Chapter 13
There’s one thing I’ve been noticing lately.
“Haven’t the viewers increased a little?”
Haven’t my average viewers gone up a bit lately?
-For real
-Seems like they have increased a little?
-New viewers, learn the rules before you speakㅋㅋ
In fact, they had already been inching upward a little.
But the viewer count had dropped sharply after New Year’s.
They must have disappeared to focus on their New Year’s resolutions or something.
Well, looking at the current viewer count, it seems most of them are back.
“I guess it’s time to step up now.”
-??
-You’d think his average viewership had gone up by 500
“What’s wrong with fifty people?”
Lately, my average has gone up by about fifty viewers.
Maybe there are a few more during Just Chatting? Anyway.
Even if it’s not noticeable normally, the viewer count is obvious when I’m gaming.
To begin with, going from 200 to 250 is a 125% increase, isn’t it?
“At this rate, big-name VTuber status is practically within reach.”
As expected, perhaps humans are monsters that live off a sense of achievement, because my energy rose on its own.
-We welcome big-name Wayoㅋㅋ...
-Kyaㅋㅋㅋㅋ
-Anything but big-name Wayo
-Please stay our little streamer
“I don’t think I can stay a little streamer. At this point, I’m, uh, maybe mid-sized?”
Unfortunately, I’d grown too big to be one of the small-time VTubers.
Oh no, I started streaming as a hobby—what if this turns into my livelihood?
-This bastard’s getting cockyㅋㅋ
-“Mid-sized,” my ass
-A mid-sized company is one where the director gets around by parachute, yeah
“Anyway, I’m delighted that more quiet gentlemen have been showing up lately. That must be thanks to how well I’ve been doing.”
-??
-?
-I want to smack that nose back down, fuck
“In that spirit, I’d like to hold a special event for all of you.”
-What are we doing??
-Is something big coming??
-What is it?
They were insulting me just a moment ago, but the word “event” had them interested immediately.
I grinned at their simple-mindedness and put something up on the screen.
“Ta-da.”
As a matter of fact, everything we’d talked about until now had been buildup for this.
I’d been having a hard time deciding what game to play lately, so I downloaded something from the internet.
[Roulette]
“I’ve always brought the games myself, right? So I’ll give you a chance to choose, too.”
-You fucking chore-dumperㅋㅋ
-What’s your reason to exist if you don’t even find games??
-Since there probably won’t be much Rell anyway, let’s put it in now, yeah?
“Ah, sure.”
First, I added LoL to the roulette.
More importantly, how did they know I was dumping my chores on them?
Ha~ I keep saying, people are getting sharper by the day.
-ㅋㅋㅋ
-Have some restraint, fuck
-This bastard, seriously;;
[Thank you for the 1,000-won donation, ㅇㅇ!]
Can you add co-op games too?
“Of course~”
Saying that, I made a small gesture with one hand.
For reference, I’d invested enough in VTuber Wayo’s equipment that it was barely any different from a big-name VTuber’s.
One of those pieces of equipment was hand tracking.
My fingers moved smoothly: my thumb and index finger came together to form a circle, while the other three fingers stretched out.
-That hand sign, fuckㅋㅋ
-This money-grubbing bitch;;
-Oh yeah? Let’s see you die today
If you want to add something, go right ahead.
Wayo on the screen grinned from ear to ear.
-I’ll add a truly shitty game
-Are dating sims allowed too??
“If it’s a dating sim that can be streamed, sure.”
It’s a roulette, after all, right?
And variety streamer Wayo could handle any game.
Horror games might be a little difficult, well, but how scary could a game like that really be?
[Thank you for the 1,000-won donation, ㅇㅇ!]
Let’s work at the pizza parlor
[Thank you for the 1,000-won donation, PleaseHorrorGames!]
Please play Toy Playtime
[Thank you for the 1,000-won donation, WayoFuneral….]
It has to be White Day
“...There are quite a lot of horror games?”
