The Joint Broadcast
The third week of August began, and it was a down market. The gloom came rolling in.
"To think it's already peaked."
Excessive greed is how you invite disaster.
YouTube was to blame.
A hundred thousand subscribers had been my top priority. All the way past thirty thousand I'd assumed the climb would stay easy, but after I barely scraped forty thousand, the numbers had slowly stalled. I had a feeling the trouble started with what I'd said after the fourth video—that I was done touching feminist issues. The sudden surge before that had been tied to exactly that storm, so when the buzz died, the growth died with it.
A real shame. Still, I couldn't stand around stamping my feet forever. I checked the points I had on hand.
"2,285 points!"
More than I'd expected. Clear one special mission right now, take the thousand-point reward, and I'd blow past the three thousand I'd set as my first target.
Or forget the hundred thousand subscribers and grind the individual missions. I could probably scrape three thousand together that way. There's a Shindaeryuk TV mission, too.
The payout on YouTube missions had turned out bigger than I'd thought, and views had done most of the work. The fourth video, a talking point for all sorts of reasons, hit a million views and hauled in an absurd pile of points. The problem was that I couldn't clear any more of those missions until another video broke a million.
Right. Three thousand is doable. Then, disappointing as it is, a full face reveal should still be possible.
The points I'd already burned upgrading my eyes and skin came to about fourteen hundred. Stack another three thousand on top of that, and I'd have a face pretty enough that ordinary people would call me good-looking.
If I could spend just a thousand more, it'd be cutting it close, but I could almost reach celebrity level.
Even then, anyone with overwhelming visuals, or a true top star, would still stand in a different class... anyway, that far was a reach. The practical final goal was four thousand points.
Once I reveal my face, further upgrades are impossible. The more people remember me, the harder those memories are to rewrite.
So the face I was going to show on Mia's birthday stream was, for all practical purposes, the final cut. All the more reason I wanted at least a bare-minimum celebrity face, even if I had to scrape for it.
Three thousand just isn't enough. Four thousand, somehow... Hah. Isn't there some piece of content out there, some hot topic, that would let me clear a mountain of missions?
I'd even tried VR recently, and the short-term response had been nothing. Maybe because the channel itself still didn't have a clear identity. It had started as modest edits of livestreams, then suddenly videos about feminism and social issues, then out of nowhere VRChat. Anyone who'd subscribed was probably dizzy.
Until I've actually locked down a place for myself, I should dig into one thing. Once I've got a core fanbase, I expand from there.
I'd talked it over with Yoonjae, and he was thinking the same way, so for the time being we decided to focus on gaming content. That category simply had more viewers, and thanks to Guillotine Match 4 my play had been in incredible form. More games I was hard-carrying meant more moments worth clipping for YouTube.
Three more wins in a row and it's my Diamond 2 promo. I've climbed a lot faster than I thought.
A female BJ, no less—and not even duo queue, but solo ranked, and jungle rather than support. Factor all of that in, and Diamond 3 was a tier you almost never saw.
All right. Starting today, it's tryhard hours. Diamond 2 is the floor, and I'm taking a shot at Diamond 1.
I didn't think it was impossible. I'd gotten comfortable using Guillotine Match 4, and in that state I could put up mechanics at Master and above.
I was still sorting those thoughts when Discord chimed again. This time it was Lac, who'd gone a little quiet since the Blame Game tournament.
This feels familiar.
Probably because I'd recently reached Clemoomoo on Discord and run a joint broadcast with him. A similar situation, and a similar invitation. I'd been thirsty for new content anyway. Good timing.
I accepted Lac's collab offer on the spot. I did set one condition: this would be a collab in real life, so the mask stayed on. Lac took it without a fuss, and we set the stream for three days out.
Whether this would be my chance to stack a mountain of points, I was genuinely looking forward to finding out.
Ever since the Blame Game tournament, Lac had been tangled in a serious inner conflict. No—the conflict had started before that. It was the kind of problem he'd forced himself to look away from while his head was full of the tournament.
The cause was simple. Hani's hidden-camera broadcast. From that day on, he couldn't stop being aware of her.
Lac was no lifelong single, and he was no kid. A healthy twenty-four-year-old man—how was he supposed to miss what this feeling was? It wasn't love yet. It wasn't some thin little liking, either. It was the stage right before a feeling turns into love, which was exactly why he'd tried so hard to look the other way and put more distance between them.
He was set to enlist in November. Love, in a situation like that? But were feelings ever that easy to control? He'd shoved them down, and they'd only swollen bigger, until at last he asked for a joint broadcast. A real-life one, at that.
It was fifty-fifty. Part of him hoping she would say yes, part of him hoping she would say no.
The answer came back. In three days, he was actually going to meet Hani.
Lac had told me the theme of that day's joint broadcast ahead of time. The military.
Wagyu, with about two weeks left before his late-August enlistment. Lac, due to ship out in November. KingAnt, home on the regular leave that comes with being a private first class. And finally me. Four of us in all, every one of us tied to the army somehow.
And me? A fourth-year reservist, obviously. More than qualified.
Even in the pre-meeting over Discord, the other three had marveled again and again at my military knowledge and the stories I told. They must have thought I was wildly creative. The truth was I'd lived every one of those stories.
The concept itself was simple. I was the sergeant. KingAnt, an active-duty private first class, stayed a PFC. Wagyu and Lac, who didn't know a thing, were privates. We'd take those roles and act out every kind of army episode we could dig up.
Two days before the stream we gathered at Lac's place for the first time and ran a light rehearsal, and I was honestly surprised. However much he'd sweated this collab, the set was still a little rough—but he'd built something that actually felt like the army. Because of it, I could sink much deeper into the role-play.
When practice ended, I could tell the way the three of them looked at me had changed quite a bit from the first time we met. So what. I wasn't about to date any of them. The broadcast just had to go well.
The viewers were loud, and the count climbed fast. Five hundred, seven hundred, a thousand, twelve hundred, fifteen hundred... They cleared three thousand without much effort, and from there the number rose more gently.
Lac must have decided that was enough, because he gestured for the cam to come on. An acquaintance of his, filling in for the day as manager to help with the content, lifted the camera and put the four of us on screen.
For this bit, Lac had sacrificed the living room, the widest space he had. He'd even brought in people who built props for film and art—not professionals, of course, just the juniors on a team, to save on labor—and with their help he'd turned the room into a rough imitation of an old platform-bunk barracks. These days the front was almost all new buildings with proper beds, but most people who remembered the rear, or the army at all, had lived in those old bunk-platform quarters, so that was the look they'd gone for.
"Loyalty! Private Lac! Reporting to Barracks One on official business!"
Lac and Wagyu stood with their backs to the camera, locked in a salute. KingAnt sat squared away, posture perfect. And the last of them, sprawled at an angle in front of the TV—activity pants below, a fuzzy army fleece on top.
That was me.
I'd meant to sell the disguise, but even under a combat cap my hair was too long to hide. I glanced Lac's way and took the salute. On the cap I'd jammed down over my head, a sergeant's insignia caught the light.
The chat was on fire.