The Bet
On the pistol round I took four kills. The round after that, Geonmo pushed out on an aggressive hold with a Judge and took four of his own.
The Judge is a shotgun that costs 1,850 credits, one of those unhinged guns with a full-auto fire mode to paper over the slow rate of fire that usually dogs a shotgun. Aim and loadout barely matter. Up close it sends someone back to the spawn in a single shot, and even at a bit of range it only takes three or four. That is why players are quicker to call both the people who pull a Judge and the weapon itself a crime than they are to call it by its name.
"Ahh— I love this!" GOandMO whooped.
"We're already at eight kills?"
"Right? God, I should just bankrupt today's mission donor."
In two rounds we had cleared more than a seventh of the kills the mission asked for. Keep this up, and a payday off the mission money looked very likely.
But things never go the way you want them to.
"What?! Why would they surrender!"
"Why surrender in competitive?"
In competitive, where your rating moves with the result, surrendering is the worst option there is. Every round after a surrender is scored as a forfeit, so give up at 5–0 and the board is written down as 13–0. On a ladder where points shift with the score and with each player's combat rating, a surrender is simply the choice that costs you the most.
Anyone actually trying to gain rating would grit their teeth, steal a few rounds, and protect whatever points they still had. I was trying to climb as fast as I could, so hitting surrender made no sense to me at all.
The viewers, apparently, saw it another way.
"Still, we won the first one clean. Straight into the next?"
"Yes."
We hadn't burned much energy, so we queued the next game right away.
But... wait. Huh?
"Hold on, Geonmo. Then our mission...?"
"Oh."
Through five rounds the kills stood at eleven for me and nine for Geonmo. Twenty in all. Four between the two of us every single round—an absurd number, and only possible because both of us had pushed out to hold forward.
"No way. We fail it like this?"
"This is ridiculous..."
On a mission where more kills only helped, we had overdone it so badly the other team just gave up. For a big mission with a serious payout riding on it, the ending felt pretty empty.
The mission was a failure, but the stream wasn't over, so we queued straight into the next game.
"If you've been playing since Project A's early days, that's since you were twelve?"
"Yes. I guess so?"
"Seriously, at that age I was on Bubble Fighter and Surprise Attack. Kids these days are all on Project A."
I'd played those same games at that age, actually. Geonmo was twenty-four. Before my body changed—back when I was a guy—we were only three years apart. Now that I was a girl, the gap was a full seven years. Definitely wide enough to earn a kids these days.
"You're on break right now, yeah? What do you do with it?"
"I just turn the stream on and play... Wow. Now that I think about it, that's my entire life."
Wake up, wash, eat, turn the stream on and play, eat again, wash, sleep. The same pattern, over and over. Thinking about it, it wasn't any different from how I'd lived as a pro.
If there was a difference, it was that nobody compared me anymore to monsters I had no business reaching for, and I didn't have to open hate comments and eat the stress. The life I had now, as a streamer—I was more than happy with it.
"Hey... so you don't go outside?"
Geonmo sounded a little incredulous. Fair enough. He'd always been the type to leave the house.
I wasn't.
"No. It's dangerous outside the blanket."
I didn't especially want to go out. Whatever I needed, I could ask the landlady, and she took care of nearly all of it. There was no reason for me to leave. More than anything, I just liked staying in my room and playing.
Even in my pro days, when the coach told me to at least go out for a walk, I let it in one ear and out the other more often than not. He never actually threw me out, either, when I holed up in the team house insisting I had to practice.
As for my health... Seungtaek, that jerk, used to drag me to the gym by force, so some of it got looked after. Pro gamers like us, stamina matters or whatever it was—he said if I didn't want to black out once a series went the full five maps, I should shut up and follow him, so I just did. Oh, and for the record, Seungtaek is Spax's real name. Kim Seungtaek.
"So you'll be starting high school soon? Did you end up at the same school as your friends?"
"No. I don't have any."
I'd suddenly become a high-school girl, so there wasn't a single friend I texted or met. To begin with, aside from family, there wasn't anyone's number saved in my phone.
"Oh. So you got split up from your friends?"
"? No. I just don't have friends."
In a way, that was lucky. If some stranger suddenly acted like they knew me, things would get very awkward.
