The Tournament Ends! A New Beginning
“Hwaaaahm.”
I was sleepy. The after-party stream the night before had kept me up until around three in the morning, and the exhaustion sat on me like a weight. It was eleven a.m. Eight hours of sleep, more or less, and still I was heavy-eyed and dull—probably because my whole rhythm had been knocked out of joint.
“……You’re acting strange. Normally you’d launch into that whole routine about delivering the Goddess’s teachings, blah blah blah, and finish with There is no time to rest!”
“Sure. I know exactly what this is. You’re only grinning like an idiot because I blew up a little yesterday. From now on, you listen to me. Get cute with me and—hey!—I’ll just take a week off streaming.”
“Ahem. Okay! We’ll leave it there.”
The sparring match with the Helper ended, and I flung myself back onto the bed. I’d already posted notice that today was a day off, so what I had left was time. I really did grind myself raw for two straight weeks. Looking back, that was no way for a person to live.
Personal broadcasts, day after day, and team scrims on top of them. Take out washing, eating, and sleeping, and I had spent the rest of every day glued to a computer. The ache creeping into my neck and lower back was no random symptom. This body was frail to begin with. Leave it like this, and I wouldn’t have been surprised to find myself carted off to a hospital one of these days.
“Exercise is kind of…… a waste of time.”
It occurred to me, suddenly, that I might be able to settle the health problem by investing points.
“Huh? What’s— ghk! Wh-what is this? That’s way too much.”
The points required were on the far side of a wall.
Every ability filed under Health started at 200 points for level one, jumped to 450 at level two, and hit 1,000 at level three. Buy a level-three health ability from a complete blank, and the bill was 1,650.
“……I’d be better off just exercising.”
I gave up at once and went back to rolling around on the bed. I could feel that I needed to exercise. I simply did not want to do it now. Tomorrow’s me—or if not tomorrow, then some future me—would work out with admirable diligence. Today’s me, accordingly, was going to rest.
The Helper was right. I had a lot of points just then. A lot. When we lost the finals, I thought that was the end of it. Who knew a twist like this had been lying in wait.
On the first day we had beaten Team AltF4 and Team Blame-the-Support and punched our ticket to the finals at two wins and one loss. The final itself was a best of three. Our opponent was Team Ikueku, arrived undefeated through three matches, and I had fought a Challenger jungler with everything I had. If Team Blame-the-Support had come up instead, their jungler was only Gold. Our odds would have been better.
Across those three matches on day one, my newly upgraded strength had been laid completely bare. Against AltF4 and Blame-the-Support, Gold junglers both, that crushing play of mine had landed cleanly. Team Ikueku’s jungler was Challenger. Even taking Kha’Zix with Guillotine Match at level four, I had come away worse off, down nothing but summoner spells. They could call allies whenever they liked, but the moment I stepped out of a one-versus-one my ability dropped, so the fight had been stacked against me from the start.
We had tried. In the end we lost two to one, and a runner-up finish was as far as we could go.
Then came the twist. When the viewers voted for the tournament MVP, everyone assumed it would come off the winning team. Astonishingly, they picked me. The pentakill against Team AltF4 on the first day—viewers who still couldn’t shake that impact had voted for me in a flood, and the MVP was mine.
Seven hundred points, the reward for the special mission. And all through the after-party broadcast, an enormous crowd of viewers, a rush of fan-club signups, and a bombardment of Water Balloons poured in on the back of that performance. Mission after mission, cleared and refreshed and cleared again. Thanks to all of it, my points now stood at 1,270. A truly monstrous haul. But it still isn’t enough. Does this thing never end, no matter how much I do?
Adorable Doe Eyes at 4. Soft Gaze at 2. Clear Skin at 2. Abilities I had bought for mask-cam streams by sinking a full 1,400 points. Nose, lips, teeth, and the balance of the whole face—there was still plenty left to do. And now the missions had climbed so high they were miserable to clear.
Water Balloons and fan-club numbers were cumulative, so I was still chipping away at them, but missions I used to clear once or twice a day now took three or four. It felt painfully slow. That was part of it. Points, though, came first no matter what. If I wanted them faster, and in greater numbers, I had made up my mind.
