It's Only Sweat Running From My Eyes
Two weeks of rest, granted under the name of spring break. Most people would spend a stretch like that—long, and yet far too short—bracing for their second year, or making one more set of memories with their friends.
I had no intention of spending any such ordinary, dime-a-dozen spring break.
Human beings are beautiful creatures precisely because they chase after something new.
"Uwaaah...."
It was like a prison. As if it would never permit an escape, it bound my arms and legs and dragged me down into a bottomless swamp.
If I gave up on everything here, would I finally be comfortable? Or would the very moment I surrendered be the moment some unknown, something nobody had ever faced, came crashing down over me?
I'll say it again. Humans are beautiful creatures because they pursue the new. Which is to say that exploring this particular unknown was a mission laid upon me....
"Yeonmin! I told you to get up, didn't I!"
"Okaaay...."
The challenge of lying in bed all day and doing absolutely nothing failed on the first day, the instant I attempted it. Someday, on a day when Mom wasn't around to interfere, I would absolutely try again.
An internet broadcast has to keep challenging something new, and at the same time keep offering viewers a fun they already know. What a contradictory thing to demand. What a difficult thing to pull off.
Inside that world, the creature known as a virtual YouTuber is especially alien. You don't put a real person's face forward. You lead with an avatar someone has written a setting for, and you build the broadcast from there. With fewer constraints from reality, trying something new comes easily, and handing people a familiar kind of fun is almost absurdly simple. The reverse, though, is that you fail just as often, and familiarity curdles into boredom just as fast.
Only a VTuber who can break through that wall deserves to succeed. Nacchan, for instance.
Then did I really have that qualification? Had I kept challenging new things, and always offered the Iztomo a fun they already knew?
That wasn't a question I could answer. I wasn't the one handing out the grade. I was the one being graded.
Even so, there was one thing I could state for certain. This situation was something I had never once experienced.
"...This is a lie, right?"
At my question, the Iztomo in chat couldn't bring themselves to answer either. That was how bewildering the situation was—how far outside anything I had expected.
"Haha...."
Say a broadcast by Kaino Izumi of Stars Flow's second generation, and what comes to mind first? Like it or not, even if I never wanted it, the first thing is surely a Calamity. I even carry the disgraceful nickname Queen of Flame Wars.
That doesn't mean my streams run on Calamity alone. Even just recently, there have been plenty of times I simply broadcast like a normal person. No—days without a Calamity are far more common, and when I think about still ending up with a nickname like Queen of Flame Wars, there is a part of me that finds it awfully unfair.
I couldn't deny, though, that the image of my broadcast sat very close to the keyword Calamity.
So where had that image come from? The debut stream, where I smashed the RP from the opening second?
No. Absolutely not. Back then I had no broadcasting experience whatsoever, and quite a few of the Iztomo had noticed as much. It wasn't that the debut had no influence at all, but in the end that stream was mostly the fun of watching a beginner's mistakes. It was not the broadcast that fixed my image as Calamity.
What built the image was the broadcast the next day. A ten-match set of TLQ, played to pull the viewers in. I ran into an alt, lost flawlessly, realized it, cut the stream and screamed—only the microphone wasn't actually off, so every single viewer heard the shriek. That broadcast, the one that drove a flustered me to declare a two-week hiatus, was what made my image Calamity.
And the very person who had caused it was meeting me now, in a ranked match.
"Heh... heheh...."
In truth, I held no ill will at all toward the opponent called Affection's Flame. It wouldn't be too much to say I was grateful. I'd felt a little wronged at the time, but that broadcast was what finally locked my character into place, and it had gone on to help my channel grow.
But that was that, and this was this. I still hadn't forgotten the humiliation of that loss. Our characters were even exactly the same as back then—Shiro, the Silver Witch, and Leticia, the Blood Doll Lord. It was a perfect chance for revenge.
The moment the match began, I did the obvious thing and summoned the black knight, Leticia's starter. Call the knight, close the distance, then choose—the black knight's melee, or Leticia's ranged poke. An offense with two roads, and I would take one of them.
The problem was that I had opened in exactly this way back then, too, and Affection's Flame had toyed with me from start to finish. But the me of that day and the me of now were different. The me of now was none other than Kaino Izumi, owner-VTuber to 183,000 subscribers, who had cleared both Arcana Shooter: Purgatory and ST on attitude alone.
