Face Reveal, in the Flesh

Streamer Eunha had debuted in January of this year and, in the short span of half a year, shot up into a major name.

Riding that rise, she entered the exhibition—an event you could join only by catching both rabbits at once, skill and recognition—then took Finals MVP and won the whole thing. She did not stop there. The Newbie Guide, which had only ever featured pros at the very top, booked her under the honorable title of master of Jett, the most popular agent in the game.

If there had been an award for the streamer who lit up the year, its winner would have been Eunha, no argument.

But whenever someone is doing well, envy always finds a way to show up.

For someone who had succeeded as young as Eunha, that jealousy came out especially ugly. And because the rise had been so sudden, she had not been spotless either. Like every other broadcaster, she had weathered controversies large and small: hounded alongside Yangjeon in the smurfing scandal, branded a booster, and, most recently, leaking the fact of her own embargoed Newbie Guide appearance.

With the Newbie Guide, interest usually dropped the moment a guest's identity leaked—lower than it had been before the leak. The whole engine of attention had always worked the same way: reveal only the agent, keep the guest hidden, and make people wonder who it would be.

In the middle of the chaos, a single viewer's donation blew Eunha's booking. The substitute the Newbie Guide and streamer Eunha's side offered in its place was this.

It was the old story of Eunha's face, the one that had once set every broadcast community on fire.

Eunha's face would never, under ordinary circumstances, have burned this hot. Faceless streamers like her—so-called Durahans—already existed in droves, and nobody had any right to scold them simply for keeping their faces hidden. As time passed, talk of her face had been fading the way it did for every other Durahan, and if things had stayed on that track the bait would have been buried in no time.

But.

Unfortunately for Eunha, a few offhand remarks—from a streamer who had been at the exhibition afterparty, and from a staffer at Wall-X Galbi, where the party was held—dragged her face back into the light, and the interest caught all over again. Worse, both of them, while describing her, named Yoon Hayeon, the famous actress now retired. That alone was enough to pull in crowds who had never cared about Eunha at all.

Yoon Hayeon: a Korean actress loved by countless people for ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠extraordinary acting and perfect looks. On appearance especially, the praise had piled up until people were calling her a beauty that might come along once in a thousand years, if even then. That was Yoon Hayeon.

So interest in Eunha's face had no choice but to heat up fast. It was not one person saying she resembled Yoon Hayeon. It was two. One of them was a fellow streamer, so maybe the praise was padded with exaggeration. The other was an ordinary person, plain and simple, and dismissing someone who had even verified that they worked there was a hard sell.

In the end, the bait showed no sign of being resolved. The simplest and surest fix was for Eunha to show her face, and she looked as if she had no intention of doing any such thing. Time would settle it, but that time crawled. Right then the communities were nothing, day after day, but talk of Eunha's face.

And then, for those people, news arrived like rain in a drought. On Rioat Korea's official K-tube, the upload waiting was the Project A Newbie Agent Guide: the Jett episode. The preview promised that Eunha, booked as the guest, would reveal her face for the first time.

People only half believed it, and still they waited for nothing but the upload, just to see whether Eunha's face was really in the video.

Sixteen hours felt endlessly long, and it was a long time in truth. But time does what time does. It passes.

The viewers who had endured that bitterly slow countdown, a stretch of time that felt like an eon, hit play the instant the sixteen-hour dial ran out.

"Hello, everyone! I'll be with you for the 2023 Project A Newbie Guide, the Jett episode. I'm caster Hwang Gihun. Good to see you!"

Anyone who watched Project A pro matches knew that voice. Hwang Gihun appeared, and the video began.

The set was nothing more than the PCK arena with the lights turned a little brighter, two tables and three chairs placed in the middle. It might have felt cheap, except the arena itself was a building so recently raised that it did not look cheap at all.

"Hello. I'm caster Hwang Gihun, and I'll be with you for the 2023 Project A Newbie Guide, the Jett episode. Everyone, hello!"

The moment the video started, viewers were already hunting for Eunha. Then, beside Hwang Gihun, a woman came into view.

"Hello! I'm Choi Hyeonju. I host interviews for PCK, and I'll be co-hosting this Newbie Guide with caster Hwang Gihun!"

The woman was PCK interviewer Choi Hyeonju. Not Eunha.

"This is only my personal guess, but I think a lot of the Project A fans watching right now are pretty angry."

"Angry? Why?"

"Because we still haven't shown the guest's face, the thing they're most curious about, and we're just talking among ourselves!"

Just as host Hwang Gihun said, what mattered most to the viewers right now was not some guide for new players. It was Eunha in the flesh. The point of the video was obviously a guide, but what could you do? All the attention had already been dragged onto the face reveal and nothing else.

"In this guide we'll be teaching you Jett again, the entry agent with the biggest following in Project A. Hyeonju, do you play Project A?"

"Of course I do."

"And your rank would be...?"

"I'm Bronze!"

"Then young Hyeonju won't do. I'm only about Gold myself, and it's not as if I can be the one on camera demonstrating this."

"In that case, we should invite a guest to teach Jett in our place, shouldn't we? Someone all of you already know. Meet her now—streamer Eunha!"

The camera that had been on Hwang Gihun and Choi Hyeonju swung over to the table beside them. A woman was sitting there.

"Ah. Hello."

The voice was cool, almost cold, and at the same time the nerves in it were impossible to miss. It matched, exactly, the voice everyone already knew as Eunha's.

"Ah, thank you for making the trip, Eunha! This is the first time since the exhibition, isn't it?"

"Uh... yes, that's right."

Eunha herself—the real thing—was fully in the camera now. The reaction, though, was nothing but cold.

"And what's with the mask? Is that a fox?"

The real Eunha they had expected to see was hidden behind a white fox mask.

"Ah, I still haven't revealed my face... I don't really know why, but my nickname is Fox, so I brought a fox mask."

The chat was already furious. Inside the recorded video, Hwang Gihun, Choi Hyeonju, and Eunha went on talking, but none of that mattered to the people watching. What they had wanted was Eunha's actual face, not a Jett guide.

The video kept rolling. The guests' introductions ended, and they moved into the agent guide, the Newbie Guide's real content.

"All right, then let's get into the agent lecture for real!"

"Do I do it from here?"

"Yes. You brought your own mouse and keyboard, right?"

"Yes, of course."

Two minutes into a twenty-five-minute video, and Eunha was still wearing the mask.

Most of the viewers who had come to see Eunha's face switched the video off in disappointment. What remained were her fans, and the people who had actually come for a Jett guide. Her fans, especially, were content just to see her in person, even with a mask on. Since the roulette penalty, she had never once run a cam broadcast.

And to the viewers watching in that modest satisfaction, Eunha dropped a bomb.

"Ah, I can't really see out of this... I'm just going to take the mask off."

Take the mask off? Now?

The viewers doubted their own ears. If she took the mask off, then the bare face she had hidden all this time would be out in the open.

"W-wait, is that all right? You said you weren't revealing your face..."

Maybe there was another mask under the fox mask. That was what the viewers told themselves. It had to be. Otherwise this situation, right now, did not make any sense.

Before the viewers could even catch up to what was happening, Eunha yanked the fox mask off in one motion.

Hair spilled loose, and beneath it was Eunha's bare face.

And that bare face was—

It was more than enough to send them into a frenzy.