Filming Begins! (Reality)
A fairly stylish studio apartment, a little over two hundred and fifty square feet.
Inside it lived a man in his thirties who still hadn't gotten up, long after the clock had swung past noon.
"Kuuuh... kuh..."
On a weekday afternoon when everyone else had already gone to work, the man sleeping in as sweetly as honey was none other than Yoo Seonho.
He had once been a pro in CS:GO, an FPS that never quite caught fire at home but had been the biggest game in the world overseas. These days he was head coach of KZ, the most popular esports team in Korea, and even now, pushing the end of his thirties, he was an unmarried man who had never managed to start a family.
Not that he particularly felt lonely. There was simply too much that needed doing, and once he was in the middle of it the hours slipped past before he noticed. He never even had a spare moment in which to feel alone.
On an ordinary day he would have been at the office long since, but a sudden bout of flu had forced him into a half-mandatory rest. The rest of KZ's coaches had physically barred him from coming in, telling him to lie down if he was sick, and so he had no choice but to sleep at home.
Yoo Seonho was dead to the world, snoring through his nose.
Bzzzt— bzzzt— bzzzt—
Someone, however, had come to ruin that sleep.
"Nnngh... kuh... ugh... who is it..."
The caller was none other than his subordinate, KZ coach Yoon Jaeha.
"Hello..."
"Yes, Coach, it's Jaeha. Are you feeling any better?"
"Ah... yeah. I'm fine..."
"Right. The thing is, the person you mentioned has just arrived."
"The person I mentioned...?"
"You said it yesterday. That a broadcaster KZ invited would be coming by today..."
Ah. So that was who he meant.
"Miss Eunha...?"
"Yes, yes. She's here, and we're about to start filming. Should we go ahead exactly the way you said?"
"Yeah... handle it for me. Miss Eunha's still a minor, so walk her through the contract properly."
"Yes, sir. Don't you worry."
"Mm..."
Beep.
"Haaahm... Now I'm wide awake."
Once the call with Coach Yoon Jaeha ended, Yoo Seonho kicked the blanket aside, got up, and started a light stretch.
Bzzzt— bzzzt—
Unfortunately, the stretch didn't survive the ringtone either.
"Damn it. Ahem. Ahem."
Was it Coach Jaeha again? Yoo loosened his throat and lifted the phone.
The call was from someone he hadn't expected in the slightest.
"...What?"
A wrong number? There was no world in which that guy called him first.
"...Hello."
Even so, if he'd gone out of his way to call, there had to be a reason. Yoo answered.
"You got a minute?"
No hello. Straight to the point the instant the line connected. Yoo spent a brief moment wondering what he was supposed to do with an attitude like that, and then—
"What."
This guy was always like this... He decided to let it go.
"Got something to say."
Something to say. Yoo Seonho and the man on the other end, Kim Sangho, were not ordinary friends. You would have to start by asking whether they could be called friends at all. Put the question to either of them—is the other one your friend?—and both would recoil and say no.
"What kind of something."
"I want some advice."
The two of them had been rivals since CS:GO. After the mainstream of FPS shifted from CS:GO to Project A, and after both of them left the server for the coach's chair, the rivalry had simply followed them there. Unlike their playing days, when it had been hard to say which of them was better, the contest between coaches had been Yoo Seonho's landslide.
"Didn't think I'd ever be the one saying this... I really don't know what I'm supposed to do."
"...I'll send you the address. Come here."
They say even loathing turns into a kind of attachment. Faced with that proud Kim Sangho coming to him like this, Yoo found it difficult to refuse him outright.
"Yeah."
"For the record, I'm sick, so bring food when you come. Something good for the body—"
Beep.
"...What? He hung up?"
While Eunha was looking over KZ's headquarters with Foxy as her guide, three people were talking in the meeting room on the first floor.
"So, Mr. Kwon Seongwook, you're Miss Eunha's bodyguard?"
The three were KZ's Coach Yoon Jaeha, manager Han Seoeun, and Kwon Seongwook, Eunha's driver and bodyguard. At a glance they were a combination that didn't belong in the same room. If not for Eunha, they might well have gone their whole lives without ever meeting.
"I only double as security. Officially, I'm nothing but a driver."
"Oh..."
"A bodyguard who looks after the young lady. That's kind of cool."
The topic happened to land with all three of them, and the conversation ran on without a hitch.
"How much would a person have to work out to get a body like yours?"
"That's a secret."
"How many hours a day do you train?"
"That's a secret."
"..."
"I'm joking. Two or three hours a day, kept up steadily, is enough."
The talk only lasted so long. Driver Kwon glanced at the watch on his left wrist, then carefully got to his feet.
"Are you heading to the restroom?"
"No. The young lady still hasn't come down. Something must have happened."
The reason was simple. Choi Eunha, the person he was meant to protect, had not come back.
On any ordinary day his place was at her side, watching her and bracing for whatever might go wrong. But—
"I'll come with you."
"Oh, come on. They said there's CCTV on every floor. Nothing's going to happen."
"Even so—"
"I'll be right back. Have some coffee and rest here, okay?"
She had refused him so firmly that, for now, he was apart from her.
At times like this Driver Kwon did feel a little hurt by Eunha. He understood the feeling, though, so he let it pass. She was only seventeen. To her, he—his very presence—might register less as a bodyguard and more as someone sent to watch her. She must never be hurt. He also didn't want to become a nuisance in her eyes, and so this once he had let her move as she pleased.