Practicing TLQ by myself now and then after that day, I had learned something. Guard the black knight's melee on the exact timing, and Leticia is left in a split second of hitstun. The black knight's melee is slow, though, and its hitbox threads an incredibly fine gap, so the usual answer is not to guard at all, but to evade and take the exchange that way.
The problem was that my opponent was a top 0.1 percent player of TLQ. Guarding the black knight's attack on the exact timing wouldn't even have been difficult for them. They had put me into hitstun with it, stepped in, and made a fool of me.
But.
"Th-there's no way I'd fall for that again...!"
The instant Affection's Flame's Shiro raised a guard, I guarded too. That would stop the hitstun from landing on Leticia, and the turn to attack would pass back to me. In other words, my chance to attack one-sidedly had arrived.
I punched the commands in as fast as I possibly could and kept the offense going. The result—
I won one round, lost two in a row, and the match was over.
"Why...."
"Hic... uuuh...."
"I-I'm not crying, okay...?"
It's just sweat, running from my eyes....
I think it's about time you gave it a try.
"Y-you think so...?"
Singing practice had, somewhere along the way, become part of the day's routine, and the moment it ended, Koga-san came out with that.
You still can't quite keep the beat, which is a little rough... but at least you don't break the flow anymore while you're singing, right? If that's the case, I think the rest of the problems would be better learned properly from someone who isn't me.
It was true. Limited to when I was singing, the stutter no longer snapped the flow in half. Following that advice from Koga-san, who had been an underground idol once, was surely the best thing I could do.
But.
"I think the only reason I'm all right now is that there's nobody around, and you're the one I'm with, Koga-san.... If I w-went and got tr-training, wouldn't I just go b-back to how I was?"
Ngh.... R-really? A familiar environment does matter, that's true. Mmm....
Something in Koga-san's voice, saying it that way, sounded faintly lifted—pleased—but it wasn't a serious problem. What mattered right now was a single question. Was it really all right for me to join vocal training as I was?
Of course, if it were only up to my heart, I wanted to start this very moment. Nobody was saying it out loud, but anyone could see that the reason the Stars Flow second generation's 3D debut kept being pushed back was me. Every other second-generation member had uploaded a cover the moment they debuted, and they kept doing singing streams besides. I didn't have a single cover on my channel, and I had never once streamed a song. There was no way, in a state like that, that I could hold a 3D debut broadcast that demanded singing and dancing.
So if it were only up to my heart, I wanted to start vocal training immediately. The anxious thoughts, though, kept catching me by the ankle. What if the improvement had been nothing but an illusion? What if I had only been able to calm down because it was literally just the two of us on a call, me and Koga-san? What if I went in for the training and the stutter made it impossible? Worries like those kept welling up without end.
"I still want to do a live. That th-thought hasn't changed, even now. But I'm so scared that I might not have ch-changed at all...."
Once I let those honest feelings out, Koga-san said nothing for a while either.
But.
Izumi.
"Yes...."
And then, slowly, Koga-san began.
You want to do a live, don't you?
"Yes. I want to...."
Because I want to shine the way Nacchan does.
I don't stutter, and I don't miss the beat the way you do when you sing, so it's a little hard for me to really feel that worry with you.
"I-it's all right. It's all because I'm the one who's l-lacking...."
But back when I was an idol, and when I was streaming on my own, I worried about similar things a lot. The scene you wanted stays out of reach, and you're scared you might just be standing still. That's it, right?
"Yes...."
But listen. If you stop because you're scared, it might be comfortable, but nothing changes. I think that's the scarier thing.
That was, unmistakably, one sincere line drawn up out of Koga-san's own experience.
So why not just slam into it once? Of course, it might turn out exactly the way you fear. Maybe you haven't improved at all.
But, Koga-san went on.
So what? You'll know for certain that nothing got better, and from there you can try again little by little and change slowly. Right?
"But then it'll be too l-late...."
You're not even a second-year yet. What are you talking about? That's an age when it's perfectly fine to fail all you want. Don't worry.
"I... is that so...."
And, well, if you're only all right because I'm the one across from you, then I can just be there for the vocal training, can't I? I'm taking lessons regularly anyway, so I only need to shift the time a little. Right?
"Koga-san."
Hm?
"I think I'm really happy, being friends with you, K-Koga-san...."
...Sometimes I wonder if you're doing this on purpose.
"Eh?"
The mood had been good just now, hadn't it...?