somehow the character lying on the ground is my Leticia. And the black knight has already vanished on her knockdown.
“Wait, what?”
What in the world just happened. In the split second I spend on that thought, Shiro closes in and pops Leticia lightly into the air.
Ah. I’m screwed.
Shiro’s strength: good priority. Put another way, the moment her offense gets started, every bizarre technique in existence starts chaining. And so I get annihilated like a dog without landing a single hit.
“I-I’m fine! It’s st-still just the first game!”
Right. It’s only the first game anyway.
Chat is roasting me like this is payback for everything so far, but even so, I’m fine. I only need to win one game. They still have to win nine more in a row.
I-I am not panicking at all, okay?!
Why is it that Flame of Love’s line, sitting there in the game chat, feels like a taunt with a little lol tucked inside it?
I absolutely cannot lose.
With that vow, I quietly select the next character.
“H-h-how?!”
Something is wrong.
Something is wrong.
Something is wrong?!
The record floating in the upper left of the screen reads 9W–9L. And chat is already a rising pool of laughter.
Flame of Love is still perfectly polite.
“P-please take c-care of me.”
Focus.
Don’t look at chat like that.
When I was winning, I was winning overwhelmingly. The perfect was only that first loss. The rest were close, weren’t they?
I can win. I can absolutely win.
I quietly steady my breath and, for the last time, pick Leticia.
And Flame of Love, as if to laugh in my face, picks Shiro.
Look at that chat.
I absolutely cannot lose.
That is the resolve I make.
And with a single hit left before I would have won, I get perfectly turned around.
“WAAAAAAAH??!!!”
The broadcast cuts to the ending credits. The manager who was watching must have thrown the video up remotely. There isn’t even time for a goodbye. Just like that, the stream is over.
A first-to-ten win-streak stream, according to the title, and it doesn’t even last a full hour. The opponent, on top of that, was the lowest grade there is. E rank.
Something’s wrong. The person I’d been practicing against told me I could hang even at A rank. Could they be... an Owner of past-life memories, the same as me...?
I am sunk in that thought when a TLQ chat ping chimes.
Right. I never closed the game. I look at the screen. Flame of Love’s character is still standing in the lobby.
You worked hard.
That was a real nail-biter.
That aside, would you mind opening this link?
Oh, and I’ll keep enjoying the streams ☆=(^ω^)/
With that last line, he leaves the lobby.
“...What is this.”
I copy the link he left in chat and slowly paste it into the address bar.
What comes up on the screen—
“Flame of... Love?”
A nickname I am seeing for the first time, and the letters SS stuck right beside it. I glance a little higher, and it isn’t hard to tell that this site is TLQ’s ranking board. And SS rank is the grade that proves you sit in the top 0.1 percent of TLQ.
In other words.
“...AAAAAAAH!! That bastard was on an alt!!! Damn it!!!!”
For a while, the scream rings through the room.
Ping.