The Bargain (Reality)
"I gained even more points than yesterday."
The first match alone had cut yesterday's haul in half, and she'd been honestly worried. In the end, though, the session had paid out even more than the day before.
The abusers gunning for her had almost certainly been watching the broadcast. Their movement gave it away. They knew every corner she was hiding in — the off-angle on B main, behind the screen, back site, wherever she tucked herself. They shoved bodies in without ever spending an info skill, or swung through a flash into a spot they had no business expecting. Taken together, she could be fairly sure they were stream-sniping.
Anyone paid to hunt another player would use a tool that good. She'd expected the snipe, at least a little.
"Stream-snipe all you want. Doesn't matter if there's no brain attached."
And what good was the snipe if they couldn't even spend the advantage? On attack, a Jett holding an Operator was the single most important piece of information there was, and the first thing you were supposed to respect. So the entry didn't die for nothing, an initiator burned info utility and found the Op, and the defender on it shifted angles on a timer and played the mind game.
They had found her through the stream. No skills at all. That opened plenty of choices: hit the site she wasn't holding, or use utility and actually take her. They chose to hunt her instead of going around her, and they failed.
"If you keep getting wiped and still walk straight at me, you're just stupid."
Other options were sitting right there. Forcing the same one over and over was the sort of thing you could only call dumb.
"Ahh, a few games back to back and I'm starting to get tired..."
Quick on the uptake, this chat.
"All right, I'll end it here. See you all tomorrow!"
"Hnn—! Hah... hoo..."
She'd been sitting so long her body had locked up. A light stretch worked the stiffness out, and then she lay down on the bed.
The Rank-1 Race was going smoothly. Smoothly enough that if she simply kept this pace, taking first looked almost easy.
Most pro gamers lived on the Asia server. A few did grind Korea, but with the regular season to prepare for they couldn't afford to live in solo queue. The top of the ladder right now was mostly amateurs who had never debuted — people she could pass whenever she had the hours.
"Oh. Right..."
It had been a while since they'd asked her to answer about the ad for the Newbie Guide.
Her mind was already made up. Filming that guide was one of the things he had never gotten to do back when he was a man. She caught herself wondering whether this, too, counted among the lingering regrets Spax had meant.
She had decided to shoot it, and they were waiting on nothing but her answer. Putting it off any longer would be the wrong kind of delay.
The door creaked. She stepped out and went down to the first floor. There was something she had to say to her father — more precisely, something she had to be allowed.
His study was on the first floor, and he spent most of his time in it. Since her mother had come home he was in the master bedroom more often, but the study was still the room that was his.
She stood in front of the door, let out a long breath, drew a few more to steady herself, and knocked.
Permission was permission. Nothing left to hesitate over. She gathered herself once more, set her hand on the handle, and pulled.
The door creaked open, and her father's face met her looking faintly thrown.
"Eunha?"
He must have expected Eunseo, not her. The look on him said, plain as anything, what are you doing all the way in here?
"What brings you to the study?"
He was his usual self again almost at once.
"There's something I need to tell you."
It mattered more than almost anything. It might be the greatest change yet for Choi Eunha, the girl born in 2007. It might also be the first time her hopelessly doting father ever truly tore into his daughter.
Perhaps he felt that resolve. Little by little his face changed — from the father who loved his daughter past all reason, back into the man she remembered from before.
"Sit."
...
"Sit."
Three short syllables, and still they were enough. The father she had been facing as a daughter and the man in front of her now felt like entirely different people. This was not the man whose face went soft the moment he saw hers. He was colder than usual, and blank.
She had met this version of him exactly once, back when she was a boy. The day he declared he was going to be a pro gamer.
Maybe that memory had worked like a vaccine. He was still frightening like this, but not so frightening that her body shook.
"Yes."
She left the head of the table empty for him and took the lowest seat, on the right.
"Do you like black tea?"
Black tea. The last time her streaming had been found out and she'd been brought into this study, it had been hot chocolate.
For him, black tea was for receiving guests. Offering tea instead of hot chocolate was his own kind of acknowledgment — acknowledgment of her as a streamer, as a broadcaster who had succeeded.
"Yes."
She didn't particularly like black tea. She had barely even drunk it. There was no reason to refuse, so she simply said yes.
"All right. Wait a moment."
He rose, crossed to a corner of the office, and came back with a teapot and two cups. Tea went into each in turn, a thin pour, and he gestured for her to try it. She took the cup carefully and sipped.
Hm? This is... better than I thought.
"How is it?"
"I thought it would be bitter, but it's nicer than I expected. The toasty note is good, too."
"That's the milk. You don't like bitter things."
"Ah..."
