After finishing a ranked game, Jian Rong opened the scoreboard and hit the report button for the player with the KDA of 1/7/8. He vented all of the suppressed insults that he couldn't let out in the game onto his keyboard, and an impressive, flowing 300-word mini essay appeared in the blink of an eye.
Then he whipped his head around, at the end of his patience. "If you have something to say, spit it out."
From the moment Jian Rong got back to the base until now, Zhuang Yibai had kept his eyes trained unwaveringly on him. Xiao Bai blinked and said, "There isn't really anything I wanna say..."
"In that case, you turn your head right back around for me."
"—Actually, I do have a question for you."
"Ask."
"Am I really allowed to ask it?"
"..."
Under Jian Rong's "do you want to die" glare, Xiao Bai rolled his gaming chair over to his side. In a very small voice, he asked bashfully, "It's just... you know, you and my ge... erm, ss—I don't really know how to phrase this... anyway, just... um... does your butt hurt?"
TTC's mid laner and support had a falling-out.
It went something like this: Jian Rong changed his stream profile picture to a super ugly photo of Xiao Bai captured during a match some years ago, back when he was in his dark past phase. Not to be outdone, Xiao Bai changed his profile picture to a photo of Lu Boyuan taken a few years ago, but it ended up attracting a bunch of comments that kept shouting "my husband was so handsome before too" under his Weibo.
During streams, neither of them interacted with each other. When they happened to be matched onto opposing sides during a ranked game, Jian Rong treated the bot lane like it was the mid lane, while Xiao Bai refused to admit defeat and kept visiting the mid lane with the jungler... and so on. They were all some childish, harmless ways to target each other.
"He came to the bot lane four times in ten minutes, I've never met someone so ridiculous before! He was just relying on the fact that you weren't there to furiously screw me over. Thankfully my ge went in for a checkup; if my ge was also duo queuing with him, I might as well have just AFKed that match." Xiao Bai complained, hand braced against the armrest of Pine's gaming chair. Then he lowered his head and took a sip from the milk tea that Pine had brought back for him.
Pine had just returned from renewing his contract at the club headquarters, and he was currently in the middle of solo queuing to fulfill his stream quota. As he skillfully scored last hits on minions, he asked, "So what exactly did you ask him."
Xiao Bai glanced at the webcam, which was lit up, and averted his eyes unnaturally. A long moment later, he finally muttered, "...Nothing really, it was just something tiny and irrelevant."
He was a frequent guest in Pine's stream by now, so when the fans heard that, they immediately started teasing him—
[Zhuang Yibai, you've changed. You have a little secret that you can't tell Pine.]
[They're so close to each other... Are they really not together?]
[This hardcore fan can pat my chest and tell you: definitely not, these two straight guys usually interact like this.]
Pine rarely checked the barrage when he was gaming, and he only kept the barrage helper open to give a little face to the spectators. When he sensed the weight leaning against him vanish, he turned his head and asked, "Where are you going?"
