An Unexpected Stroke of Luck
What a shame.
What an absolute shame.
They had lost the first game, and now the second had gone the same way. Ban Vayne, and the enemy simply locked in Quinn. In review they had agreed that if another ranged top showed up they would answer with Malphite, but the other team had used their heads. Malphite was already banned.
Compared with Vayne, Quinn actually had several decent answers. The problem was that Wagyu's champion pool was nothing to brag about. Renekton, Malphite, Camille, Mordekaiser, Sett, Volibear—he didn't have a single pick that could take the edge into Quinn. They fought for it, and still the late game collapsed into the same shape as game one. The matchup mattered. The gap in skill mattered more.
Overwhelming violence, born of a tier difference you could not shrug off: Gold against Master. And even the jungle, the role that was supposed to cover a top lane like that, had a Challenger planted on the other side. It felt hopeless.
They drafted well. We're still not there.
They had banned Jinx, the linchpin of the enemy's stall the game before, and the other side had simply walked out with Sivir. A clean plan, played by a team that knew exactly where it was strong and where it was weak.
"Come on, nobody get too down. Call it good experience. We got hit early, so we'll prepare, we'll be ready, and when the tournament comes we'll pay it back the other way."
"Like Waka-hyung said, let's not lose heart. Honestly, we did plenty right. The late invade landing in game one, the bot dives staying clean the whole way—that was good, wasn't it?"
"...If I'd just played a little better, we would have won."
Wagyu was still wilted. His teammates were trying to comfort him. The viewers were not. Toxic regulars, and antis wearing the faces of fans, had swarmed his stream and were filthing up the chat. Quit the team. Your very existence is a minus; we'd be better off without you.
Even if Wagyu walked, they would still have to scrape up another Gold top laner. Put a brand-new hire in against a Master, and would it really be any different? This was not Wagyu's problem alone. It was the team's. The enemy had collapsed top with brutal efficiency, and the allies had failed to fully collapse their bot. Which meant that the next time they faced Ikueku's team, they needed a clear stance: commit even harder to bot and turn it into a straight topside-versus-botside war, or fortify the upper half of the map and play for balance.
No.
Wagyu's collapse had only hidden it. The jungle gap had been there the entire game. It started with the first match, when a late cover let the dive go through untouched, and from then on she had handed Ikueku the tempo and spent the game chasing him. A Challenger is a Challenger for a reason. The early late-invade had put him completely behind, and still he recovered, and from the mid game on he kept overwhelming every jungle setup. Without that successful invade, he might have walked into her jungle for a counter-jungle and left her every bit as ruined as Wagyu. In the second game she had only held on because the mid gap kept feeding her fast backup. If mid had been anywhere near even, she was certain she wouldn't have been able to breathe.
It made her angry. Was this just the innate trait of a Korean man? She could stomach anything else. Being bad at the game, she could not. She wanted to win, somehow. She did not want to stay the team's burden. And in that sense, the first thing to do was grab Wagyu's mental and hold it up.
"I'm going to step into Wagyu's room for a minute."
She asked her viewers to bear with her and joined his broadcast. The chat was a complete wreck. Wagyu had never been a particularly successful BJ. Two or three hundred viewers, drifting back and forth—a smaller room than hers, if anything. Now more than four hundred had gathered and set the chat on fire. About a third of them were griefers who had smelled blood and come in on it.
To get a handle on the situation, she threw the three hundred Water Balloons she had charged in advance. Then she told Wagyu to switch the chat to fan club only.
"Uh—uhh? Hani... thank you for the three hundred Water Balloons."
He was badly deflated, and plainly rattled by the viewers' aggressive chat. Twenty-three. An adult, certainly, but still a spring chick who didn't know the world and hadn't been through the army. This was an opportunity. To Wagyu, to the viewers in his room, and potentially to everyone who would hear this story later, she would make a case for the kind of person she was.
"Don't beat yourself up so much. You know how it is. Top lane is a jungle diff."
"Huh? Uh... that's..."
She opened with the magic phrase worshipped by sufferers of Top-Lane Syndrome. Wagyu stared, dumbfounded, his face showing in a small cam at the lower right, the same as hers. The hair, cut short as if he had already started preparing for the army, looked a little ridiculous and, somehow, a little cute. Maybe because it brought back old memories.
Anyway, she told him what she had felt in the game. How she had started with a big lead in the jungle and still moved too late to cover top, and they had been dove for it. The regrets. The parts that had been lacking. It had never been Wagyu's fault alone. They had all but abandoned top, and still failed to break the enemy bot, until a game that should have been decided turned into a dead heat. She said it with everything she had, to him and to every viewer watching, so that he might climb even a little way out of the guilt.
Once more: this was not an act for the sake of managing her image. It was sincerity. If anyone had felt the gap with Ikueku down to the bone, it was her.
"D-do you really think that?"