The stream was on break. Today, all the same, was going to be endlessly busy.
I wanted to start YouTube. When it came to YouTube, though, I was a complete beginner. So I decided to play my connections card.
“Mm-hmm! Unnie, leave every bit of it to me. I’ll teach you from A to Z.”
Mia—a streamer and YouTuber who already had a hundred and fifty thousand subscribers—accepted, bright with delight. When I asked why she was so wound up, the answer came at once.
“That phony got absolutely wrecked. Yesss! The best. Love to see it!”
She must have hated them an awful lot. In any case, through Mia I got a serious education in what starting YouTube would require, and what I needed to have ready beforehand.
“The most important thing is still the editor. Even boring footage turns into a video with views exploding everywhere once it lands in a skilled editor’s hands.”
“Then what about thumbnails and illustrations?”
“Obviously those matter. Don’t you remember? Even picking out romance comics as a kid, plenty of people fussed over the art style. Videos are exactly the same. Some people take one look at the thumbnail, decide they don’t like the art, and never click.”
I almost answered that I wouldn’t know, since I’d never read shoujo comics—but Mia’s explanation kept rolling, and it was far too good to interrupt. She had been running a channel for nearly two years, and she handed over everything she had learned without holding back. Just taking notes in earnest, and it was already lunchtime.
“Ugh, I’m starving! It’s lunchtime already. Unnie, lunch together today? I’ll come to your neighborhood.”
“Hm? No, I actually already have plans……”
“Unnie, you’re totally bailing. Tch! That is so mean.”
“Sorry. I’ll definitely come for your birthday, though.”
“You promise? Break it and I’m blocking you for a week, Unnie! For real!”
“Yeah, yeah. I got it. September 9th! I even drew a big fat circle around it on the calendar.”
Today was August 2nd, which left a month and seven days. By then I had to scrape together the points somehow and finish my face. Put that way, I sounded like I’d become some artificial human, or a robot—but regardless, that day was set for an in-person collab stream in honor of Mia’s birthday.
“Whew. I learned a lot. Lunch first, I guess.”
All of this was in the service of eating and staying alive, so today, too, I put in a delivery order at speed. Over a bowl of jajangmyeon—black-bean noodles mixed until they shone—I realized the due date for this month’s rent was creeping up again.
What I had left was not even two million won. Barely fifteen hundred dollars. And if I meant to hire a proper editor, a thumbnail artist, and the rest, it was nowhere near enough.
“So do I have to sell after all?”
I hadn’t even collected a dividend yet, and the mere thought of sending away my Ecopia shares—dear to me as a child—blurred my eyes with tears.
“Shut up!”
I could not endure the name Baidi Pharmaceuticals spoken in my presence. The stock that had eaten a lower-limit crash that day, then opened the next session gapped down seven percent and left me in tears. I had already closed it out and erased it, neatly, from memory. If I weren’t in such a rush for points, this would actually be an incredible income.
Every week the galleries archived the Water Balloon rankings, and my name was sitting inside the top one hundred. A rough count put last month’s Water Balloons a little past sixty thousand. Take out the fees, and it came to about 5.5 million won—around four thousand dollars. Serious money. But none of it actually reached my hands. I needed points too badly, so the instant anything came in, it was burned on clearing missions. Nothing’s settled yet. Talk first.
I’d checked with Mia as well, and she said ACupDetector had quite a good reputation as an editor. Skilled enough, and not especially fussy—an easygoing sort. The worry was that the fee would match the skill. And then there was Yerin……
Yerin, sitting at tenth among the special members of my broadcast. A second-year high schooler, and a girl who was unfairness incarnate—holder of all three grand titles at once: golden hands, a golden spoon, and high school girl! Out of sheer fandom for me, she had even offered to give up her current post as thumbnail artist for another YouTuber, and she was making a full dash in my direction. What I was supposed to do with that, I had no idea. My head hurt.
“……And here I thought all you ever did was harp on about the Goddess to no purpose. So you are useful sometimes.”
The Helper was right. Between people, what truly mattered was a conversation.
The first step toward YouTube began with talking to the two of them.