Chapter 91
‘It’s been a while since you turned your stream back on, huh?’
The man returned home from a day’s work at the Interactive AI Research Lab of the Korean Institute of Magic and Technology and threw himself onto his bed without even changing out of his outdoor clothes.
It was evening, when everyone cast off the fatigue of daily life and enjoyed some time of their own.
‘Daesal’ tapped the home screen of the streamer he subscribed to.
[NoName]
Unusually, this streamer had set her avatar to the youngest possible age.
If she had been targeting viewers with pedophilic tastes, she could be said to have succeeded halfway.
There were even people who came simply to listen to her voice and admire her avatar amid the bland broadcast with no content whatsoever.
Watching her solve homework for young viewers in exchange for their thousand- and two-thousand-won donations even made him feel sorry for her.
But a true Twish viewer never sends a streamer a donation in the ordinary way.
Though he was now a graduate student at a prestigious educational institution, the inferiority complex about his academic background, born during his grueling second attempt at the college entrance exam, urged Daesal to expose the streamer’s true worthlessness.
He wanted to reveal that this streamer, cheered on by elementary, middle, and high school students, was actually an incompetent unemployed person.
So he deliberately sent difficult questions in abstract theoretical magic and radio engineering at a fourth-year university level.
[It’s a Hermitian matrix. I can just write Resha Aikvar in the upper-left.]
That was the answer she gave the instant she saw the problem. She wasn’t an ordinary unemployed person, was she?
After that, Daesal began keeping NoName’s stream on regularly, even if he didn’t watch every broadcast from start to finish.
Graduate-level coursework had no training data, so even asking an AI about an assignment couldn’t be expected to produce an accurate answer.
Yet this streamer displayed knowledge far broader than his own.
For a while, Daesal made NoName into a useful homework answer machine. It cost him quite a bit of money, but what of it? A mutually beneficial relationship was enough.
That NoName played LoL, and WoA as well.
As it turned out, she had been a LoL addict who had played tens of thousands of games over eight years, and apparently she had teamed up with another LoL streamer and climbed all the way to Master in just one week.
That was the only broadcast Daesal didn’t watch. It was also a busy week because of his paper, and he knew absolutely nothing about LoL.
But when NoName said she was starting WoA, he couldn’t help getting excited.
This, after all, was practically his area of expertise.
Just as he was giving her pointers out of a desire to look after a newbie, she cleared Nightmare Part 1 on the highest difficulty, nearly completing it in a single day.
She was no longer my little streamer.
A genius among geniuses who could accomplish anything if she set her mind to it.
[I’ll give manager privileges in my room to the three people who survive until the end.]
After returning from an incredible feat, she declared that she would choose stream managers after shaking off the ants with a Japanese anime insert song.
Daesal had a premonition.
NoName’s stream was a sure-fire growth stock. If this stream had been a stock, he wouldn’t merely have sunk his entire fortune into it—he would have leveraged himself to the hilt and thrown it all in.
The managers of the “big-name” streamers had considerable authority and prestige, didn’t they?
As one of its early viewers, he couldn’t help wanting the position.
Daesal swallowed hard, abandoned the assignments he had been putting off, and climbed into his capsule.
It was time to receive a reward for doggedly watching the stream until now. He would dissect her preferences down to the last detail using the big data he had accumulated.
* * *
[Combat Magic World Cup Round of 32, Match 1/16]
[5th Circle Ignis Velum (Fire Curtain) vs. 4th Circle Glacĭs Hasta (Ice Spear)]
“Oh, aren’t you Daesal? Even a big-name viewer came to participate.”
“Ah, yes. I’m a little nervous. I’ve been watching NoName’s stream for quite a long time, so I’m worried I might get eliminated too quickly.”
“Yep, then let’s cheer each other on!”
Having exchanged words of encouragement as fellow viewers, Daesal stepped onto the set with a solemn resolve.
Since it was the first round, NoName generously laid out her thoughts for everyone.
The viewers were beginning to relax.
Daesal, too, had been one of those standing on Ignis Velum without a moment’s hesitation.
[Fire Curtain definitely does look cooler, even at a glance.]
That was, until NoName uttered those calculated words.
Hearing that, even people who had chosen Ice Spear stampeded over to the Fire Curtain side.
Daesal, on the other hand, hesitated.
That wasn’t something NoName would normally say.
Someone obsessed solely with magical efficiency and scalability was making an aesthetic judgment like “cool”?
‘It’s definitely a trap!’
Sensing something suspicious, Daesal hurled himself toward the other side before the selection timer ran out.
No sooner had he switched sides than everyone who had chosen Fire Curtain vanished into the abyss.
[None of you have any convictions.]
“Haha...”
