A Suffocating Collab
Ahead of the collab with Curry, I carefully went over everything I'd been sent.
The stream would open with a call connecting to Curry, followed by a brief Q&A segment. I was curious what the questions would be, but I didn't bother asking. It wasn't a real broadcast network show — there was no need to stick to a rigid script. More than that, knowing in advance would kill the fun and strip the reactions of any real authenticity.
I prepared for the collab while doing my best to "accommodate" Curry's position. Midway through, though, I realized something far too late — a critical problem.
I didn't have a Diamond-tier account to use for the collab with Curry.
I never should've said I had a Diamond smurf…
Curry had asked if I had a Diamond-tier alt, and I'd said yes. The problem was that those Diamond smurfs were the accounts I'd used to stream-snipe Curry — NayeonQueen and NayeonPrincess.
The maximum number of accounts one person could create under a single name was five. NayeonRoyal, NayeonQueen, NayeonPrincess, Barcode, and a dedicated sniping account. I was already using every single slot available under one identity.
The collab Curry had announced was set for next Sunday. Could I even get a Diamond-tier account by then?
I didn't particularly want to break any laws, so I considered renaming one of my existing accounts — then immediately discarded the idea.
No. The risk of getting caught is way too high.
As a notorious stream sniper, my user IDs were already plastered all over the match-history sites. Even with a name change, people would figure out in no time that Barcode's smurf belonged to that toxic sniper.
Was I really going to have to find a new account?
I was turning it over in my head when something suddenly clicked.
I'd once asked Night Move — the people who'd helped me launder my identity — about accounts. Their answer: Goliat Games was a game company, not a government office, so they had no way of knowing whether I was dead. Unless surviving family members submitted a death certificate and requested deactivation, accounts almost never got shut down.
The owner of the accounts I was currently using was Son Min-woo. Almost no one from my past life knew me, and anyone who did had almost certainly forgotten. I'd never known anything about my father beyond the fact that he worked with cryptocurrency. On the day of his funeral, not a single person came to pay respects. The only family my father had was me — and the old me had been just like him. The kind of person who never tried to form relationships, and never did.
Which meant Son Min-woo was still, officially, a living person. No missing-person report had ever been filed. There was no family left to file one, no friends, no lingering connections of any kind. For a long time — maybe forever — no account under Son Min-woo's name would ever be deactivated.
And the person I was now held an entirely new identity: Choi Nayeon. Separate from Son Min-woo's name, I could create five more accounts under Choi Nayeon's.
The moment that thought landed, I went straight to making accounts under Choi Nayeon's name. When they actually went through, I bit back a laugh and logged into Leori.
I set the nickname to Barcode, skipped the tutorial, and headed to the main screen. The first thing that hit me was the account's level.
Level 1.
To duo with Curry — who'd been demoted to Diamond the instant preseason hit, like clockwork — I needed to hit level 30 and climb to Diamond within a week.
I hired a leveling party with cash and ran normals in a five-man queue. I ground normal games by hand, relentlessly, over and over. Three days later, I'd reached level 30 — the minimum required to queue ranked.
All that remained was hitting Diamond. For a Challenger player like me, climbing to Diamond in four days was almost trivially easy.
After my debut stream, I stayed offline the entire time I was preparing for the collab. Part of it was being busy leveling the new Diamond smurf — but there was another angle. If a streamer who'd gone dark for a full week after becoming a hot topic suddenly reappeared for a collab with Curry? The attention funneling toward Curry would be enormous. And sure enough, the moment Curry's stream went live, people poured in by the hundreds.
—Hello, everyone. Nice to see you all. Ka-ha…
I ended my own stream the moment Curry started greeting chat. Then I switched off my mic and cleared my throat. I was already waiting in the call, ready for Curry's mic to come on.
Before long, a light lit up next to Curry's nickname, and a familiar voice came through.
"So you're the famous 'Mysterious Yune One-Trick' — the Barcode who carried a game against Showdown?"
I wondered if Curry had any idea. That the person collabing with them right now was the same sniper who'd been tormenting them all this time. The whole situation was so funny I had to fight back a laugh as I answered.
"Yes. That's me."
"Nice to meet you! I guess that's a Challenger for you — your answer is dripping with confidence."
Curry took my reply and rolled smoothly into the broadcast.
"Barcode, you're known as a Yune one-trick under the nickname 'Mysterious Yune One-Trick.' Were you aware people call you that?"
"Of course I know. Just yesterday I saw a post on a certain community board titled 'Barcode's voice is so damn hot' — I keep up with Leori news pretty closely."
