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After snatching victory from Showdown, I queued up a few more solo ranked games.

Aside from tossing out the occasional offhand comment mid-match, I paid the stream almost no attention at all.

...I did sneak peeks at chat now and then, but I never let it show.

Roughly four hours had passed since I'd gone live.

With nothing better to do while the matchmaking timer ticked, I checked the viewer count — and immediately knew something was wrong.

I'd started the stream at around 6,400. Last time I'd looked, it had been about 6,700.

Now the number watching me had blown past 8,600.

Even with the bombshell reveal that the mysterious Yone one-trick was a woman, breaking eight thousand viewers at this hour of the day was nearly impossible.

Only the absolute top-tier streamers and BJs pulled numbers like that.

Unable to make sense of it, I opened a browser window outside the stream overlay.

The first thing that hit me was a wall of posts about me sitting on the front page.

A little digging confirmed it — the entire board was drowning in threads about me, and every one I read left some part of me itching.

Was every other community like this too?

I opened a new tab, hopped onto another site, and swallowed a low groan.

What the hell...

It didn't make sense.

Why were 8,600 people watching my stream?

Was my energy that good?

No. Two hours of muttered half-sentences had been the entire performance.

Was I just that dominant at Leori?

True — but there were plenty of skilled streamers and BJs out there. Skill alone didn't explain a crowd like this.

Because I was a female Challenger?

That didn't hold either. There had been other women in Challenger before me. One of them had even been the first and only female Challenger with a genuinely pretty face.

She'd made waves at the time, sure — but the spark of interest had died out fast.

I kept turning over possible explanations until my head was a mess. To clear it, I mindlessly scrolled through the communities, reading every post about me I could find.

My voice was ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠high-handed and sexy, they said.

The queenly way I looked down on people with pure contempt was hot, they said.

The gap moe of speaking formally most of the time but dropping into casual speech when I got mad was the best, they said.

All kinds of bizarre takes floated by, mixed in with the more normal posts about how good my Yone was.

Is my voice really that good?

Since becoming a woman, I had never once thought about my own voice. Even before the change, I'd never cared much about how I sounded.

I was still turning that over in my head when a match popped.

I hit accept and immediately locked Yone's portrait onto the select screen.

When the ban phase came around, I banned the most disgusting champion in the game — Zoe.

My throat was dry from streaming for the first time, so I stood up to grab a drink.

"Gonna grab something to drink."

I tossed out a rough explanation and left the room.

Downstairs, I opened the fridge and pulled out a bottle of chilled barley tea. Drink in hand, I headed back up to my room on the second floor — and something felt off the moment I sat down.

"...Yone got banned?"

While I'd been downstairs, the enemy team had banned Yone.

Not that I couldn't understand it. Yone had skyrocketed thanks to Guinsoo's Rageblade being an absolute monster of an item. Getting banned under those conditions wasn't strange at all.

I glanced at the chat rolling in from the corner of my eye.

Most of them were assuming I'd dodge now that Yone was banned.

Too bad for them — I had zero intention of dodging.

I scrolled down the champion list and locked in that one, right around the middle.

The chat exploded at my Yasuo first pick.

Fair enough. No matter how well you played Yone, watching the same champion over and over eventually got stale. Just as the audience was starting to tire of Yone, the mysterious one-trick first-picked Yasuo?

Of course they lost their minds.

Setting Yasuo's runes, I murmured,

"I can handle him a bit. Not on Nangin Geomgaek's level, but still."

They weren't wrong — it was my first Yasuo game. On this account, at least.

I used to play him a lot, though.

Not on the account known as the mysterious Yone one-trick. On my other accounts, I'd rotated Yasuo in regularly and handled him more than decently. When I'd taken a break from sniping and climbed the NayeonPrincess account to Grandmaster, Yasuo had been one of my main picks.

And right now, Yasuo was one of the few champions who could squeeze more than a hundred percent out of Guinsoo's Rageblade — same as Yone.

Granted, Yasuo's skill ceiling was far higher than Yone's. But at the end of the day, the two shared a similar skill kit, and I was a one-trick who could push Yone to the absolute limit.

So I locked Yasuo. The enemy mid picked Katarina.

