The Story
Bang! Bang! Bang!
"No, this is not okay!"
Two losses in a row with Timong on the team... I had swallowed that, somehow.
We were both streamers, and a mission was on the line. I knew it couldn't be helped. But was this matchmaking really a blessing from the god of variety shows? The third time I ran into Soldier, my mental was already coming apart.
This time he was on the enemy team. Watching him lock Fioran instead of Timong and solo-carry the game lit a rage in me I couldn't hold down.
Why was it Timong when he was with me, and Fioran the second he was against me?!
And then, frost heaped on snow, the demotion effect detonated the moment the game ended.
Excuse me, Doctor—what on earth are you saying?
I'm Diamond 2... I'm Diamond 2!
Under a fury I couldn't swallow, my keyboard howled. And yet, at the same time, a streamer's sharp instinct was screaming.
This was an opportunity.
Across all three games, viewers hadn't cared that we were on different platforms. They bounced between my room and Soldier's, live-relaying each side's reactions in real time.
Quietly, I launched Tweet TV and slipped into Soldier's stream.
Right on cue, an edited clip of my first Penalty Broadcast was being donated. There was Haniang, meowing through her reactions with a face like she'd just bitten into a bug.
"Is this person a professional cosplay streamer?"
"Why are you people crossing over to another platform's stream just to type in the chat, you monsters!"
Even while I bickered with them in chat, I checked what needed checking, quick and sharp.
Soldier's viewer count sat at about six thousand. Donation after donation about me was rolling in, and the reactions were still remarkably friendly. The idea had hit me on impulse, but that friendliness let me push it further—and bolder.
That last one stung. A little too on the nose.
But I wasn't in any position to be picky. I had no special content prepared for the near future, and the climb toward Master in Legend of League was my only talking point. If I could do it alongside Soldier, a former pro, the help would be enormous.
"Ah... I'll have to apologize for that. I didn't mean for it to turn out this way. The mission just happened to be set up like that."
I layered the plea with a stuffy, nasal aegyo voice I almost never used. He'd already gotten a thorough look at my looks (?) through the video donation. Could he really refuse a request this cute?
"I'm sorry. I tend to avoid collab streams."
Humiliating.
Getting turned down in front of this many people sent a flush of shame creeping up on me. But backing off now would be an actual defeat. I ground my teeth and offered Soldier the proposal again, this time loaded with sincerity.
Soldier hesitated for a moment. The viewers were so into it that ignoring them was difficult, and since he didn't give defeat so much as a one-percent chance, he accepted.
"All right. Then how should we... do it right now? And I feel like I ought to have a penalty. Did you have something in mind?"
Diamond versus a former pro. The framing alone made Soldier offer the penalty readily. Every piece of it was a scenario flowing exactly as I'd expected. I smiled where no one could see, and named the date.
Tomorrow. And the game would be a single match.
The penalty was settled as this: I would choose Soldier's champion.
All right. Time to really suck this former-pro straw dry!
I hadn't played the one-on-one on the spot. Pushing it back a day was deliberate—long enough to farm the aggro and pin every eye on the matchup.
I told Yoonjae and Yerin what had happened and put them to work on promo. The two of them logged into galleries and the other sites on alt accounts and spread the news like their lives depended on it. I also finished the prep so the YouTube edit could go up the moment it was done.
Soldier didn't do YouTube. He streamed only on Tweet TV, which meant that win or lose, every sweet fruit this showdown grew on video would be mine alone.
This alone is enough to pay for the embarrassment I swallowed.
It had all moved so fast that the weight of who he was hadn't really landed, but he was a World Series champion from a storied pro team. Worldwide, more than ten thousand searches a day pulled up matches Soldier had played. After the anti-feminist coin, there was a real chance this could pump new life into my YouTube channel.
Of course, for it to succeed that far, I have to win tomorrow and actually carry the follow-up content...
Given who I was up against, it wouldn't be as easy as it had been with Mia. But I couldn't let an opportunity this good slip. I prepared with everything I had.
In that spirit, I even accepted a small sacrifice from the points I'd been hoarding like treasure.
I invested 300 points and upgraded Nimble Control to 3. The total slid back into the 2200s. But this was an investment in a bigger success. Guillotine Match 4 granted master-level specs in a one-on-one; with that in play, even a former pro shouldn't be able to steamroll me outright. And if I stacked the penalty on top of it...
It showed up out of nowhere, but I'm not letting it go. I put points into this. This side isn't playing around!
Less than three weeks remained until Mia's birthday. The plan had been to give up on a hundred thousand YouTube subscribers, scrape together 3,000 points somehow, and debut at the level of an ordinary person who was just a little pretty (?). Now that things had come to this, I was going to plant that straw properly.
"Everyone, please don't fight. Today I am absolutely paying back the grudge of that demotion!"
The viewer count was clearly higher than usual, and keeping the chat under control wasn't easy. If Hani'sUncleFan and Yoonjae hadn't logged in right after and lent their weight, I would have struggled to focus on the broadcast at all.
"Fifteen hundred... wow, a lot of you are really watching me today."
For a solo stream, not a collab, it was a complete record. The aggro I'd baited with Soldier's name in the title had been worth it. A viewer-related mission cleared for the first time in a long while. Soldier was already on Discord, so I spoke to him at once.
"You're all ready, right? The grudge of someone demoted to Diamond 2 won't go down easy."
"Got it. Should I make the room, then?"
"......"
Damn it! You're a second-year streamer. I'm not asking for full banter, but you could at least volley a conversation back—straight into the game?
My plan to build the most entertaining broadcast possible and rake the views in had struck a reef before we even left the harbor. But if he thought I'd give up over something like this, he was dead wrong—Osan, Gyeonggi!
'Shut up!'
What is it that makes a piece of content catch on?
The subject? Of course that matters. When a single game blows up, most YouTubers stampede in, play it, and upload—Battle Space, Among Us, that sort of thing. But even when the videos use the same subject, the views and the reactions scatter in every direction.
The uploader's skill at the game, and plenty of other factors, all matter. If I had to name the core, though, I would pick this.
Story.
A video of someone playing well ends at they're good. You might get a few comments praising their mechanics. A video with a story draws a different kind of reaction. Viewers aren't pulled in by the game used as material alone. They're pulled in by the story, sink deeper into the video, project themselves onto it, and answer it for real.
I prepared in advance. The video should go up in about an hour.
I'd already cleared it with Soldier. An edit of why the one-on-one was happening, and of everything yesterday up through the moment I was demoted. Timong, Timong... and the single story that arrives at Fioran. To finish that story, I was about to make one choice. Right now.
"The champion Soldier will pick in this match is..."
Guess after guess packed the chat. I betrayed every one of them and spoke the name of the champion that, over the last day, had become the very symbol of my hatred.
"......"
The story was ready.
Now all that remained was to give everything I had to finish it.