Time Flows Like Water
Time flowed on like a river.
"Hold it!! Hold it even if it kills you, please!!!"
Curry's desperate, raw scream filled the quiet room. If you'd been listening through earphones, the decibels would have been enough to damage your eardrums. With two million won on the line, Curry threw himself into the game with a desperation he'd never shown before.
But in the end, Curry failed to protect the nexus. Just like that, as it fell, he lost his two million won along with it.
"AAAAAARGH!!"
Crash-bang-thud—!!
He hurled his mouse, toppled over with his chair, and vanished off-camera. Silence settled over the stream for a long stretch, and I started to worry he might have actually hurt himself.
"Urgh… my two million won…"
Before long, Curry's sniffling voice drifted up, and I could finally relax. Anyone still whining about two million won probably wasn't hurt that badly.
How did it even end up like that…
Curry had played well, no question. In the laning phase, even when the enemy jungler came to gank, he'd turned it into a 2v1 and won. Before the promotion series even started, he'd spent over thirty minutes playing psychological warfare with the snipers and cleaned every last one of them out. It had been the final promotion series under the absolute best conditions imaginable.
But the single most important factor—team luck—had been so catastrophically bad that defeat was inevitable.
"Aaaah… that fucking hurts."
Curry reappeared on camera, face twisted in a grimace, and righted the toppled chair. At what might as well have been the end of the world, he'd lost what could have been his last shot at a promotion series—and two million won with it. Even Curry, who'd kept peak condition the entire stream, couldn't help but have his energy crash.
Sitting there dejected after losing both money and pride, he looked so much like a rain-soaked puppy that I almost laughed. Of course, feeling sorry for him didn't mean I was going to hit the mission-success button. I'd loaded that two million won for Curry's sake in the first place.
"Aigoooo, FlowerShopOwner!! Even after the mission failed, a five-hundred-thousand-won donation!! Thank you so, so much!!!"
Having patched Curry's mental state with a bit of capital, I shut the stream off then and there. Curry looked ready to launch into a full grand-bow thank-you performance, but more than that, my body was simply too exhausted.
"Maybe I should work out…"
I still hadn't fully adapted to a woman's body. Even six hours of gaming a day left me completely wiped. Back when I was a man, I could game for eighteen hours straight and still more or less hold it together. Were all women this low on stamina? Or was this particular body just unusually frail?
I hated hassle—but I hated not being able to do what I wanted even more. I had nothing but time and money to spare, so looking into a gym later wouldn't be the worst idea.
Thinking about this and that, my eyes started to close. Sleep rolled in fast, and my vision went completely black.
From there, time flowed on like a river once more, and the end of the Leori season drew near.
Solo queue players, every last one of them, ground ranked games harder than anyone. Most approached each match with deadly seriousness, determined to close out the season at a higher tier than they currently held.
But there were others who didn't—the ones who'd already parked their ranks. This was the moment when the true "gatekeepers" flooded the ladder.
That moment was the day before the season ended.
Two hours before season end. Curry's stream.
"Seriously, don't snipe me, okay? Hm?"
Having passed through any number of gatekeepers and become a veteran bootlicker in the process, Curry stared into the camera and clenched his teeth. Of course he did—Curry was still a Diamond peak, one step short of parking Master. Having clawed his way to a promotion series with tears of blood, it was only natural he'd issue a warning this serious.
This was the moment that would decide whether the tier crowning a full year of his life would be blue or purple. Even Curry, normally generous about sniping, could not forgive anyone who sniped a Master promotion series two hours before season end.
But who were Curry's viewers? The kind of reverse-psychology frogs who only got more aggressive the more you told them not to. Curry and his chat both knew this perfectly well, so an invisible psychological war began.
Come to think of it, why hasn't that one sniper shown up?
In the middle of his mental chess match with the snipers, Curry found himself thinking of one sniper who had vanished at some point. Thanks to that sniper, he'd been able to pull one legendary clip after another and rake in massive revenue. But strangely, that sniper had never reappeared after the day Curry's Master promotion series fell apart.
Did something happen to them?
Thinking back on how relentlessly they'd sniped him, it was hard to believe they'd simply gotten bored and quit. So maybe something had come up and they couldn't play—he was almost starting to worry—
…Worry, my ass!
After everything that sniper had put him through? Convert the psychological damage into cash and it easily cleared a hundred million.
And so, at just the right moment, Curry silently, stealthily queued up without making a sound. With so little time left before season end, he needed three wins in a row just to barely settle into Master.
This was, across the entire twenty-six years of Curry's life, a top-one moment of pure concentration. In that suffocating tension, a match found him. Curry steadied his trembling hands and hit Accept.
