The Future Is Future Me's Problem

While I had my brother handle the lawsuit against Cries, I didn't go live a single time. The legal mess still wasn't finished, and I didn't know the first thing about the law. If I slipped up on stream, I'd only be making trouble for him.

Fortunately, it wrapped up fast. Three days later, I turned the broadcast back on.

I'd been off for a couple of days, so the viewer count ought to have dipped a little. A shame, but it couldn't be helped. I could always grow it back.

I put on a song that wouldn't trip a copyright claim and headed for the kitchen to get some water. After going live, I liked to leave three to five minutes as a warm-up anyway. It took about three minutes to fill a tumbler with honey water and get back to my room. The house was pointlessly enormous, so even that ate up time.

I put my earphones in, glanced at chat, and offered a hello.

"Hello, everyone... huh?"

Normally a wait like that gathered four or five hundred people. I'd vanished two days running without a single notice, so it should have been fewer than that.

Uh... the count was supposed to go down.

Were my eyes broken?

No matter how good a day it was, I had never cleared seven hundred. Five minutes after I went live, I'd blown straight past a thousand.

"Uh... we suddenly have a lot of people?"

At five hundred, even at seven hundred, I could still read chat. Now it was racing upward too fast to follow. While I flailed in that wave of messages, a single donation landed.

Are you all right. I wasn't so dense I couldn't tell what they meant.

"Yes, I'm fine. The reason I couldn't stream over the weekend is that I was getting the lawsuit ready."

Chat filled with every kind of reaction—justice served, good for you, worry over my mental, are you sure you're really okay.

"Huh?"

"Why would KZ apologize to me?"

Chat caught fire at my reaction, and I just sat there, stunned. Why on earth would KZ apologize to me?

I found out immediately.

KZ Cries. Lee Hoyeong. The one I'd sued—the one who had thrown insults at me, family slurs, even a death threat. If I hadn't had a mental tempered by four years of pro play, those were the kind of words that could have done real damage. And that guy was with the KZ Academy?

The KZ in front of his name—he'd been wearing it because he actually belonged to KZ?

"That person was really with KZ?"

"...One second."

I figured I ought to check, so I opened the community on my phone. Doing it on the streaming computer felt—how to put it—a little too close to the shady side of the internet. Enough of the people watching had come over from there that my broadcast was already the topic of the hour.

I opened the main post at the center of all that bait, and a few titles jumped out at once.

I read them as fast as I could, so the stream wouldn't go slack.

"He really was a KZ trainee..."

I'd spent about a year as a KZ Academy trainee myself. And aside from a handful of talented kids, that academy was a place that basically left the rest of them to rot.

"It's all right, Coach. Still, please manage them so there isn't another victim besides me."

"All right. Take care~"

I didn't have many good memories of the academy, and I didn't want to get tangled up with it any further than this.

"Mm... should we just play?"

Row while the tide is in—wasn't that the saying? If I meant to grow the channel, then now, with this controversy having doubled the people pouring in, I had to keep them here. The way to do that was obvious.

The greatest weapon on my stream was, as ever, an overwhelming skill at the game.

...Or was it?

"Whew. That's five in a row."

"Oh, I don't know about that. Thanks for the compliment, though."

In truth, eating and playing Project A was exactly all I'd been doing.

"At this pace I'll hit Master within the week."

I was Diamond 2, ninety points. Across the weekend and today—three days in all—I'd climbed from Diamond 1 to the doorstep of Diamond 3.

"I'll hit Diamond 3 today, then I'm ending the stream."

I had no intention of stopping right before a promo, so I went to queue, meaning to stamp Diamond 3 cleanly and go to sleep. I was about to click.

"Eek! You scared me!"

If not for the hosting alert that had burst in out of nowhere.

I'd turned the donation sound down in the settings, but this was the first host I'd ever taken on stream, and I hadn't gotten around to lowering that one.

"Uh... thank you for the host, GOandMO... huh?"

...GOandMO?

"Uh... thank you for watching...?"

No way. Geonmo?

"That's all for today. Eunba~"

"Oh, right. I had one announcement. I don't think I'll be co-streaming PCT LOCK//IN anymore."

"The matches run so deep into the morning that waking up has been brutal."

"Okay, I'm really going. Good night, everyone~"

I hit the end-stream button, stretched lightly, and rolled the stiffness out of my shoulders.

"Nnnnngh...!"

My old coach used to say a pro gamer's lower back was their life, and he'd drilled the habit into me until I did it whether anyone told me to or not.

"Hnngh... haah. That's better."

Of course, I mostly stopped doing it on stream—after the one time I stretched with the mic hot and chat went up in flames asking what that sound was. Something about it sounding weird. I still don't really get it.

"Anyway, what am I supposed to do about this..."

I'd hit Diamond 3 and signed off, and one new worry had landed on me.

A collab request, sent straight from the streamer himself. GOandMO.

Geonmo was a major player in the overcrowded sea of Project A streaming. A collab offer from someone like that? It was a perfect chance for the channel to explode, and a chance to show my skill to far more people. The kind of collab you cling to and beg for, if that's what it takes.

"I'm not about to put my foot in my mouth, am I...?"

Because in the past—back when I was Choi Eunha, the boy born in 2003—I already knew Geonmo. Close enough to grab a meal now and then. An older brother, and the kid who tagged along after him. That was the two of us.

But as Choi Eunha, the girl born in 2007, I had never met him in my life. Today we'd only just said hello, and only because he'd hosted me. If I acted familiar in a situation like that, or brought up something strange and killed the mood outright, I would sink a channel that was only just starting to grow.

"Ugh, damn it. I need to think this through!"

I shut the computer off and dove straight into bed.

He'd said I only had to answer by tomorrow, so I could afford to worry a little longer. I'd always shoved problems like this off until later.

The future... the me of the future will take responsibility for it.