-ㅋㅋㅋ
-Let’s really die today
I’d expected it, but the roulette was being filled with all kinds of horror games at a frightening pace.
From famous horror games even I knew to bizarre RPG Maker horror games.
In the midst of it, major titles like PUBG and Minecraft took up spots too, along with dating sims I’d never played at all.
…Did these people really have this many games they wanted to see?
Now that I was actually getting recommendations, I felt a little guilty about all those times I’d ended up booting up Rell no matter what.
[Thank you for the 2,000-won donation, ㅇㅇ!]
Add Pizza Parlor 2 to the pile
Let’s get into a horror gameㅋㅋㅋ
Even now, the roulette continued to pile up.
Seeing donations accumulate at a level unbelievable for a tiny stream made me wonder if they’d been saving their money all this time.
“Hmm, should we stop taking suggestions soon?”
More importantly, I really should stop accepting them soon.
The game list had already piled up on the roulette until the text was almost impossible to read.
…I wouldn’t have to look for games for a while.
I could just pick something playable from here and go with it, couldn’t I?
Admiring my own scheme for killing two birds with one stone, I closed donations for the time being.
-Ah
-Makko, please
-I was in the middle of recharging;;
“I’ll do this again later.”
-ㅋㅋㅋ Sweet, huh?
-Wow, how much is this?
“Looks like I’ll be slicing up some beef for dinner tonight.”
I cackled as I looked at the roulette.
I’d received almost a record amount in donations.
Had I ever received this much before?
The most recent time I’d received anything close to this much was when I played Outwind.
After I died, I’d been showered with donations full of insults.
But today, the stream had only just begun.
Was this what wealth felt like?
The roulette, with each vote costing 1,000 won, had 163 votes on it in total.
That number was possible because big spenders had dumped 30,000 and 50,000 won at a time into their votes.
Still, it was a little worrying that more than half the roulette consisted of horror games….
-All right, let’s get into a horror gameㅋㅋㅋ
-Horror game, let’s goㅋㅋ
-Let’s cry once today and make this stream legendaryㅋㅋㅋ
That was fine as long as I didn’t land on one.
“Who says I’m going to land on a horror game? You all seem to be counting your chickens before they hatch….”
This Wayo was a person chosen by God, after all.
'Though I’ve never been to church.'
Still, hoping He would answer, I spun the roulette.
Whirrrrrrr-!
The roulette began spinning merrily.
-Please be a horror game
-Let’s go to the pizza parlorㅋㅋㅋ
-We have to escape the toy company, right?
“Please be Rell…!”
-??
-?
-This fucking bitchㅋㅋ
The more the chat stirred, the more the roulette gradually slowed down.
Wh, irrrrr.
And just as it slowed enough for the words on the roulette—previously impossible to make out—to become legible,
The roulette began to stop over one horror game that took up the largest section, 20 percent of the wheel.
-Ohㅋㅋㅋㅋ
-Is it landing there?
-Let’s go to the pizza parlorㅋㅋㅋㅋ
It was a famous game.
A horror game where you work security at a pizza parlor and run from toys.
…I remembered it being pretty scary.
Should I ask Aseong to buy me some calming pills?
No, would he be asleep by now?
…So what if he is? His growth period is over; I’ll just wake him.
As I imagined Aseong, who should be sleeping, freaking out if he heard that, the roulette slowly stopped moving.
Then.
“Huh?”
-Uh
-Huh?
It passed over the horror-game section and landed precariously on the one after it.
-What the fuck is that ㅆㅂ
-???
I’d made the roulette hoping everyone would play a horror game, or a dating sim, or some legendary piece of trash….
But there were some things that weren’t any of those.
[PawnWorld]
-??
-?
-Ah, Pawn-sensei, fuck...
“What game was this again?”
One of the less familiar games had been selected.
**
PawnWorld.
I’d thought it looked a little unfamiliar, but after searching for the game, I realized I knew it.
