NOVEL NEXT Chapter 639: That's A Streamer
"So… You did it with them, huh?" Amber grinned at me while we were relaxing in the recreation room.
Amber was seated on my lap and cuddled comfortably against me while Ries was busy with the games console.
And before you ask, no, Amber wasn't doing anything lewd, we were just cuddling and watching Ries play her game on the large screen.
I turned to give her a knowing look, "I knew it… You orchestrated it, didn't you?"
She placed her finger beside her lip cheekily, "Well… I wouldn't go so far as to say I orchestrated it… They merely told me what they wanted and I gave them the push~"
Yeah sure… In other words, she caused it.
I reached forward and pinched her chin with my free hand, causing her to let out a yelp of surprise.
I then pulled forward and gave her a kiss, my tongue darting out to give her lips a lick before pulling back.
My blonde haired lover was still lost in the surprise kiss I gave her so I turned my attention back to Ries.
She was currently playing one of the FPS games and I could easily tell she was really good at it. And this wasn't just my personal bias because she's my lover but my actual opinion as a gamer.
Right now, she was playing the PvP mode so she was currently in a match against other players and they were competing in a free for all match against each other in an arena.
In typical Ries fashion, she had opted to be the heavy weapons person and had chosen a loadout that consisted of a light machine gun and as many explosives as the game allowed her to carry.
While she might move slower than the other players due to her choice of armaments, she makes up for it with expert tactical positioning and also complete understanding of all the weapons in the game.
I watched as she set up two claymores at the entrances of the ruined building she was bunkering herself in before she ascended to the second floor. At the top of the stairs, she placed another claymore before moving towards the wall where the windows were.
From here, she mounted her light machine gun at the window and took aim at a group of players that were in the midst of a shootout with each other in a plaza in front of her building.
Her tail flicked to the side for a moment before she pressed the button on her controller that made her character unleash a hail of bullets down at the clueless players.
In an instant, the kill feed was updated with Ries's name appearing five times in quick succession.
"Wahahahahaha!!! Die you little pieces of trash!! Ahahahahaha!!" She laughed heartily.
Several of the remaining players tried to shoot back at her while the rest fled to look for cover.
She prioritised the ones who were targeting her first and three more names joined the kill feed as her newest victims.
She then had to duck back down behind cover as she needed to reload and the players peeked out from the cover to lay suppressive fire on her.
But since this was a free for all, those guys only opened themselves up to being targeted by other players taking advantage of the distraction, cutting down their numbers dramatically.
When Ries's character finished the reloading animation of her light machine gun, she mounted the weapon on the window once again to spray down a hail of lead on the players below.
She managed to kill two more before a sudden explosion came from the floor below, adding another victim to the list indicating her claymore had been set off.
She immediately ceased firing and moved towards the stairs, just in time to catch one of the players pushing through the smoke cloud of the claymore as they took advantage of the opening the previous victim created.
The other player didn't even have time to raise their own weapon before Ries deleted them with her light machine gun, the other player's avatar dropping onto the ground as it ragdolled back down the stairs.
Another explosion came from below and added one more to her kill counter while she started to reload.
Knowing that she would be in a bad position if someone else were to come up the stairs at that moment, Ries retreated back towards the window again to put distance between her and the stairs.
That was when we saw someone zooming through the plaza and melting through the group of players that still remained below.
The kill feed quickly scrolled up as that player blasted their way through the crowd, gunning them down and taking cover to reload before continuing to the next group.
And the direction this person was moving in just so happens to be the building that Ries was bunkered down in.
She must have recognised that the player was also aiming for her and quickly laid down fire on them.
I was expecting them to be gunned down quickly but that player's avatar started moving extremely erratically as they combined jumping, leaning and crouching the avatar to dodge the hail of bullets raining down on them.
Heck, they even did a three sixty spin at one point just to make Ries think they were running away to cause her to aim in the wrong direction before they slid behind a wall for cover.
Ries then switched to a grenade and threw it behind the wall that player was hiding behind, only to see the player taking advantage of the lag time her avatar had in the animation of her throwing the grenade and switching back to her main gun to run out of their cover.
The fact that this player managed to get past all of that and reach Ries's building without dying was already a feat by itself.
"Fucking bitch!" Ries swore as she made her character reload while moving away from the stairs.
I wasn't sure why she was that worried since she still had a claymore planted at the stairs so even if that enemy player came up, they would be blown up by it anyway.
The answer came when that player jumped up onto the landing of the stairs before doing what could only be a slide cancel into another jump.
All of us watched as that player avatar was flung forward faster than what should have been normal speeds and the claymore exploded harmlessly behind them.
Ries was still stuck in her reloading animation for her light machine gun so she tried to switch to her secondary weapon, only for the enemy player to gun her down within a second and eliminating her.
The words 'SonicSlayer eliminated you' popped up on the screen.
"Ahhhhh!!! Bastard! Bitch!" Ries swore, kicking her legs on the ground in frustration.
At least she didn't throw the controller or smash the console…
Amber giggled at her, "You got owned pretty badly huh?"
Ries turned around to scowl at her, "Shut up! You don't even know who that guy is!! That's fucking SonicSlayer!!"
Amber tilted her head, "Is that supposed to mean something?"
"Yes!! That bastard is the top gaming streamer right now!! Arrghhh!! He's definitely streaming right now!! If I killed him, everyone would have seen how good I was!!"
That piqued my interest, "Are they really good?"
Ries turned to me, "Are you kidding Boss? I'm not exaggerating when I say they're the best! Look!"
She switched the screen to browse the GalaNet and navigated to the streaming site, GalaStream, to search up 'SonicSlayer' before tapping on the first result that popped up.
We were then shown a stream of the same game that Ries had been playing but from the other player's perspective. That player had already moved on after killing Ries's character and was in the midst of gunning down another player unfortunate enough to cross their path.
Ries then pointed at a number counter below, "There!! Look! That's the number of live viewers right now!!"
My gaze drifted downwards and…
"One 'Q' plus?" I muttered.
What does that even mean?
Ries, mistaking me for understanding what it meant, nodded, "That's right!! That's one quadrillion live viewers right now!! And this isn't even their normal streaming time!! That's live viewers Boss! Not followers!!"
Holy crap… Ok, yeah… That is indeed insane…
I remember Ragbar and Valiea having like… Twenty billion followers? This streamer's current viewers were already multiple times of their total follower count.
That's really insane…
I can't even imagine what a crowd of a quadrillion people will look like… That's like… More than one hundred and twenty thousand times the population of Earth in my universe.
If every planet had the same number of people, this streamer would have one hundred and twenty thousand planets worth of people watching them at this very instance.
Holy fucking shit…
Damn… Now I'm wondering how profitable streaming is…
Should we do one too?