Best Effort
A life spent charging down a single road: pro gamer, and nothing else. After that came the army, and after the army a dead sprint with nothing in his sights but a World Series title. He never once looked aside. He simply worked, and at last he carved out a championship. Retirement opened a second act as a streamer.
And yet, in all of Soldier’s life, there had not been so much as a scrap of luck with women.
Viewers found his flustered stammering hilarious, so they piled on missions of every kind. Calling him oppa was the bare minimum. They demanded honey, babe, husband — even Daddy (?). I was a pro BJ gone blind for points, so I ran every mission without a second’s hesitation. Every time, the only one in pain was Soldier. He had no immunity whatsoever to this sort of thing and didn’t know what to do with himself. It made you wonder just how high a wall he had built between himself and the world. I was starting to feel I could see a little of who he really was.
No one could deny what he had accomplished in Legend of League, and he was a player worthy of the juniors’ respect. Everything else was a complete bust. Even as a second-year streamer he had almost no network beyond old ties, and the fact that he always went on alone said plenty.
“So, uh… in a matchup like this, Aatrox uses Q first, and—”
“No. Aatrox isn’t what matters right now.”
The bit changed on the spot. Learning Aatrox was not the point. I was giving Soldier life advice.
Good thing the reaction’s this warm.
The bond with Soldier, which I hadn’t seen coming, was already three days old. I’d been a fan, and learning what he was actually like had shocked me. He was twenty-eight, not some middle-schooler in his edgelord phase, and yet he insisted the self from his World Series days was the real him, and the person he was now was only a shell. Until he felt that thrill again — the one that had shaken his whole body — living didn’t even feel like living. He ought to try starving for three days. That would knock some sense into him.
Listening to him, the life he’d grown up in was a flower in a greenhouse, through and through. Twenty-eight years old, and he had never once worked a part-time job. He had no interest in the economy, in politics, in how the world turned. His life ran on games or broadcasts and nothing else. His only other worry was what to eat that day. All-boys middle school, all-boys high school, trainee life, then the army, then a first-team debut — his immunity to women was absolute zero.
Anyway, for a little while I slipped back into being the twenty-eight-year-old Lee Kangjun and gave him a serious talk about life. At first Soldier froze every time I called him oppa, but my manner was as blunt and easy as any man’s, and maybe that put him at ease. Bit by bit he started spilling his worries and what he actually felt. We ran that kind of broadcast two days running, and funny enough, we got fairly close. The heart of that closeness was probably all the talking we kept doing on Discord even after the stream went dark. He was nothing like what I had imagined, but getting to talk privately with Soldier — someone I had been a fan of — felt good.
And the broadcast that came out of it hit harder than I had expected. Soldier already held a top-tier viewer count on the strength of being a World Series winner alone. Once a real story started coming out, along with personal details he had never shared, it became an enormous topic. On top of that I layered in all kinds of broadcast coaching: behind-the-scenes from his playing days, the World Series itself, stories about players he had been close with as a pro. Until then, turning the stream on had meant Soldier quietly playing and nothing more, so the change after my coaching landed very well with the viewers he already had. People who had been watching purely for absurd mechanics suddenly got the fun of a broadcast too, and good reactions followed as a matter of course.
I kept cooing encouragement at him, building his confidence, and yesterday he did his first collab with people other than me. Watching the baby bird I had raised leave the nest left me proud. What left me prouder, if I was honest, was the subscriber count and the points I had stacked over those three days.
“Heh! When I put my mind to it, this is what you get.”
Set beside the collabs with Lac and Clemoomoo, the return here was ridiculous. With both of them I had drilled scripts for more than three days, held no end of actual discussions, and fretted over every detail, and the results still hadn’t come out the way I had hoped. The reaction had been good, yes, but not the kind of blast you could feel in your gut. This time was different. I had put in less effort than either of those collabs, and the result was several times larger. World class… so this was the weight of a Legend of League World Series champion. Not that it mattered once you took the game away. Strip that out and he was just a twenty-eight-year-old who had never dated, who didn’t even know what the four major social insurances were, and who flailed the moment you asked.