Whenever Daesal was about to forget, she reminded him again just how vicious she was.
[Combat Magic World Cup Round of 32, Match 13/16]
[1st Circle Light (Light) vs. 3rd Circle Diagon Kaido (Diagonal Slash)]
[How are you supposed to use Light magic in combat... It’s hilarious that something like this was selected as combat magic.]
Some viewers sensed something suspicious in her blatant advocacy of Diagon Kaido and chose Light magic instead this time.
[Diagon Kaido (Diagonal Slash)]
Unfortunately, that sort of trick didn’t work.
[Three people have been eliminated.]
[Five people have survived.]
In the end, the final three in NoName’s Combat Magic World Cup were about to be decided before it had even reached the end.
The next question was highly likely to be the last.
With only five viewers left in the vast space, the stage felt desolate.
Name came down from the stage and greeted the viewers.
“Congratulations. If I had it my way, I’d give manager privileges to all five of you.”
“Then couldn’t you appoint all five of us? Haha.”
A man gave an awkward laugh.
It was a tactless remark, but Daesal could fully understand how he felt.
They had barely survived after beating the slim odds and playing a game of reading the host’s intentions.
If he failed to become a manager over the difference of one final question, he would regret it for years to come.
“Are any of you unable to spare the time?”
At NoName’s question, all five remained silent. They had come prepared to give up their lives outside the stream if only they could become managers.
“I do have to keep my promise, at least. Instead, I’ll make the final question something else.”
She abruptly closed the Combat Magic World Cup window.
“Why did you close it?”
The five manager candidates, as well as the roughly 1,500 viewers who had never been curious about the combat-magic rankings in the first place, groaned because they wanted to see the ending.
It meant that there had been no point in running the content this far.
“The World Cup was just an excuse—you never intended to do anything but pick managers from the start...!”
NoName merely blinked at the sharp accusation.
It was frustrating not knowing what she was thinking.
“You’re all people of conviction. No matter what I said, you didn’t waver and trusted your own choices.”
It was just as Name had said.
Though they had once or twice tried to read her mood and deliberate over what to choose, in the end they had to rely solely on their own judgment.
“I want you to answer according to your convictions to the very end. Now, here’s the question.”
Name took a deep breath.
She naturally folded her arms and walked past the candidates.
Her small stature, not even reaching the chests of the other avatars, stood out conspicuously.
She exhaled once more. Name’s lips trembled. Her exhalation was uneven.
“Let’s make an assumption.”
She walked calmly before stopping in front of a man. It was the muscular man who had earlier asked if she could make all of them managers.
“You’ve been stranded in the mountains. There’s no water or food, and it’s a dark night with the sky thickly overcast.”
“Climbing a mountain at night is really dangerous.”
The man nodded. Name glanced at his nickname and asked him a question.
“Do you have a girlfriend, by any chance?”
“I do. Why?”
“Think of one person you love. You can think of your girlfriend, ‘hellsMonster.’ If you don’t have one, your family is fine.”
Name turned half a circle and headed toward the participant on the opposite side.
“The two of you are stranded like that. If you wait until the next morning, you’ll definitely be able to descend the mountain safely. But unable to bear the cold and hunger, you chose to go down.”
People slowly became absorbed in the little girl’s strangely specific storytelling.
“Because of that poor judgment of yours, while you were hurriedly descending the mountainside, your lover—or family member—was bitten by a venomous snake. Unless treated immediately, poison that will certainly kill them is spreading through their body in real time.”
“Oh dear.”
An exclamation came from somewhere.
“And you have two spells you can use.”
She summoned the blackboard item from her private room and began drawing a magic circle.
No one knew what it meant.
Name continued filling the white space with dense circles, lines, and twisting characters.
One could almost sense madness in her hands.
When the marker ran out of ink, she opened the cap of a new whiteboard marker and doggedly completed the magic circle.
“The first magic circle is a spell that can buy you one day right away. If you’re rescued safely the next day, you can at least receive treatment, but you’ll have missed the window, so you’ll waste away with a terminal illness and die within a month.”
“What a cruel situation.”
“That’s some potent venom.”
Soon afterward, Name pointed to the second magic circle.
However, despite being far larger and more complex than the first, this magic circle had a gaping hole in its center.
“The second magic circle is a spell that can completely detoxify the poison. It leaves no aftereffects and removes the poison perfectly.”
“Then isn’t the second one better?”
“But you don’t know the central rune needed to complete this magic circle at all. You might have to take a shot in the dark at one of the ten or twenty possibilities you can vaguely guess.”
Would they choose to guarantee only one more month of life, or to be fully saved at a low probability?
“B-but what if I only had one chance?”
Because, of all things, he was short on mana.
“Which one would you choose?”