A Fated Bond
Game Two was my turn to pick the champion.
There would be no yielding, and no courtesy either. Mia was a far more famous streamer than I was, and she earned far more money—a success already. Just because I was a little ahead in the match, offering some clumsy pity would have been nothing but hypocrisy.
For the sake of a thorough victory, I had combed through Mia's champion pool until there was nothing left to find. And then I chose the optimal champion.
"The champion stepping onto the stage for Game Two is none other than Master In. Heh. If you're a jungler, you just can't resist In, can you? Fellow junglers, haven't you all dreamed it at least once? The sight of yourself, hard-carrying on In."
Alongside Vaing and Timon, In was a champion once infamous as one of Legend of League's Three Great Pests. These days Yasuon's overwhelming impact had buried him, forcing him down from the throne of the Three Pest Kings, but he was still the sort of champion who drew nothing but groans from his own team.
When I went through Mia's match history, she had played In in exactly three games. And every one of those had been a custom, or a normal game she was goofing around in with other streamers.
In looks simple, but he's harder to pilot than people think. Beginners, and anyone who's never played him, don't realize that.
There was the Q, able to slip perfectly clear of crowd control, and the W, whose whole value was letting you endure focused fire for a brief window—and then there was seizing the exact moment to use them. Whether In became a pest or a carry was truly decided in a single instant.
Judging that timing is so difficult that even I gave up on him once I got past Platinum...
But none of that old history mattered now. What mattered was that, where In was concerned, the gap in mastery between Mia and me was the difference between heaven and earth.
And Game Two, true to that expectation, ran entirely one way. The match ended so easily it felt empty.
"Ahh... Next to how close Game One was, this is just hollow. To think it would end this easily."
A duel between melee champions can be closed out far faster if you decide to end it. The instant I hit level two, I cut down Mia's In.
Chat was in an uproar. I glanced over for only a moment, and to my astonishment the viewers in my own room had already passed three hundred. Mia's numbers, and Lac's, went without saying. The mood had overheated.
Seeing that, Lac pushed Game Three back a little and opened an interview, hoping to cool the viewers down.
"Now, now. The score is 2–0, and things have been flowing rather one-sided. Honestly, now that it's come to this, it's hard not to feel that Game One was a real shame. Mia, what do you think?"
"...I'm so frustrated. I was sure I was going to win Game One, no matter what."
In truth, the format had Mia choose the mirror-match champion for Game One and me choose it for Game Two, so anyone thinking about it normally had expected each of us to take a win, and for Game Three to decide the rest.
"I definitely didn't expect Game One to get that intense either. I looked through Hani's match history while I was prepping, and there really weren't that many games on Lula."
"Lula is... Lula is..."
She had been certain she would win, and the result had refused to follow. Mia seemed thoroughly worked up. I was already in her debt in more ways than one, from the viewer count on down to the Water Balloons, so I decided this was the moment to smooth things over.
"Actually, I've played a fair amount of Lula."
"Huh? But you said your main role is jungle, and your secondary is ADC or top."
"Yeah, that's right. I didn't play her much on my main, but there was a time I played top Lula on a smurf for almost a whole season."
"...!"
"Ah, now that you mention it, there was a stretch where supports occupied the top lane. No, wait—I feel like top Lula showed up even before that."
"Yeah. It had a brief run during the Censer meta too, but people pulled it out now and then even before then."
"Then your Lula mastery, by any chance...?"
"If you add my main and my smurf together, it's over 300,000. And whenever I played Lula top, it was always a one-on-one, so I think the matchup itself worked a bit more in my favor this time."
Little by little, the mood settled. Even the viewers who had been mocking and sneering at Mia, the loser, began to read the room as opinion shifted. Catching that, Lac skillfully praised Mia and Hani each in turn and soothed the crowd.
The match was already decided, but he worked to give Game Three a graceful finish, and at the same time to leave Mia with the look of someone who had lost, but fought well.
"Game Three is a blind pick. You start the game without knowing which champion the other person has chosen. I really can't wait to see what Mia and Hani have each prepared!"
We each locked in a champion and checked our runes and summoner spells. Game Three began.
It was time to crown the finale.
I had reached Platinum by duoing with a streamer I knew.