"Ah... oh, sorry..."
"I... Eunha, I just... I think of it like this. What's so bad about not having friends? Plenty of people live on their own these days, and, you know... that's all I'm saying..."
Geonmo suddenly started stammering out an apology, and all I felt was thrown by the sudden shift.
"Why are you suddenly like this? You're making it awkward."
"N-never mind. Forget it..."
What was that. So lame. I wasn't at an age where not having friends could hurt me. Well—if I really were a seventeen-year-old high-school girl, maybe it would have been different.
"Wait, you actually like that...?"
"Why? What's wrong with mint choco?"
"N-never mind. Taste should be respected. Yeah."
While matchmaking kept spinning, Geonmo and I traded this and that. It had been pretty awkward at first, but talking like this, I felt us get a little closer. He was good at steering a conversation and good at looking out for the other person, so that was probably why it worked. We still weren't what we used to be, but it felt a little like an old bond coming back.
A hundred and fifty dollars to whoever gets more kills.
While I was sunk in old memories, a new mission came in.
"A hundred and fifty dollars to whoever gets more kills? Me and Eunha?"
A mission built to drive a wedge into a closeness we'd only just managed.
"Eh."
"Okay, we'll do it. Seeing you up close, Eunha, you do look pretty nasty, but I can still win."
"Then I'll do it too."
The money was money, but I wasn't the sort to duck a bet like this.
"Okay, accepting the mission. Huh? Open a betting pool? God, these people, at it again."
Kwitch has something viewers call a gambling hall. The official name is the prediction system. Simple enough: viewers stake channel points on whether a proposition the streamer sets is true or false.
Say the streamer opens a prediction on first place this game. Viewers split into yes and no and put channel points on it. The payout is set by how many points land on each side, and whoever calls it right collects according to the odds.
Once a streamer has a solid enough core of regulars, just turning the prediction system on is enough to manufacture content.
"It's open, it's open. Wait, seventy–thirty...? You guys aren't selling Eunha way too short?"
Well. They weren't wrong to.
Geonmo's time as a pro had been short, half a year, but he was still ex-pro, someone who had played the game at a pro level. Even if I'd shown off with flashy Chamber plays last game, the name Galaxy was gone now. To them, I was nothing more than a halfway decent amateur who hadn't quite left that tier.
The mission had barely locked in when, with perfect timing, a game popped.
"Ascent? Ugh, Ascent is so boring."
"It does feel like it's been coming up a lot lately."
With a kill bet on the line, Geonmo locked Raze, the easier agent for farming kills.
"Hmm. What do I play..."
Even just for the bet, I wanted someone who made kills easy.
Everyone on our team except me had already locked an agent. Smokes, info, and a sentinel were all filled out evenly, so it hardly mattered what I picked. The comp wasn't going to fall apart.
While I was weighing whether to take entry or play initiator, Geonmo made an offer.
"A kill bet by itself is boring. Eunha, want to make another bet?"
"A bet?"
I said it in a voice full of unease. He was bringing it up the way an older friend talks to a younger teammate he'd been pretty close with, and once he opened his mouth like that, there was no way the bet that followed would be anything ordinary.
"If I win, how about you call me oppa?"
Just as I thought. This damn guy pulled a bet I never would have imagined.
"What??"
What was he even saying?
"I'm not crossing a line, guys. I talk casual and Eunha keeps it all formal, so it looks awkward. I'm just trying to loosen that up~"
I was about to turn him down like it was nothing, but too many people were waiting to hear me say oppa. Too many voices were already in on it for me to just bail, so I had no choice but to take the bet.
"Fine. But if I win, you call me oppa."
I wasn't about to be the only one holding the risk.
"Huh? Not noona?"
Right. I was a girl now.
"Ah, I got mixed up. Anyway, if I win, you call me noona."
The risk of having to use an honorific for a kid seven years younger than him. It had to be at least that, or it wasn't fair.
"Okay, you're on. Everyone, I will now present to you the sound of oppa coming out of a seventeen-year-old high-school girl's mouth."
I hadn't meant to get invested in the bet, but now I had a reason I absolutely could not lose. Maybe in front of family. Saying oppa in front of this many people, though—for someone barely a month into being a girl—was far too hard.
This bet—I was winning it. No matter what.