He would never have allowed it outdoors. This, at least, was inside a building that looked reasonably secure, and she had been so certain that the place had to be trustworthy.
What Driver Kwon did not realize was something else.
"...Hasn't it only been fifteen minutes?"
He was overprotecting Eunha every bit as much as Chairman Choi, his old university senior and the man who employed him.
"Even so, fifteen minutes is more than enough to look the whole place over. It's strange she still isn't back."
"...Four floors above ground, three below, seven in all, and you want that done in fifteen minutes...?"
"Even so, something's off. I'll go look."
Han Seoeun and Yoon Jaeha tried to stop him, insisting Eunha would be down any moment, but the man was far too rigid for that.
"Wait! Do you even know where she is?"
"If I start from the lower floors, I can find—"
Driver Kwon was just about to head upstairs after her when—
"I'm here. Am I very late?"
The girl he had been waiting on so anxiously came back.
"Ah, hang on! Nuna, let's go down together!"
"N-nuna?"
"...Jaeseong?"
And with her was Jaeseong, using a form of address that didn't fit in the slightest.
The moment I came down from the practice room and stepped back into the meeting room, the first thing I did was explain Jaeseong's nuna.
"You made a bet?"
"...Yeah."
God. This idiot.
I hadn't thought he would just blurt nuna out in front of people. If I'd known, I would have made the title something we only used when it was the two of us. We'd kept the one-on-one itself a secret, so I'd assumed the penalty would stay a secret too. Watching him call me nuna in front of everyone without a second thought, I couldn't help pressing a hand to my forehead.
"I... I see."
Jaeseong said so, and I said so, and Coach Jaeha simply let it pass. He already knew that thinking too long about anything involving Jaeseong only cost him.
"Did you get a good look around the building?"
"Yeah. Jaeseong showed me around fine."
The bet was already out, so there was no point keeping up the polite speech with him. Everyone else only knew we'd made a bet. They didn't know it had been a Project A one-versus-one, right?
"That's a relief. Then when were you planning to start filming? Coming all the way to us like this..."
The domestic league season was over, and Masters was still ahead. For KZ's staff, the stretch in between was as good as a short vacation. KZ might have been the ones who invited me, but I still couldn't keep them from clocking out on time.
"Right. I was going to start right away."
I already knew the layout of the building. No reason to drag it out. I decided to start filming.
Before the shoot, KZ handed me a camera so the filming would go smoothly. At a glance the thing looked like a long remote. They said it was the sort of camera influencers often used for vlogs.
The left button records. Press it again and the recording stops. The right button switches the screen...
So the little device sitting on top of the stick was the camera.
"Hmm... this is kind of hard."
"Then shall I hold the camera for you?"
I wasn't entirely unused to a shoot like this. I had been a pro under KZ, once. Back then, though, I had only ever been talent or a guest. I had never actually run the filming myself.
"No. I should do this part."
Even so, maybe it was the half year I'd spent as a streamer, or shoots like the Newbie Guide. I wasn't particularly nervous.
"Th-then... we start?"
...Probably?
"Why are you shaking like that?"
"I meeean... what do people usually do when they start recording...?"
Now that I thought about it, that was fair. I had streamed nearly every single day for half a year, and I had never once recorded my own broadcast. Unlike most other broadcasters, I didn't run a K-tube at all, and with no K-tube there had never been a reason to save the footage. A live show was one thing. I still had no real idea how you were supposed to begin when you were recording a video.
"Huh?? If you don't know that, nuna, then what are we supposed to do?"
Th-that's...
"I've never done anything like this. You watch K-tube videos all the time, don't you?"
"Well, I mean, yeah, but..."
"Then help me a little."
Jaeseong stared at me like he was looking at some impossible species of person.
Oh, come on. You want this over fast too. So help.
"If you watch K-tube videos, they all say pretty much the same thing at the start."
"Subscribe and like? That kind of thing?"
"No, not that... what do they call it... a hello? Introducing yourself? Something like that."
Hmm. A self-introduction.
Now that he mentioned it...
Every K-tube video I had watched until now had started just like that.
"Okay. I know what to do."
This wasn't a livestream. It was a video that would go up on K-tube, so all I had to do was match the feel of the ones already there.
"So we're starting the shoot right now?"
"Yeah. On three. One, two... three."
Beep.
I worked the button, started the recording, and checked that the video was actually taking.
"Hello, I'm Eunha, a streamer who broadcasts on Kwitch."
I fired off the opening I'd lined up in advance. Once I knew how the first button had to be fastened, everything after felt absurdly easy. It was simple. K-tube was full of vlogs. All I had to do was follow them.
"Today, I have been so incredibly honored as to be invited to KZ's headquarters!"
Clap. Clap. Clap.
Nice applause, Jaeseong.
"It's my first time here too, so I don't really know how the place is laid out, and I've brought one special guest to introduce the building for me. Come on out and introduce yourself!"
"Hello. I'm Park Jaeseong, FOXY, KZ's main entry."
"Great to meet you. Then shall we really start exploring the building, with Player Foxy as our guide?"
And with that, filming officially began on streamer Eunha's tour of KZ, the video that would go up on KZ's K-tube.