Come In, You Fucking Bitch
“Wh-what…?”
The sudden message froze her body solid. She felt exactly like a field mouse standing before a predator.
Aura… that’s her…
The major corporate streamer serving as team captain for this Fall of the Great. The benefactor who had plucked Bullet out of a sea of hopefuls.
But how the hell am I supposed to answer this?
While she was still babbling internally, another message slammed in. This one felt even colder than the last.
Nickname’s pure elementary-school energy, but goddamn is she terrifying…
She swallowed hard. Her tongue swept once across dry lips.
Ignoring this would be suicide. Her reputation was already scraping the floor; one more shove and it would bury itself six feet under.
I have to send something… but what? What words would even earn me a scrap of praise?
Under the chair her toes tapped in anxious little jerks. Say the wrong thing and the dislike stack would only climb higher. Bow too low and she’d look pathetic.
After an eternity of hesitation she finally typed and sent it. Not too groveling, yet still confident!
That should do it! A reply that could actually score some goodwill!
“…Is this bitch actually insane?”
Aura—Shin Ga-on—let out a hollow laugh at the reply.
“Does she seriously not understand the situation right now? There’s no way…”
Every bottom-tier streamer she had ever watched got completely steamrolled by community opinion.
The moment people started paying attention, ego-searching became automatic.
Of course it does.
It was the first time most of them had ever tasted mass attention. That high was pure narcotic; once you got a hit you kept chasing it.
The real problem hit when the opinion turned sour.
Negative posts piled up and those streamers visibly crumpled. Their broadcast energy turned timid, their word count dropped, every single reaction became careful and small.
Bottom-tier streamers almost always walk that path.
They had no fans. At best a tiny handful. So when the dogs started biting, no one stepped in to shield them.
A corporate streamer could commit ten sins and only eat one unit of hate, because the fans would flood the boards, muddy the narrative, and rewrite the entire atmosphere.
A nobody, meanwhile, could commit one sin and eat ten units of hate—sometimes even wearing the blame for mistakes the big names had made.
Because there are no fans.
And Bullet was a nobody among nobodies. Getting into the tournament at all had been a miracle.
Yet that nobody had just committed a hundred-point sin, topped it off with a ridiculous excuse and a full-scale responsibility dodge, and her dislike image had long since left “mountain” territory and entered “Everest”.
So of course I figured she’d shut the stream down and run…
Bullet’s behavior looked exactly like someone who hadn’t considered the aftermath for even a second.
That was Aura’s read. She had already been preparing to recruit a replacement. When a proxy or cheat scandal hit, swapping a player was a captain’s legitimate right.
But Bullet hadn’t run. She was practicing. Like nothing had happened at all.
What the hell?
Aura’s brain short-circuited. She had no idea how to process the situation.
Is she actually deranged? More importantly, why the fuck isn’t she banned?
She was so stunned that even the anger evaporated. The fury that had boiled up the second she saw Bullet online got shoved aside by pure bewilderment and simply vanished.
Did her mind already snap?
Even at first glance she had seemed a little off—classic mentally-fragile type. That was part of why Aura had picked her. She needed an explosive variable.
This wasn’t a variable. This was a bomb. A bomb that could wipe the entire team off the map.
She forced a deep breath and started with the obvious question.
Aura stared at the reply for a long second, then finally let out another empty laugh.
“Wow.”
Bold. No—that word didn’t even begin to cover it. This bitch was unhinged.
“Wow, she really… wow… what the fuck do I even do?”
Her head was a mess.
Aura typed and deleted replies over and over. There was so much she wanted to tear into, so much she needed to confirm. Doing it all over text was going to be impossible.
A reply came almost instantly, but Aura hit the call button without even reading it.
Rrrrring—
The dial tone stretched on and on.
She’s not dodging, is she?
Just as the thought crossed her mind—
Click—
“H-hello…?”
The call connected a split second before it would have dropped. Bullet’s voice on the other end sounded almost exactly the same as the first time they had met.
It trembled. There was zero confidence. Pure loser energy.
“Hello? Bullet?”
“Y-yes?”
The dazed answer made Aura snort before she could stop herself.
“Why’d your confidence suddenly evaporate? You were so bold in chat.”
She deliberately laced the words with a little venom. After thirty-six hours of mental suffering because of this person, she figured she was allowed a little bitchiness.
“Ch-chat and… t-talking with your voice are completely different things…?”
The voice still shook like a leaf. Yet she still managed to fire back every single time.
“I can’t even tell if I should call that confidence or a complete lack of it.”
“I-I’d say lack of it….”
“Ah. Right.”
Her self-assessment was brutally cold, like she was talking about a total stranger.
“So why the hell didn’t you get banned?”
“Ah, like I said earlier… I don’t think there’s any reason I should’ve been banned… I mean, I didn’t use cheats….”
“…It wasn’t cheats?”
“…Yes.”
“That aim?”
“Yes….”
The answer came a beat too late. Aura’s eyes narrowed.
“Got proof?”
“One second….”
A moment later an image landed in private messages. An account investigation notice from the NOVA Syndicate operations team.
Regarding the abnormal play suspicions raised during tournament participation, an investigation of Bullet’s account was conducted… this is talking about Fall of the Great, right?
She muttered the text under her breath as she read.
Regarding the abnormal play suspicions raised during tournament participation, an investigation of Bullet’s account was conducted.
No violations of operating policy found.
No sanctions applied.
Tournament participation eligibility maintained.
The second she finished the last line she leaned back against the chair and exhaled in pure defeat.
“…It really wasn’t cheats?”
