What's Wrong With Them All of a Sudden?

When I first decided to live as a girl, a few things gave me trouble.

One was clothes. Back when I was a man, I got through life in the ultimate comfort combo of sweatpants and a hoodie, but the girl named Choi Eunha apparently had very different taste. Around the house it was comfortable enough, yet the moment I caught myself in the mirror a strange self-loathing crept in—I had to wear a pajama dress of white frilled lace, and the closet was stuffed with clothes in every style imaginable.

The second was my body as a woman. For a while after the change, I had so little tolerance for it that I needed the housekeeper's help just to wash. It's a little embarrassing to admit, but after elementary school I went through an all-boys middle school and high school, dropped out in my first year, and went straight into life as a trainee before debuting as a pro. To someone who had lived like that, women might as well have been animals out of a fantasy.

Only after I reminded myself hundreds of times that this body belonged to me, and not to someone else, could I finally look at my naked self in the mirror.

What stood there was a beauty with a sharp, catlike face and a bob that fell to her shoulders.

I had never thought of myself as a cold or detached person, but it was the kind of face that would plant exactly that prejudice in anyone who saw it now. I wasn't even 160 centimeters—short even for a girl—but my head was so small and my proportions so good that the lack of height didn't really show. And contrary to how fierce I looked, there was so little flesh on my arms and legs that I even gave off a frail impression.

I understood, at least a little, why Father treated me like a princess and doted on me so much. If I had a daughter like this, I'd probably turn into that same terminal case of girl-dad syndrome. Someone might call it an excess of self-awareness, but what was I supposed to do when it was the truth?

If I was a woman now and there was no taking it back, better that the looks at least be easy on the eyes. What I had at the moment went well past easy on the eyes and into burdensome territory, but still.

Anyway, those difficulties had grown familiar by now. And just when I thought I had adapted perfectly to life as a girl, one last gate remained.

Menstruation. The biological fact of life every woman of childbearing age has to go through. It found me too, and I had to take it with no preparation at all. The pain was like a hammer pounding my lower belly, and the chair had gone red with blood, so I couldn't even give the viewers a proper goodbye before I had to kill the stream in a rush.

I hurried off to find the housekeeper. One look at me and she startled, then told me she would clean the room and to go wash up and come back out.

"Whew..."

Under the warm water pouring from the showerhead, I let out a long sigh.

I had never once resented living a woman's life. Because I had become a girl, I got back the four years I had wasted as a pro. Three billion won? Of course it was a shame, but the truth was I didn't need money like that. Our family lived more than well enough even if I never brought a cent home, and I only had to earn enough to feed myself.

But this first taste of magical agony blew far past anything I had expected. Enough that, for the first time, I wanted to pour resentment on whatever god had turned me into a girl.

I toweled the water off my body and stepped out. Sitting at the vanity, I dried my hair in a rough pass and didn't so much as glance at the pile of cosmetics—just pulled out the lotion and put that on. Honestly, I didn't even really know how to use any of that other stuff.

On the bed, a change of clothes and underwear had been laid out in a neat row, and beside them sat a package that looked like wet wipes.

"Ah. Pads."

I shook off the self-loathing creeping back in, pulled out a single pad, stuck it to the underwear, and put them on.

"Not as uncomfortable as I thought?"

From now on I was going to memorize my cycle cold, so nothing this unpleasant would ever happen again.

Come to think of it, a lot of viewers had piled in right before I ended the stream. Missing that moment was a real shame.

"I'm pretty sure I saw it hit five hundred..."

Somewhere, someone had dropped my coordinates, and five hundred people had flooded a broadcast whose peak used to be twenty.

The reason was obvious. Yangjeon.

I searched him on the Project A community the way the viewers told me to, and he turned out to be a pretty vicious player. He abused the fact that Rioat put no limit on making alt accounts, mass-produced them, and made a specialty of streaming himself slaughtering newbies on those alts. Smurfing, start to finish. That was Yangjeon.

Still, he'd gotten his ass handed to him by me, so things ought to have quieted down.

I went into the community for the first time in quite a while with that thought, but the bait spinning around was nothing like what I had expected.

"..."

A foul feeling I hadn't tasted in a long time. The community was packed wall to wall with curses, half for Yangjeon and half for me.

Him getting dragged was what I had expected. Me eating it too was not. I hadn't been hoping for a warm ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠welcome, but what exactly had I done?

Getting cursed at without even knowing why left me in a pretty foul mood, but even this much abuse didn't shake me. Eating insults was basically daily life. When I lost to YAYE at a tournament, when I lost to APAS, when I lost to Duke, I got cursed then too. They tore me down saying KZ would never make it because of me, that I was someone who did nothing for the team, and I had wanted to prove something to people like that. That in the end they were wrong and I was right, and that pecking out malicious comments from their rooms with those precious fingers of theirs would not hinder me in the slightest.

In the end I failed. I never proved them wrong. Even I thought my share of the blame for KZ's losses was the largest.

Turning over those foul old memories as I looked around the community, I started to get a handle on it.

"So that's why the viewers came flooding in..."

Someone had also posted Yangjeon's reactions from while he was getting wrecked by me. The first few times he insisted he had only lost because of luck, and from some point on he said nothing at all. Then he started eating insults from about three thousand viewers who had swarmed in from the community, and in the end one line from a Yangjeon whose mental had left the building made me a target too.

Saying that changed nothing about how the viewers treated him, and Yangjeon ended the stream after leaving only a single line that he would reflect and lay low.

Once the Yangjeon they had been chewing to pieces was gone, they switched their target to me. From their point of view, I must have looked like the exact same smurf. From mine it was unfair, but I had chosen to end the stream without making any excuse, and thinking I had run was only natural on their side.

"It's a pain, but I'd better put out a clarification."

If you don't settle a controversy like this early, it latches on later and becomes a nuisance.

I searched my ID on the Rioat homepage, hit account lookup, and took a screenshot.

"First time writing a clarification."

Was there even a format for this?

At first I tried to keep it as calm as I could, but the further I went the hotter my anger ran, and before I knew it the ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠tone had turned into me picking a fight.

I didn't have an ID, so I made a new one. If they were going to call that smurfing, what exactly did they want me to do? There was no trick like Leori's for shooting up fast through AI matches. Was I supposed to have played some mode other than unrated?

Because of trash like Yangjeon, people running alt accounts just to smurf had started popping up everywhere, and to those eyes I must have looked like one of them. I understood. At the same time, it pissed me off.

Since I knew one clarification post would not settle it anyway, I hit the start-stream button and waited.

People with nothing better to do—the moment I went live, more than a hundred of them rushed in.

I had figured it would get about this ugly. Seeing it for real, it was a spectacle. I needed to shut it down before the chat box went completely feral.

"Please don't spam. I'll wait three more minutes for everyone else to get in."

I sent my voice out to the viewers through the mic. For anyone who streams, that kind of talk is the most basic communication there is, but with the mic out of commission all this time, even that much had been miserably inconvenient. The truth was it hadn't broken so much as I had plugged the cable in backward, and realizing that had been mortifying.

The moment I said a single sentence telling them not to spam, the people who had each been flooding the chat with their own nonsense switched to flooding it with question marks.

What? Why? Had I done something wrong?

What's wrong with them all of a sudden?