"…Th-ahaha! Well, of course a famous Challenger would stay on top of Leori news!"
Curry floundered for a second, then slipped out of it with the polished verbal footwork of a pro streamer. Seeing a reaction I'd never gotten from sniping alone, I felt the corner of my mouth lift on its own.
"I actually prepared a few questions before we play together, but…"
"And?"
"…We probably don't need them, right?"
"Hmm… I'm kind of curious what questions you prepared, though?"
I flipped it back on them. Was Curry really not going to ask?
A brief silence told me Curry was deliberating. Maybe they hadn't expected me to push like this. I could practically see the flustered look on their face.
"You're really not going to ask?"
"Weeell… if you want me to, I should. Haha!"
I loaded my voice with pure disappointment, and Curry's awkward answer came back. Forcing out a dry laugh, Curry dragged the questions into the open.
"Barcode, when Yune first released, you set an unprecedented record of fifty straight wins — then vanished from solo queue entirely. Any chance we could hear why?"
"I was winning so much back then that it got boring. So I quit."
"Quit because it was boring! A ridiculously confident answer — maybe even arrogant — but coming from the mouth of the Barcode who set that record, it doesn't sound strange at all."
"Heh. Thanks for the compliment."
I thanked them with a light laugh, as if it were nothing. I could already picture Curry clutching their head.
"Alright, let's move on from Q&A and get into a game!"
"Huh? What about the next question? If I said something wrong somehow…"
"It's not that! Honestly, I didn't prepare any questions. I made them up on the spot to keep the stream feeling real."
"Ah… so Curry doesn't have any questions about me… enough to lie about it… And the collab invite was also…"
"No! No, no! It's just that the questions I came up with on the fly weren't interesting. You didn't do anything wrong — I did!"
"Is that so? Well, that's a relief."
The two of us talking was genuinely hard to breathe through. …More precisely, only Curry — the one running this collab — was the one running out of air.
After that short exchange, Curry invited me to a game. I accepted, and Curry — Master (formerly Diamond I) — started the queue. Naturally, the queue screen left dead air, so Curry filled the stream by talking to me.
"Yune and Yasuo's performance skyrocketed with Guinsoo's, but I believe Guinsoo's just got nerfed in a hotfix. In the current state, what tier would you put Yune at?"
"Tier one."
"Most one-tricks call their own champion tier one regardless of actual performance…"
"No. Setting aside any affection for Yune — Yune is solidly tier one."
I cut Curry off and stated it flat. Guinsoo's had been hotfix-nerfed, sure, but its status hadn't dropped. A damage reduction of maybe ten on the first item did absolutely nothing to Yune. Two hundred gold more expensive? Guinsoo's was worth every bit of three thousand gold, not twenty-eight hundred. A Legendary item that outperformed Mythics — and six hundred gold cheaper than the average Mythic, at that. Yune and Yasuo, who could wring more than a hundred percent out of an item that broken, were the undisputed tier-one picks of the current preseason meta.
We bantered back and forth like that, and a game popped almost immediately. Getting a match in under a minute reeked of stream sniping, but I didn't care. My goal for this collab was to torment Curry as much as possible — not to win the game.
"If Yune gets banned, I'm dodging, so behave yourselves."
Curry's iron resolve not to tolerate a sniper ban this time came through loud and clear. Maybe that resolve reached the enemy team — Yune didn't get banned. As a broken champion, Yune had a high ban rate even without targeted sniping. The fact that it survived suggested the other team had a few "actors" on it.
"Thankfully Yune lived. I'll take it first."
Curry, first pick on blue side, locked in Yune. Did Curry assume I was an all-champ player? I was, but locking first pick without even checking with me… I wasn't offended, exactly — I just wanted to mess with them, so I spoke up.
"I don't really have many top champs…"
"Huh? Ah, then what do we do… Do you not have Aatrox, or any of my other mains either?"
"Yeah… I only have mid champs."
"Then… I guess I have no choice but to dodge…"
"I'm kidding."
"…I see."
Curry's voice had already gone flat with resignation. How long had the stream even been running for the energy to tank this hard? Worse was coming — several times over.
Both sides kept picking. The enemy top was Darius.
"Pick Jake for me."
"Jake… Jake… uh…?"
"…Stop teasing."
"Ah, was it that obvious?"
I picked Jake with a quiet laugh. I could've sworn I heard Curry sigh.
Finally, the enemy fifth pick locked in Jaa, and ban-pick was over. I checked that the enemy mid was Sialacy and adjusted my runes.
And just like that, the first game of the collab began.