Was that really such a terrible thing? I had never once looked down on Bronze, Silver, or Gold. And yet they hated me, dismissed me, and held malice toward me. If the word Platinum showed up in my stream title, or if I let it slip at an in-house or some other small tournament that my current rank was Platinum, they appeared without fail—sneering, cursing, flooding the chat, laying their blackened insides bare.
Why? Was it simply that they couldn't stand me sitting in a higher tier than they did, because I'd had someone's help? They insisted duoing wasn't fair and cried out for fairness, so why did people that righteous leave every real problem in society alone and come hunting for fairness and equity inside a mere game?
I couldn't understand it. I couldn't accept it. They only tormented me, and that day, too, I was only miserable.
I kept swallowing that gloom and burying it deep, until one ordinary day I happened to meet another streamer in a game. It wasn't common, but it wasn't something that never happened, either. More people were trying their hand at personal broadcasts with every passing day, and there was no piece of content streamers committed to the way they committed to Legend of League.
The viewers said their piece. We were the same Platinum, but I was a Hyeji who had climbed on a duo bus, and the other player was actually skilled—a jungle main who only ran solo queue.
I laughed it off as if it were nothing. Inside, I was burning up.
I died first to a gank from Noktan, the champion the other streamer had locked in. Then, the moment Noktan hit level six and fired an ultimate, I died again. After that I died, and I died again.
Someone in the audience called it sniping.
I was indignant. And I was angry. I tried to hold it in, but it wouldn't stay down. When even the last play I had aimed for—the one built around Stopwatch—failed, I lost to the anger, and there I was, slamming my hands down on the keyboard.
As if they had been waiting, a malicious crowd swarmed in and fouled the chat. In the end I fought them. I shut the chat down, and the worst of them I threw onto the blacklist, cutting them off from the stream entirely. Once I had vented my fill, a little of my reason came back. I ended the broadcast and went looking for the stream of Hani, the one who had played Noktan.
Unfortunately, while I had been fighting that crowd, the stream had already gone offline. So I put off what I had resolved to do, and I rested.
My head hurt. Was I doing this right? I had started streaming because I loved being able to laugh with my viewers, so why had it come to this? That person wasn't getting any of the blame, were they? I was the one having such a hard time.
Maybe it had been jealousy. And then I thought that if I faced Hani, won, and proved my skill, even a little of the malice aimed at me might ease.
And so the match was set.
Game One was Lula. Lula... I was confident on Lula. That malicious crowd dragged me for duoing, but they had never once said I couldn't play Lula.
But I lost. I had fought fiercely, and still a loss was a loss. A defeat I had never imagined left my head blank. I couldn't even properly remember how Game Two had gone. By the time I came back to myself, my champion was already down, and Lac oppa was declaring Hani's victory in a low voice.
How had it turned out like this?
Chat was in flames. Justice served. The Hyeji's real skill, laid bare. Picking a fight and then losing is ugly. The haters, more delighted than usual, ran wild. I didn't even have the strength to hold them back. I thought I might cry.
Perhaps he had caught the sour mood. Lac oppa paused things for a moment and tried to clear the air with an interview.
No. This won't fix anything. I was the one who asked for the match, and I lost ugly. This is a burden I have to carry. Something I have to answer for, completely...
That was what I thought. And then, astonishingly, Hani shielded me. She said that she herself had played a great deal of Lula. If anything, Game One had been a matchup even more favorable to her.
At the words of the person involved, the malice in chat faltered. They lost their justification for tearing me down. Then my fans stepped forward and drove them out. Opinion turned. Catching the shift, Lac oppa praised both of us and warmed the air.
In the middle of all that, I had become the girl who let the urge to win get the better of her and childishly challenged someone she barely knew. But that had been my image from the start, so it didn't wound me in the slightest.
Hani... she said she was twenty-four, right?
I remembered it from the light introductions we had traded before the match. Among women streamers, it was rare to find anyone in a role other than support who sat in a higher tier than I did. If I counted roughly, would there even be ten? At any rate, she was better at Legend of League than I was. And she was kind, and she had consideration to spare.
If it had been any of those other sly, foxlike streamers, they would not have let a chance like this slip. They would have sunk their teeth into me and tried to steal my viewers.
Game Three began. A blind pick, each of us hiding our champion.
I made a small promise to myself. Once today's stream was over, I would apologize to Hani for the rudeness of suddenly challenging her to a one-on-one when the two of us were perfect strangers.