The Rest Stream Ends (Just Chatting)
As she had arranged with Rioat Korea, Eunha decided to reveal her face in this Newbie Guide.
She had already talked her father down from opposing it, and her viewers had always been curious what she looked like. Her own slip was what had leaked the news of her appearance in the first place, and the reveal was also meant to soften the damage that leak would do to Rioat Korea.
Even so, Eunha had one wish. If her face was going public, she wanted her fans to see it first.
So she asked the director for help.
"Then how about something like this?"
The director offered her a single clever trick: film with her face covered, then take the mask off partway through. Anyone who wasn't already her fan would see the mask at the start and, for the most part, stop the video there. Her fans would watch it all the way to the end.
Just as Eunha had intended, most of the people watching the video now were her own fans.
On the screen was a woman who looked far too mature to be seventeen—cold, expressionless, and beautiful to an almost unreasonable degree. Viewers felt a sharp disconnect from the real thing. The Eunha they had pictured all this time was a bubbly, slightly airheaded high-school girl. Fellow streamers and shop clerks had already let slip that she was good-looking, but no one had imagined she would come off this cold.
In the video, Eunha turned her head and looked straight into the lens.
And then—
"Hehe."
She broke into a clear, bright smile that had nothing at all to do with that cold, haughty face.
Smile and all, the Eunha on screen gazed steadily into the camera. The look in her eyes might as well have been asking, So? What do you think, now that you're seeing it yourself? If this hadn't been a recording and had been one of her actual streams, she would certainly have said it out loud. The viewers were sure of that. If it was Eunha, that was exactly what she would do.
As if she knew her own viewers would think precisely that, she answered them.
One eye. A single, clean wink.
Honestly, Eunha's appearance hadn't made the Newbie Guide dramatically better.
Most of the guests on the Newbie Guide were pro gamers, and Eunha, this time's guest, wasn't a pro—but she was the same kind of person. In the world of the pros, where even the top one percent of talent gets eaten alive, understanding ordinary people is close to impossible.
"If they push up like this, you just Updraft and Tailwind to open the angle."
"Huh? Do what, exactly?"
Being a genius in a field doesn't mean you can teach it, and Eunha was no exception. More precisely, she had no talent for teaching at all. Every explanation was a cliché, and she was walking someone who didn't even understand how the skills worked through an advanced course. If you remembered that the video was supposed to be a guide, there was no denying it was a complete flop.
"Just like this. If you only do this, it's easier for your team to trade."
"Th-that's not—you don't do it like that... Ah, how am I supposed to explain this?"
Right. If only the guest hadn't been Eunha.
If the video had truly flopped, they would never have uploaded a recording like that to K-tube as it was. So why had Rioat Korea put up a video that failed the whole point of being a guide?
"Whoa... you actually saw that just now?"
"Yes. If you want to take someone with an Operator at a pro level, this kind of reaction speed is the baseline."
"What? But you aren't a pro gamer..."
"Ah—I mean—! At a pro level. I'm obviously not a pro."
Because the video was simply that good.
Choi Hyeonju, an interviewer already adored by PCK fans for her looks alone, and beside her the streamer Eunha, whose face sat at roughly the level of Yoon Hayeon in her younger days. Project A had too many women playing it to ignore, but in the end most of the users were men. A video starring a beautiful woman was bound to guarantee a certain number of views.
"Whoa, that swing peek is actually insane..."
"If the agent still alive has a flash, you move while always keeping in mind that a flash could come at any moment. Then it's easier to react."
"In a one-on-one I get so nervous I can't think that deeply..."
"Mm... I was like that at first too. Spend a whole year getting yelled at to actually think while you play, and it gets fixed."
"What?"
"Ah, no. That was a joke."
And it didn't stop at the faces. The in-game footage showed play as flashy as a pro's—no, flashier—and gave the viewers a feast for the eyes. How could Rioat have thrown this video away?
Perfect looks and a cold impression, and, opposite to both, a personality full of openings and a scattered air. But when it came to the game, something close to perfect. The video was packed with that particular charm of Eunha's, and it wasn't something you could discard just because the teaching was thin.
In the end, that was why Rioat uploaded it as it was. And that upload became the best move Rioat had made.
A single day after it went up, the views hit a million. A massive hit.
It was the day right after the Newbie Guide shoot. The video itself had gone up that same evening, as if the editor had burned through a lifetime the moment filming wrapped.
If I went live now, people would come flooding in. That was the thought in my head as I hovered the cursor over the Go Live button. I had never once taken a rest stream; I had broadcast every single day. Today was the day a three-day break ended, and I was turning the stream on for the first time in a while.
"Mm... ah, I left the tumbler again."
I usually ate breakfast and then went live, so I always filled a tumbler with water in the kitchen and brought it up. Now and then I left it behind, and from the look of the empty desk, today was one of those days. Viewers wouldn't have gathered yet anyway, and the room needed a little warming up, so I put on a song that wouldn't trip a copyright claim and headed down to the kitchen.
But Eunha didn't know.
That the bait from the Newbie Guide had drawn people in a little. No. That it had drawn them in hard.