I'm Sorry (Just Chatting)
Among players at the very top, Nebula had long been famous for an image of cool, untouchable distance: a user who never sent the first friend request, and never asked anyone to duo first. He kept his mystery so complete that nothing was known about him beyond the fact that he was a seventeen-year-old guy. That was Nebula.
And now that same aloof Nebula had sent a duo request to me. Not to some giant-platform streamer or a famous pro, but to a rookie who had debuted all of two months ago.
Setting that aside—
"...How does Nebula even know I'm a streamer?"
Figures.
I'd set my nickname so anyone who wasn't a friend couldn't see it, which was why it threw me when Nebula called me Eunha. More than that, though—a duo request. To me.
Why?
Back when I was KZ Galaxy, one of the best pro gamers in Korea, that prissy Nebula had never once sent me a friend request first. And the me of now was a rookie streamer who had only been making a name for herself for about two months—a player who had just barely hit Immortal a few days ago. However good I'd looked last game, that alone shouldn't have been enough to catch his eye.
Honestly, I couldn't read what he wanted, coming at me like this.
If that was all it was, well, I could understand. I had no idea why Nebula was entering the Platform Exhibition in the first place, but he sounded serious enough.
A substitute in the Platform Exhibition was someone held in reserve to fill a hole if a starter couldn't make it for reasons beyond their control. In practice, nothing but a backup. Once the roster locked, it was two weeks to the first match if things ran short, three if they ran long, and that was barely enough time for the starters to find their chemistry. When the substitute spot had been offered to me, honestly—
Well, he wasn't entirely wrong. If even one of the players offered a starting berth turned it down, I was next in line, and the starting spot would be mine. But the Platform Exhibition was a tempting event, one that paid a streamer handsomely just for taking part.
Duoing with Nebula, I could honestly promise something close to a ninety percent win rate. If I'd been alone last game, I would have lost in humiliating fashion, and my ranked win rate since hitting Immortal would already have sunk below fifty. Having even one teammate you can trust makes a pretty big difference.
The request looked extremely appealing. Unfortunately, what came out of my mouth was a no.
Judging by the fact that he was still gaming into the dawn, Nebula had apparently dropped out. I hadn't. I had to be up at seven-thirty tomorrow morning, wash, and get myself to school.
Not having to show up for class at all... I envied him.
"Haa... I wanted to at least win the last one. Nothing ever goes the way I want."
I didn't want to blame the team, but lately there had been far too many games where the gap between the enemy and my own side felt enormous. We were all wearing Immortal, and still plenty of people looked a full rank or two apart.
Immortal—the tier sitting just beneath the very top of the ladder—was in complete chaos. The cause was almost certainly the players migrating in from the Asia server, and I didn't have much to say about that. I was one of those so-called invasive species myself.
I felt bad for the Immortals who had always been on the Korean server, but they had no right to pin it on the Asia crowd. In a game where you test skill against skill, it was perfectly normal for someone who had fallen behind to yield their seat to someone new.
The problem was that the only people due to fall behind were the ones I kept finding on my team. Hadn't the very first match today already been a disaster? The one mercy was the Jett I'd been matched with—skilled enough that I'd been spared a team diff right out of the gate.
"That's all for today, then. Everyone have a good one."
Fifty-five viewers. It was the small hours, so a few of those fifty were probably asleep already—calling it fifty-five was generous. Even so, I offered a kind word to the people who had stayed up this late, ended the stream, and opened the friend-message window I'd closed earlier.
The first duo request of my life. The moment I sent it to Eunha, people reacted as if some natural disaster had struck. Everyone loved to go on about mystery and aloof pride, but the truth was I'd simply never felt the need to send a friend request or a duo invite first. When I desperately needed a teammate I could trust, the way I did now, I did reach out first.
Turned down, of course. She was a seventeen-year-old high schooler, the same age as me. That message would have come in at eleven. Unlike me—asleep through the day and gaming at night, my schedule flipped inside out—she needed a full night's sleep if she was going to make it to school tomorrow. Even so, I wasn't all that disappointed. It hadn't been a flat refusal.
A collab that had come together before I quite knew it. Part of it was syncing up for the exhibition. What mattered more was a collab to claw my way out of this hellish stretch of the ladder as fast as I could.
It's whether Eunha's a sub or not. Yeah.
If she's a sub, fuck it, I'm just not watching the exhibition.
They're fielding last year's best five as-is, and every single one of our roster from last year is sitting out lol
Rec this if you think Kwitch is just fucked for this year's exhibition lol
Two weeks went by faster than I'd expected. Maybe it felt that way because I was living the same monotonous pattern, day after day.
From where I stood, those two weeks had flown. The people watching broadcasts online seemed to feel differently. Today, after all, was finally the day the Platform Exhibition rosters and schedule would be announced.
The two giants of internet broadcasting, Kwitch and AFS, were simulcasting, and of course I had the Kwitch feed on. I slipped in at three-twenty with ten minutes still left on the countdown and killed the time in idle chat with the viewers.
When those ten minutes were up, a rather splendid tournament hall filled the screen, and with it a face that had already passed into memory.
Caster Jeon Seongjun, the man they called the father of esports. After Legend of League collapsed he had chosen to rest, but it seemed he had come out for a brief event, just for today. Kwitch and AFS had prepared a surprise gift behind their viewers' backs.
"Wow... it's been a really long time since I actually saw Lord Seongjun's face."
The broadcasters' faces rose onto the screen one after another. The introductions for NPT and KKT finished, leaving only Kwitch—the platform with the most titles in history—and AFS, picked as this exhibition's number-one favorite.
"Seriously, though. When is this guy getting here?"
We'd said two-thirty. It was three-thirty, and he still wasn't here. Even granting Korean time—the national habit of showing up late—an hour was pushing it.
Speak of the devil. The latecomer popped into the Discord channel.
"Behold. I have arrived."
"Late! You're late! Grand entrance, my ass—what were you doing that took this long?"
"Ah, sorry, sorry. Something came up."
The latecomer was Nebula, who I'd gotten pretty close to over the past two weeks.