“This is how you show you’re close. What would a friendless loser of a Helper know!”
Faced with a merciless bludgeoning of facts that offered no quarter, the Helper shut their mouth. I savored a rare victory and checked my subscriber count and points.
Did I upgrade Agile Control III for nothing? No. Whatever it is, certainty is best. And it’ll help when I push for Master tier.
A little regret lingered over the points I had just spent, but clinging to what was already past was the most inefficient thing there was. I set my mind and went over the plan ahead.
Master tier is the baseline. And I need a little more help from Soldier. Of course, I’ll be helping him on the broadcast side too.
The celebrity buff I had felt this time was enormous. It might look underhanded, but if I wanted a hundred thousand subscribers in a short window, this was no time to be choosy about methods.
A little over two weeks left. I have to give it everything.
A full cam broadcast — face and all — would be a turning point. Everything I had only planned and turned over in my head could finally be used from that day on.
The connection with Soldier really had been a dream of an opportunity. Even after retiring he had kept up with former pro broadcasters — Redback, Time, Boom, and others like them. I nudged him into collabs with them and quietly set a foot in myself. It felt a little like I was using him, and my conscience twinged, but in the end this was a win-win too. Soldier’s broadcast, stuck in place for two years, had finally started to grow and change.
Anyway, I streamed like mad for a week. Broadcasting alongside three former pros, my subscriber count broke seventy thousand, and my points hit 3,025. The first goal was finally done. The date was August 29. Not counting the birthday itself, that left about eleven days, today included.
“No matter how I look at it… this is too much, isn’t it?”
I had spent a week latching onto former pros like a straw and sucking them dry, and this was all I had. Soldier’s network was tapped out now. Short of a collab with Fake, the most famous pro gamer there was, hitting a hundred thousand subscribers in the time left looked impossible.
“Hmm…”
The 1,400 points I had already sunk into my eyes and skin, plus the 3,000 that had been the first goal. If I used all of that, I would at least hear that I was pretty, for an ordinary person. But was this really the end?
Everyone dreams it at least once. If I were born again — or if, whatever the situation, some power past common sense took hold and I could have a celebrity’s face. Was I supposed to give up a dream that sweet? Call it greed if you like. Looks even at that level would be plenty; if people said I was overfed and ungrateful, I would take the scolding. But the chance had already been handed to me. Then I would run until my feet would not move anymore. Until my heart felt ready to burst. Until not a scrap of regret was left.
From today, there was no such thing as a set broadcast hour. I would not even flinch at a twenty-four-hour stream. I said as much to Yoonjae and Yerin. If they had good source material, or footage they had been saving, they were not to cling to it — dump it all, hard, before Mia’s birthday. Don’t ask why. Just this once, follow me.
“I do think it’d come out better if we put a little more care into the edit… Ah, well. If it’s what Broadcast Genius Hani-nim wants, you must have something bigger in mind.”
“Unnie! Meet me before Mia’s birthday! The wish ticket! I’m cashing in the wish ticket I saved up back then!”
“Uh… sorry. I’ve really been way too busy lately. Let’s meet after Mia’s birthday.”
“Tch!”
Yerin put on a little sulk, but I coaxed her out of it and smoothed things over. After that it was broadcast, broadcast, and more broadcast. A morning stream, then food, a lunch stream, then food… On gym days I asked Myunghoon ahead of time, and even inside the health club I turned on a short workout stream from my phone. I did my best, of course, to keep the people around me off the screen. The skintight workout clothes I had prepared — the ones that showed off my figure — must have done their job, because subscribers jumped quite a bit that day. Even so I was still hovering around 71,000. A hundred thousand didn’t look like a goal in the same universe.
And so the days slipped past. Now it was September. Eight days remained until Mia’s birthday.
Was this as far as it went? After all this effort? But I don’t give up. And heaven helps those who help themselves.