“Yes… A-Aura, do you… tend to deny the truth right in front of you…? Like a flat-earther…?”
“What the fuck kind of nonsense is that. I was just talking to myself.”
“O-okay….”
Aura rubbed her temples and bit her lip.
“I still can’t believe it, but that aim back then was actually real skill.”
“Yes… Sometimes when your condition’s good that kind of aim just… comes out, you know…? People call it ‘popping off’…?”
Instead of answering, Aura pulled up the controversial clip again.
Tdddddding—
Out of thirty-five bullets, more than twenty-five punched clean through heads. The enemy assault hero’s health melted; even after the reload the crosshair kept obsessively dancing around the head.
And this isn’t cheats…?
No matter how she looked at it, it made zero sense. The aim was wildly different from her usual. The crosshair only playing around the head was weird, and the sudden snap-jumps in movement were suspicious as hell.
Everything looked shady, but the real reason Aura had been so certain it was cheats was something else entirely.
Context.
It had been way too perfect.
When a nobody streamer first collabs with a corporate name, they almost always go hunting community reactions. Of course they do—they want to know how people see them.
And the second they discover they’re getting roasted, the desperation hits.
I have to show something.
I have to win them over somehow!
They cling to that thought.
So nobodies either start offering tribute to the big streamers or force themselves into the spotlight by any means necessary.
The problem is that those methods are almost always clumsy as hell.
Even mosquito-buzzing for attention only works if it’s natural and funny. The second it becomes obvious, it’s just pure dislike fuel.
In that sense, Bullet had been the perfect candidate for cheating.
She had been put on the same team as Aura.
The communities were already piling on the hate.
The pressure to prove something must have been crushing.
Trying to score points with conversation was impossible—her talk game was absolute garbage. Generously speaking, below average civilian level.
Her mechanical skill was also just okay.
In that situation Bullet only had two real options.
One: curl up like a dead mouse and pray the tournament ends quickly. Two: try something—anything.
Stay quiet and the risk is zero. But so is the return.
Make a move and risk appears. But return becomes possible too. Of course, fuck it up and you become permanently hated and buried forever…
But staying quiet gets you buried the same way. There’s a reason nobodies throw themselves at big servers and tournaments like this. They need viewer blood transfusions somehow.
And Bullet had clearly chosen option two. The problem was the direction. You can’t upgrade talk game overnight. You can’t magically jump skill tiers in a day either.
Which left only one path.
Cheats.
That had been Aura’s conclusion.
I thought she was a headache of a bitch in every possible way.
A normal human, no matter how desperate, wouldn’t actually pull out cheats. You get caught. So if she used them anyway, she had to have been cornered past the point of rational thought.
By Aura’s streaming experience and pure deduction, Bullet absolutely should have been on cheats. Yet she hadn’t been banned. The investigation came back clean, and the infamous aim was supposedly pure skill.
Truly astonishing!
“Hmmm….”
Aura’s eyes narrowed to slits.
What’s the smart play here?
She accepted Bullet was clean. That didn’t mean a roster swap was off the table.
The controversy had already exploded. Team chemistry was shaken. The tournament schedule itself had taken a hit.
If Aura wanted, she could demand a replacement right now.
Truthfully, a corporate streamer of her caliber had no real reason to enter a tournament like this. Just streaming grew her numbers. One collab, one good clip, and the communities were talking about her.
The rich-get-richer, poor-get-poorer rule didn’t only apply to money. Internet broadcasting ran on the exact same law—maybe even more ruthlessly.
Yet Aura still entered tournaments for one reason only. Winning. She could never forget the pure dopamine hit of that moment.
I really shouldn’t have won that first one…
The rush of her first championship. The flood of chat and donations. The victory-lap streams that came after! Every second of it was still crystal clear.
The problem was everything that followed.
Aura kept entering tournaments chasing that high again, but for nearly two years her best result had been quarterfinals. Period.
The fans had cheered at first. Once the early exits started stacking up, the goodwill slowly cooled.
Do you really need to keep going?
Just collab with the usual people… run some casuals now and then…
Tournaments just kill the vibe, you know?
The more those comments piled up, the more Aura had to fold. As a streamer she couldn’t keep clinging to something her audience hated.
Which made this Fall of the Great critically important. It was her last shot.
Aura was that desperate. If she hadn’t been, she never would have even considered keeping a deranged cheat-scandal bitch on the roster.
What helps me win more…
Keeping Bullet had clear upsides.
Skill.
Looking purely at the aim in that clip, she was already better than anyone currently on the replacement shortlist. And now that they were talking, her personality was actually pretty entertaining. Strong character, you could say.
The problem was the risk.
The cheat controversy hadn’t fully died. Even with ops clearing her, there would always be people who refused to believe it.
In Bullet’s own words—flat-earthers.
Aura drummed her fingers on the desk. Discard pile card? Or hidden ace that could flip the whole table?
“Bullet.”
She decided to run a test first.
“Y-yes?!”
“I’m making a custom lobby right now. Get in. One-versus-one.”
“O-one-versus-one?”
“Yeah. I’m curious about your actual skill. That okay?”
“I-I’m fine with it…!”
Aura nodded. She had expected that. For Bullet this was a chance to prove herself too.
“B-but Aura… one promise first….”
“A promise…?”
Her expression hardened for a second.
Was she about to demand a roster spot if she won the 1v1? A little arrogant, isn’t it? Does she not understand her own situation?
“P-please promise you won’t… emotionally kick me off the team after I completely destroy you….”
“……Ha.”
Aura barked a laugh. She raked her fallen hair back with rough fingers.
“Get in here, you fucking bitch.”