Teammate nicknames scrolled up the chat window. Mixed in among them was one familiar—and utterly dreadful—name.
He hadn't wanted a reunion like this. Not at a timing like this.
"Oh, for fuck's sake."
The nightmare of that day rose unbidden in his mind, and Curry spat a curse without thinking. A reunion with NayeonQueen after a full week was, sincerely, the absolute worst.
After that day, I never sniped Curry again.
I'd woken up aching all over, realized my physical condition was worse than I'd thought, and focused on taking care of my body. At first I tried to sign up for a gym, but given the state of the world, finding one that was actually open for normal business was nearly impossible. So I bought a few pieces of decent workout equipment and brought them into the house.
From then on, I worked out steadily and built up my stamina. At first it was so hard I genuinely thought I might die. But people are adaptable creatures, aren't they? Grind hard enough and, before I knew it, my body had adjusted to the brutal exercise schedule. The result: a body that could only handle six hours of gaming could now manage about twelve.
"Nngh…"
Morning sunlight filtering through the curtains woke me. I'd worked out late into the night, and my body was in rough shape. I got out of bed and went downstairs to the living room. I opened the fridge, roughly mixed chicken breast and salad together, and shoved it into my mouth.
Once I'd taken care of the empty stomach, I turned my head—and the living room, which had become a complete disaster zone, filled my vision. Recyclable trash piled up from delivery orders, dust settled everywhere from a total lack of cleaning. Even for someone who lived as roughly as I did, this level of filth was intolerable, so I'd called a cleaning part-timer yesterday.
"When did they say they were coming…"
My memory of hiring them was fuzzy. What hours had I set as the work window? I'd posted a listing for a daytime cleaning gig and hired the first person who applied. I'd been exhausted from working out at the time, which was probably why—I had absolutely no recollection of when the contracted part-timer was supposed to arrive.
I was turning it over carefully when, suddenly, it came back to me.
Ding-dong—
At the sound of the doorbell, I checked the time.
Nine in the morning.
Ah. They were coming now.
I got up and headed for the front door.
Kim Ji-hye was an utterly ordinary college student. Her family wasn't well-off, so even in times like these she had to work part-time jobs to cover her tuition—one of those common college students. That single sentence pretty much summed up the life of the human being known as Kim Ji-hye.
"Wooow…"
Having lived such an ordinary life, Kim Ji-hye couldn't help but gasp in admiration at the cleanly designed country house standing before her. Growing up in a shabby family home, she'd almost never had occasion to see a country house of this scale. More than anything, she'd never imagined she'd actually be working in a place like this, so she stood there pouring out one exclamation after another.
After a good long stretch of pure awe, she finally remembered her original purpose.
"Ahem, ahem…"
Kim Ji-hye cleared her throat lightly and pressed the doorbell with a trembling hand.
—Ding-dong
The chime rang once. Footsteps approached from the other side. She swallowed hard for no good reason, and the door slowly began to open.
The person who stepped out of the house was a woman. Without meaning to, Kim Ji-hye took in her appearance.
Hazy yet intense red eyes. Long, light-red hair falling all the way to her waist—still sticking out in every direction, as if she'd only just woken up. The woman who seemed to be the homeowner had skin so clear it was free of a single blemish. Against that pure white complexion, the dark circles sunk deep under her eyes gave her a strikingly decadent air—an appearance that called to mind a vampire from legend.
And above all, her figure was absurd. Even as a fellow woman, Ji-hye found herself speechless in the face of that perfect body.
Th-they're even… big…
Feeling a sudden, pointless relative deprivation, Kim Ji-hye snapped back to her senses a beat late and bowed her head.
"I'm Kim Ji-hye! I'll be the cleaning part-timer starting today!"
"Come in."
Following the homeowner inside, Ji-hye looked around, taking in the interior. It had looked quite spacious from the outside, but stepping inside made the scale hit her all at once.
"Cleaning supplies are in the storage room over there. Call me if you need anything."
"Ah, yes! Understood."
Ji-hye headed toward the storage room the homeowner—Nayeon—had pointed out. All the basic cleaning tools were there, and Ji-hye took hold of the vacuum first. While looking around earlier, she'd also checked the state of the house—it was considerably filthy. Of course it was. If the place had been clean, there would have been no reason to hire a part-timer at all.
And so Ji-hye began a full-scale deep clean.
The Leori season came to a close.
A major new patch went live in earnest, bringing so many item changes it could fairly be called a seismic shift. Some people went wild for the new patch; others, less fond of change, did not welcome it at all. And so the preseason began under the large-scale overhaul, and many players started adapting to the new world.
"What? A Platform War?"
At the same time a great wind of change swept through Leori, a similar wind began to blow through the streaming world as well.