The Boosters (Hunsil)

"So... VPN on. Set it to a Japan IP. Then this..."

Bzzzzzt.

The phone I'd tossed onto the desk started buzzing. At this hour, only one person would be calling me.

And that was how Kim Seungtaek and I left the Korea server and moved to Asia.

We stayed there. Through becoming a high school student, debuting as a pro, winning a domestic championship, and reaching the semifinals of a world championship—right up to the edge of retirement, three years later.

I don't hate people who are bad at games. They aren't bad because they want to be, and talent is a real thing in a game, same as anywhere else.

I don't hate players who don't grind. For them a game is a hobby, nothing more. It isn't their job, the way it is for a pro.

Unless you're someone like me, all-in on the game, there's no particular reason they should burn time and stamina just to get better.

Plenty of other temperaments live in a game, and I respect most of them. I grant them that.

There is exactly one kind I can't stand. The malicious users who ignore the rules and do harm to the company and to people who came to play fair.

Intentional throwers, leavers, cheaters—anyone breaking the terms the publisher set.

And among those, I hate abusers. No. I loathe them.

I've been on the wrong end of them, and they're vermin that chew the lifespan out of a game.

Once I was playing as a pro, I had no choice but to be sensitive about match-fixing. Losing because of something that has nothing to do with skill is not a feeling I enjoy.

Back in middle school, chasing first place, I cut into my sleep to climb and drove my stamina to the limit—and that was when the boosters found me.

A few rounds of intentional throwing and targeted sniping, and in a single day I lost most of the points I had built. I came within a breath of deleting the game.

It was only a score. For someone as serious about the game as I was, it was a score that meant something.

And I'd nearly split my own skull studying English, a subject I had no gift for, just so I could move to the Asia server.

...This is absolutely not why I hate abusers.

One amusing fact: abusers, as a rule, have the skill to belong in the bracket they're working.

They have to. Otherwise they couldn't hold the rating, or snipe one another.

Which means the abusers tearing through Chaser right now, absurd as it sounds, mostly have the skill to reach Chaser even if they played like normal people.

The two malicious users who had handed me a hollow ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠loss the game before. Running into them on the same team—and as the enemy—the thought that hit me was a simple one.

Good thing we met again.

"You two are fucked."

A shabby one-room, little more than three hundred and fifty square feet. Desks and computers stood everywhere, and they made it plain the place wasn't for living. It was an office. A workshop.

The scene could have been a PC café, and the towers of instant-noodle cups on the desks said plenty about how the people here lived. Every ashtray was packed with smoked-down butts and gray ash. They'd opened the window to air the place out, but there was only one window in the room. The stale smoke showed no intention of leaving through that single pane, and the room sat thick with it.

You couldn't call it a good environment. Far from good—it was miserable. Three men lived in it. As if to prove they hadn't gone out in quite a while, stubble had grown in thick along their jaws and upper lips.

And if you asked what they were doing...

An online game.

Summer, and they lived in sleeveless shirts and shorts, too cheap even to run the air conditioner—and all they did at those desks was play. No matter how generously you looked at them, they were nothing more and nothing less than unemployed bums shut in a room. The one real difference was that, unlike actual bums, these men were very much making money. Whether that money was clean, and honestly earned, was another question.

"Ah... the score didn't go up as much as I thought?"

The three of them were boosters. Proxy plays, targeted sniping, match-fixing, account sales—the malicious trade, the so-called operators. Right up until a moment ago they had been building a Chaser account to sell.

To lock the win down, they'd gone as far as fixing the match with throwaway accounts, the sniping accounts thick with troll history, trying to push the ACS on the account they meant to sell as high as it would go. But—

"It's 'cause that one got in the way. Ugh, now we've gotta run it again. Fuck."

Last game, a player matched against the sale account had interfered with a stubborn, obsessive focus. They hadn't raised the ACS as much as they'd hoped, and the points climbed that much less. A job that should have ended in one game now demanded another. For operators whose time was money, none of this was pleasant.

"Ha, shit. Let's just drop it, this is fucking miserable. Hey, let's eat first and do the rest after."

One nuisance had already ruined the mood. One of the three offered dinner and the leftover work later, half to cool off and half for the excuse of a break...

"Hey. Last game's Killjoy is a streamer."

Something he couldn't just let slide came back from his partner.

"What? A streamer?"

"Look at this."

On the phone his partner handed over, a streamer's live broadcast was playing. And not just anyone—the streamer you could fairly call the most famous name in Project A right now.

"This is that one, right? Eunha? What's she doing here."

An extra game, in the time it took to watch a broadcast, was money. Operators didn't keep up with livestreams. They still knew who Eunha was. They were Project A players too, and in the current scene she was the craze itself. Even men who spent all day throwing and sniping were still men in their twenties. They weren't so far out of the world that they couldn't follow what was popular.

"She was last game's Killjoy."

Knowing who she was didn't make him her fan.

He had no reason to be kind to her. If a request came in to snipe her and tank her score, operators like us would do it gladly.

Strangers, basically. And the Killjoy who had dogged us last game was Eunha?

"Shit, she was a streamer?"

Requests to snipe this or that streamer were already booming off the turf war, and learning that the vicious user who had just handed them extra work was the streamer Eunha sent the anger surging up.

"Hey. Pull another snipe account."

On a normal day he would have let it go. But the user who had screwed them was a high schooler a good ten years younger. And that high schooler wasn't a boy. She was a girl. That was what hit the limit of his patience.

"We're sniping her?"

"Gotta educate the little shit. Show her what happens when you mouth off at us."

People might not remember it now, but in the early days of Project A, the ones who papered the entire first page of the Korea server leaderboard were operators like us. Of course, once the Korea server's numbers dropped off hard enough that the customers stopped coming, we had to leave the game too.

"Queue's up. Get ready."

Back then Project A wasn't that popular a game, so sniping was absurdly easy. The top brackets, Chaser especially, were easier still. After Leori collapsed and the game shot up until people called it the most popular in the country, the work got quite a bit harder. Years of an operator's know-how were nothing to take lightly, though. Spare accounts in case of a miss, the timing of the queue, the matchmaking MMR—none of that was even work to them.

"Hey, did we catch her?"

"Yeah. Think so."

A live broadcast can lag a little, but not by much. Unless the streamer sets a delay herself, the stream and reality are only a few seconds apart, and a gap like that hardly matters. On top ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠of that, this was Chaser, home to some fraction of a percent of the player base. However much the population had grown, Chaser was still a handful of people, and matchmaking took time because of it.

On the broadcast, Eunha's map was Pil too. The same map they had matched.

"Did it work?"

"Yeah, it worked. Different team, though."

Unfortunately, two accounts had landed the snipe, and both were on a different team from Eunha, so an intentional throw was impossible. If they wanted to screw her over, they would have to beat her with raw skill...

"Tsk. Is this fine? Shouldn't we just dodge?"

"What are you talking about?"

"That Eunha girl's a total psycho. She's already famous up in the high ranks as a carry machine."

And here I'd been wondering what he was so worried about.

"Hey, we're gonna stream-snipe anyway. What's the point? We already know exactly where she is. What's that bitch gonna do?"

Eunha was live right now. Streamers cover the map as a matter of course, but reading a position off the screen is dead simple. Even the Operator, supposedly her greatest weapon, is hard to use once her spot gets called. They held an overwhelming advantage.

"That's... fair."

The two of them locked in a frontline duelist and a second-line initiator, a pairing built to play off each other.

"We just stomp the little shit, then sit back and watch this bitch cry."

"Heh heh. Nasty."