"I do. So stop acting like you're the only sinner here. Gold against Master, Diamond against Challenger—does it even make sense to talk like this? The carry has to come from bot and mid. We're already struggling just to hold on."
"Pfft! Yeah, that part's true."
Maybe he had heard the sincerity in her voice. A little of the light came back into his face.
"Y-yeah. Honestly, I'm the sinner. Dragging it out this long against Platinum..."
"Mhm, that's fair. The support gap was pretty bad too, but the ADC was kinda... yeah."
Lac and Mia, who had been watching the whole thing, decided this was their cue and piled on with a round of there-there baby talk. Wagyu seemed to feel a bit better for it. He tossed out a joke and climbed aboard the mood.
And then, suddenly, a low voice rolled through Discord.
"...?"
"What?"
From somewhere, she could almost hear the mood shatter like a window.
Until just before YouTube rose to become the mainstream, two platforms were called the twin pillars of personal broadcasting. One was Shindaeryuk TV, the old establishment that had made its name as the native power of the scene. The other, chasing at its heels, was the rising power Tweet TV.
At first Shindaeryuk's dominance was absolute. They had claimed the pie early, and with so many popular shows on the air, viewers had no thought of leaving. But as the old saying goes, no power lasts ten years. Still water is bound to rot. Accident after accident erupted on Shindaeryuk TV, and Tweet TV did not miss the opening. Bold investment and quick feet: they recruited popular solo broadcasters, overhauled the service, and dragged viewer satisfaction upward.
Shindaeryuk's mistakes did not stop at one. Incidents blew up like clockwork, and in proportion the number of BJs transferring to Tweet TV grew. Viewers moved with them, naturally. Thanks to that, the present was very nearly a two-power standoff. A tug-of-war held in tense balance, and inside it, of course, plenty of slander and insult aimed at each other.
From Shindaeryuk TV, the attacks on Tweet TV usually came dressed in the image of the otaku. Understandable enough. Tweet TV had a great many streamers who broadcast with 2D characters out front, and both the tendency of the shows and the things the viewers loved leaned that way. Tweet TV, for its part, went after Shindaeryuk over illegal activity and social controversies. It was not once or twice that a BJ representing Shindaeryuk TV caused a scandal and ended up on the news or on television.
Anyway, the reason for all this explanation was simple. Because of what had happened yesterday, she was in a rather awkward spot. The whole thing had started with Waka's "Mama," which burst out of nowhere in the middle of them cooing over Wagyu.
Waka was a BJ and a streamer who simulcast on Shindaeryuk TV and Tweet TV. Watching her soothe and comfort Wagyu—and yes, that little scene probably had mid lane's overwhelming presence baked into it—he had looked so painfully awkward that she hadn't pressed him any further. At any rate, Waka liked his anime and had soaked up a great deal from the Tweet TV crowd, and without even realizing it he had called her Mama. That was the spark.
The remark was saved as a clip, edited together with a shot from her cam room, and was now circulating on Tweet TV as a donation video. A video of her, making the rounds somewhere she didn't know about. The feeling was unpleasant. Still, she checked it, and there was nothing particularly problematic or embarrassing in it. If anything, the reaction was explosive. This is pure healing. Please become my mama. Some of the comments were a little hard to understand, but at any rate the affair did not end inside Tweet TV.
She turned the stream on, and once the viewers who had crossed over from Tweet TV were added in, the count shot past six hundred and fifty in a breath. Set aside the record of seven hundred from the stock broadcast, and this was nothing but her switching the stream on with no content at all. A truly startling number. And it did not stop there. Little by little, it climbed. 680, 700, 720... She was reading the pleasant little message that she had cleared a viewer-count mission, and the growth refused to stop.
Wh-what is this? Don't tell me one video dragged all of them in?
As it turned out, the video had only been the trigger. Tweet TV viewers who had found her through it went back through her old broadcasts, shared what they found, and landed on a single fact: the voice impressions she had shown off so lavishly during the Miracle Crew collab. Truth was, that skill was always going to land even harder on Tweet TV, which ran a little more otaku than Shindaeryuk TV.
The count broke eight hundred and kept inching up. Then an existing viewer, displeased with the Tweet TV crowd, threw oil on the fire one more time. They posted on the Shindaeryuk TV board that Tweet TV had invaded. Bored toxic viewers with nothing better to do came flooding into her stream, every last one of them. She wasn't doing a thing, just riding the wave, and the viewer count copied itself. Past 850, past 900, and at last it broke a thousand.
It happens this easily?
All this time she had scraped and struggled just to hold an average of about four hundred, and in one stroke she had more than doubled it. She cleared another mission and even received bonus points. On top of that, the Helper—delighted that things were going well for the Goddess—counted it as a special mission clear and gave her a hundred points. Only a few days after she had spent 1,400 points, and she had already gathered more than three hundred again.
An unexpected stroke of luck.