She was sure that back when he was a boy, her father had simply given him black tea. This time it was milk tea. He looked unchanged, and still the differences were plainly there.
"Tea settles the mind and the body, and it eases stress. We should talk once you've unwound."
"Did... did it show that much?"
She had thought she wasn't all that nervous. Apparently he could see every bit of it.
A few swallows of the warm tea, and the stiffness in her body loosened a little.
"All right. Then let's hear this thing you were afraid to tell me."
"I..."
He hated a trailing sentence. If you had something to say, he wanted it set in order and said cleanly.
"I want to drop out of high school."
So she went straight at the point and played her hand.
The thought had been with her since she started streaming — no. Since the moment she understood she had become a girl, seventeen, four years younger. Why did she have to go to high school at all? She couldn't speak for anyone else. For her, school was nothing but wasted time.
"Drop out...?"
His face said he had not seen it coming at all. It was a look she rarely got from him, and today she seemed to be getting it often.
"Eunha. I don't know why you want to leave high school. Didn't you promise me? That you would at least earn the diploma."
Their first promise had been exactly that: a high school diploma.
He hated a broken promise more than almost anything. If she had still been his son and brought this up now, he might well have roared. But she had no intention of breaking it. She only meant to keep it another way.
"The reason you told me to get the diploma was so that if I quit streaming, I'd still be able to find another job. Wasn't it?"
Internet broadcasting was a place thick with variables, where no one could say who would rise and who would collapse. Someone nobody had cared about could catch fire overnight, and a broadcaster at the very top of their fame could be finished by morning. So he had wanted a way out left open, in case she failed.
He nodded without a word. Watching him, she set down the other plan she had been turning over.
"If I need the diploma, I'll take the equivalency exam and earn it that way."
If she tried to break the promise with nothing offered in its place, he would never allow it.
"The equivalency exam?"
"Yes. Honestly, commuting to high school is an enormous waste of time for me. And I don't think I have any talent for studying."
Then and now, she was bad at schoolwork. Open a book, sit at a desk, and she was asleep within ten minutes. There was a reason Kim Seungtaek had called him a brickhead.
"I think streaming in that time is more efficient."
"Hm..."
He turned it over. Even this much was already a real result.
"Can you promise me?"
"Promise?"
"That you will pass the equivalency exam. Can you?"
"...Yes!"
"Hah. Do as you wish about dropping out. Streaming is your business, strictly speaking. I can hardly interfere in it."
"Th-there's one more thing..."
He pressed his left fingertips into his temple, hard, twice. His eyes told her to go on, so she moved to the next point.
"I want to show my face."
This one, too, landed on him like a bomb.
"What?"
He was startled enough to rise halfway out of his chair.
"I cannot allow that. You promised me. That you would never reveal your face."
He was absolute. She looked at him, lifted a finger toward her own face, and answered.
"You just said you wouldn't interfere in my business. Showing my face would be a huge advantage for the stream."
Even a father who barely knew the streaming world could tell whether a face reveal would help her or hurt her.
"I hope it never comes to this. But if your stream does not go well, then when you choose another path, the fact that you showed your face could become an obstacle."
She had already thought about that. Whether she would truly take this road if that day came, she didn't know.
"If my stream dies — if it actually comes to that — then I'll become a pro gamer."
"What?"
After streaming, or maybe even more than streaming, it was the work that might fit her best. A pro gamer had to show their face. The worry simply went away.
"Hah... Eunha. Being a pro gamer is not something you become just because you want to. And besides... you're a girl."
He didn't finish the rest, but she could guess it well enough. He meant it would be hard to make it as a pro because of her gender.
"Several orgs have already sent love calls saying they want to sign me. They said that for me, they could even arrange the commute to the practice room and a private dorm."
"..."
"Coach Kim Sangho of SC, the org your company runs directly — he passed a scout offer to me quietly, through one of the players."
"Eunha..."
"Please allow it, Father. It's what I want. It's what I want to do."
Of course she still had no intention of going pro. She was saying it only to persuade him. The reason for bringing it up at all was to show that she was not betting everything on one unstable stream and walking a single road. There were other choices.
He breathed out, lowered the body he had half-raised, and sat back down. His index finger tapped the table. Once, twice, three times. She waited for whatever conclusion he would reach.
And the conclusion was the one she had wanted.
"Really?! Thank you, Father!"
The moment itself made her so happy that she ran to him and threw her arms around him before she knew she was moving.
"Haha. I would have liked it if you called me Dad... but you've grown too much for that now."
There was a faint sulk in his face. Under it, unmistakably, was pride.
"From now on I won't interfere much in your affairs. But if you need help, I'll give it whenever you ask. So be sure to tell me."
"Yes!"