“Ah, I only know what it is.”
It was built around the premise that you crash-land on a planet while traveling through space.
You overcome every kind of unfair bullshit, develop your technology, gather resources, advance your tech, and eventually build a spaceship from scratch and escape.
Wasn’t it even a game that had gotten fairly popular on Chzzk for a while?
It had already been quite popular among enthusiasts before that, too.
-It is famous, at least;;
-Wow, it actually landed thereㅋㅋㅋ
-Can we spin the roulette again??
Come to think of it, there had occasionally been people asking me to play it, so I guess the heavens had helped me out today.
Looking at it, the odds had been under one percent.
-Please, a horror game;;
-If I donate tens of thousands, can we vote again?
“As the saying goes, life is full of twists and turns. Things don’t normally go the way you want, do they?”
Honestly, I thought it was a huge relief that I didn’t have to play a horror game….
But wasn’t this game kind of huge? I had no idea how long it took to beat.
I could just do one light first run for now, though.
“Am I buying all the DLC, too?”
-Nope, just play vanilla at first
-It’d be good to buy one or two
-There are some essential DLCs, though
“Really?”
Hmm, DLC, huh.
Since they were on sale anyway, should I just buy them all?
They were even 50% off, which made it extremely tempting.
“I made a lot of money today, so I’ll buy them all.”
-Kyaㅋㅋㅋㅋ
-Fuck, we told you to buy a horror game
-Wayo, miss, you aren’t even hiding it anymore
-As expected of a rich lady
“I’ll make it back in donations~”
-??
-ㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋ
-What a shameless bitch..
Swipe, swipe, swish.
Just like that, I swiped my card and bought the entire game, DLC included, in an instant.
First, I took a rough look at what kind of game it was.
-Do you study beforehand??
-Aren’t you going to headbutt your way through from scratch?
“Ah, I heard this was one of those unfair games.”
There are certain types of games that basically say, ‘If you don’t know, suffer.’
PawnWorld, as I knew it, was one of those.
-It’s fine if you lower the difficulty
-Try the default difficulty first?
Of course, if I lowered the difficulty as chat suggested, I could learn even while taking hits from the unfairness.
But what kind of Taejin-like idea was that?
I casually looked away from the chat window.
-Aww, come onㅋㅋㅋㅋ
-Lower the difficulty, fuck
-This stubborn bitch;;
Yeah, no thanks~ I’m going to clear it on the highest difficulty and then act smug about it~
So I quickly stuffed the basic strategy into my head, then diligently went through the tutorial too.
-Only reads the manual at times like this..
-Try acting like this normally
-Ugh, fuck, he’s stubborn as hell
“Ah, should we open a betting pool?”
-Do we look like gamblers? Just open it first
-Treating us like people, fuck;; I’m salty, so I’m betting on the favorite
-If we’ve done this much big-brain math, you should be able to clear it, right??
Before starting the game, I opened the betting pool first.
“Everyone has quite a few points, huh?”
There had to be some people who’d gone bankrupt after my recent Rell winning streak.
Yet here they were, betting with whatever points they’d somehow scraped together.
-Shut up
-Fuck;;;
-Upvote if you made bank betting against himㅋㅋ
Anyway, only after taking their bets did I finally press the button to start the game in earnest.
After fiddling with various initial settings, the character-creation screen soon appeared.
“Hmm.”
PawnWorld began by randomly selecting three characters to crash-land on the planet.
Their abilities were one thing, but I had to name them too.
A sense for naming characters was practically a streamer’s obligation.
That was why ordinary streamers tended to rack their brains at this moment.
-All right, let’s bring in Seongwonㅋㅋㅋㅋ
-Seongwon hypeㅋㅋ
-It’s time to see Seongwon hyung
Fortunately, that wasn’t something that happened on our stream.
"Yeah, well, we'll go with Seongwon."
Shall we add Seongwon again for the first time in a while?