Looking at the matchup, there was no reason to second-pick Katarina into Yasuo. Yasuo didn't lose that lane — if anything, he held the advantage.

Both sides finished drafting, and before long the game began.

Carnet was one of the most famous Katarina one-tricks around.

He had the highest name recognition among them, and he was the one who'd originally codified Katarina's item builds.

But with a massive wave of new items added to the game, Katarina needed a full rebuild. Carnet spent an entire day researching her new options and arrived at a single conclusion.

Katarina had always been an AP assassin running pure AP builds — but now she needed to go AD.

Her core skills, E and her ultimate, now applied on-hit effects. AP simply no longer suited her.

So Carnet cooked up a bizarre build: Blade of the Ruined King into Kraken Slayer.

The raw destructive power of that strange tree was even more overwhelming than he'd expected. After tasting what the new items could do, Carnet knew it in his bones.

This patch was going to be the season AD Katarina ran wild and made her name feared.

...At least, that was what he'd thought.

Until he ran into a Guinsoo's Yasuo with insane mechanical skill.

The enemy Katarina was Carnet — a well-known name. People called him the Father of Katarina, and he played her to perfection.

But the skill gap wasn't wide enough to ignore a bad matchup.

If my skill was a ten, Carnet's was about a nine.

Unfavorable matchup, lower skill — me stomping the laning phase was just the natural order of things.

That made five solo kills.

I'd already finished two items during laning phase. At that point, securing a solo kill was easier than eating cake. The game state was that lopsided in my favor — and that disastrous for Carnet's Katarina.

"Blade of the Ruined King?"

Midway through, I couldn't help but raise an eyebrow at Katarina's first item.

Normally Katarina was an AP assassin who built AP. But Carnet — the so-called Father of Katarina — had first-itemed an AD item in BotRK.

Chat split into a full-blown arena over Carnet's first-item ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠BotRK, and watching them brawl among themselves started to irritate me.

I hadn't turned the stream on because I wanted to — but watching them fight over someone who had nothing to do with me still rubbed me the wrong way.

If they'd been fighting about me, I wouldn't have been half this annoyed.

"If you keep fighting from now on, I'm ending the stream."

I dropped the warning in a low, flat voice, and the arena combatants went silent.

That improved my mood a little — but the irritation hadn't fully burned off.

So every time an enemy showed on the map, I hunted them down with vicious persistence and made sure they died. Especially Carnet's Katarina, the root cause of this whole mess — I focused my hunting on her.

If she showed on a lane, I rode a minion wave and ran her down. If she passed through the jungle, I camped a bush along her predicted path and killed her there.

I killed and killed until, before I knew it, Katarina had hit ten deaths.

By the time the game was nearly over, the chat's atmosphere had completely flipped.

The people who'd been glazing and flaming Carnet's Katarina were gone. Now the only messages coming through were ones pitying her.

I banned one viewer who still hadn't gotten the memo, then said with a laugh in my voice,

"You just got banned by me, so congratulations — that's your reward. Anyone else want one?"

Every time a chat asking for a "reward" appeared, I banned them on the spot.

The game had snowballed so hard I could afford to pay attention to the stream. No more upsets — my Yasuo hard-carried the match straight to the end.

I'm exhausted...

Playing while streaming wore out my mind more than my body. If I just coasted on autopilot, I could keep going longer — but rest mattered more to me right now than the stream.

"That's it for today's stream."

I ignored the chat and hit the end stream button without hesitation.

Nangin Geomgaek had only told me to stream for a few hours — he hadn't set a hard number — so ending it like this was fine. And even if it wasn't, "I was tired so I ended the stream" was a perfectly good excuse.

"A lot of friend requests came in..."

This account always got a steady stream of them, but going live had multiplied the pile. I hated clutter in my field of view, so I started hammering decline one by one.

I was still clearing them when a familiar nickname caught my eye.

"...Curry?"

A friend request from Curry's account.

I hesitated over whether to accept it, then finally hit yes. My empty friends list gained an online LonelyGourmet.

I opened the messenger and sent a message.

What ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠could he possibly want that he needed to drag it out like this?

I waited with what patience I had, and Curry's next message arrived.