Chapter 198: Damn

Nyx was the first to break the silence.

Then Luna followed, snorting with barely suppressed laughter before it spilled over.

"You’ve got one hell of a little sister," Nyx managed to mouth the words, wiping a tear from the corner of her eye.

Luna followed with a similar tone of voice. "Obsessed, clingy, loud, and terrifyingly committed. I can respect it. But also... damn. Just damn."

Kaiden rubbed the side of his head, sighing.

Across from them, Aria and Bastet didn’t laugh, but they weren’t exactly stone-faced either. Aria looked... unsure. She tilted her head, brows drawn in concern. Bastet, meanwhile, rested her chin on her fist, golden eyes narrowed in thoughtful amusement.

Then, Aria spoke.

"...Kai, you do know we’re not in the state of Alabama, right?"

Kaiden turned toward her, eyebrows lifting.

Aria didn’t back down. She didn’t look away. She met his gaze head-on, steady and unflinching, despite the clear nervousness flickering in her eyes.

He stared for a moment longer. Then sighed for a second time.

"It’s not like that. Alice is just..." He paused, searching for the right word. "Clingy. That’s all. She’s gonna grow out of it. For sure."

"She’s gonna grow out of it."

"For sure."

Nyx and Luna echoed in perfect sync, each word dripping with sarcasm.

Their matching looks said it all: You’re delusional.

Bastet finally chimed in as she tilted her head thoughtfully. "I don’t know much about human familial customs, but I’m pretty sure it’s not standard practice for the mother to have to pry her daughter off her son while she’s screeching about rather dying than being separated ever again."

Kaiden gave her a flat look.

"Thanks for the insight, Professor Bastet."

She gave him a feline grin. "I just voiced an innocent observation of mine, Master~"

He looked to the rest: Nyx’s amused smirk, Luna’s mischievous glint, Aria’s concerned brows, Bastet’s smug neutrality.

None of them looked ready to drop the subject.

They weren’t judging him. But they weren’t pretending this was normal either. Kaiden sighed the third time, heavier than ever before.

"Anyways... Let’s shift focus."

The girls laughed together at him running away, but didn’t press the matter any further.

A flicker of light shimmered into being above his palm.

The System window returned.

[New System Quest: Fangirl Bottleneck]

[...]

"This is what we’re dealing with now," Kaiden said.

"The system’s calling it a bottleneck..." Luna mused, stroking her chin in thought.

"Well, I mean, it clearly is a bottleneck. There’s no reason to put it more gently," Nyx added. "We have more than three times the needed views and income to reach rank 3, but we’re only one-tenth of the way to reach the fangirl requirement."

"But what else can we do?" Aria asked before continuing,

"Based on its own wording, which was ’the Successor must cultivate a following whose devotion stems from genuine connection and profound inspiration. Superficial engagement, while boosting views and income, does not translate into the deep admiration required for this metric.’ It clearly suggests that the fangirl metric is simply going to be slower to accumulate than the other two, no matter what we do."

Luna nodded in agreement. "You’re right, I believe. And we’ve already been trying to make Kai appeal to the horny sluts by doing variety content and also having things like your nurse RP focus on him."

*Clap!*

Nyx clapped her hands once, sharp and loud.

"Okay! Hear me out," she murmured with excited eyes.

"Instead of taking this side quest as us assuming that the system is saying we’re doing horribly... maybe we should take it as the system saying we’re just not doing enough."

Kaiden raised a brow. "Not enough?"

Nyx nodded. "Exactly! We’ve been dipping our toes into things, trying to be versatile, trying a little bit of everything. But the fangirl metric doesn’t reward ’a little of everything.’ It rewards obsession. We need to lean in, hard. Stop playing it safe and greedy."

Kaiden was a bit skeptical as he asked, "What do you suggest we do, then?"

Nyx leaned back in her chair, tapping a finger against her lips in exaggerated thought.

Silence hung for a beat.

Then her lips curled into a grin. Slow, confident, and utterly devilish.

"We need to rebrand."

"...Rebrand?" Aria asked, confused.

Luna didn’t speak. She just narrowed her eyes, her amusement gone, replaced with focused scrutiny. She knew Nyx well enough to recognize when her gears were turning fast.

Bastet remained silent but watchful. She didn’t know enough about human entertainment strategy to add to the conversation in any meaningful way for now, but she was clearly intrigued. After all, her master’s future growth potential was the topic being discussed before her.

Nyx nodded, "Rebrand, yes."

Her eyes were sharp now, the usual mischief replaced by genuine strategy. "Think back to that night at the sushi place. When Kaiden made us his Valkyries after the porn shoot."

Her gaze swept across the room, catching the gazes of the other two Valkyries.

"He told us his vision. That we were going to storm the world with content so bold, so captivating, so insane that no one would be able to ignore it. That we’d rise to the very top, not just in numbers, not just in influence, but in legacy. He wanted our faces etched into the damn mythos of this post-apocalypse world."

"And that’s perhaps just a tiny bit too ambitious. At least, for now. What we’re seeing now—what this bottleneck quest is telling us—is that there’s a consequence to trying to appeal to everyone at once."

Kaiden furrowed his brow, listening to his girlfriend intently.

"We’re spreading ourselves too thin," Nyx continued. "We’ve been trying to do it all. Cater to every fantasy, every viewer type, every demographic. Some content for women, some for men, some for the lonely, the horny, the curious, the bloodthirsty. And it’s worked. We dominate in views and income."

She lifted a finger.

"But that third metric? That devotion? It doesn’t care how wide we cast the net. It only cares about depth. About emotional entanglement. About fixation."

The air in the room shifted as her words sank in.

"So here’s what I’m proposing. We stop worrying about appealing to everyone on Planet Earth. We accept a drop in views and income. We narrow our focus. We build something targeted. Intimate. The kind of content that drills deep into the soul of a viewer and stays there."

A long silence followed her words.

No one said anything for a good bit.

Then Luna whispered, voicing her realization.

"... You want our adult content to solely focus on Kai instead of all of us."

Her voice wasn’t angry, but it wasn’t without weight. There was understanding there... and tension beneath it.

Aria added her own words with a pale face: "You no longer want to appeal to the male viewers."

Nyx didn’t deny it.

She nodded once.

"Look, even if our views and income got halved by losing every single male viewer overnight—which wouldn’t even be half since we’ve already established that the desperate chicks are more willing to pay for the ultimate fantasy of watching Kai with first POV and better resolution than a manmade camera could ever provide—we’d still be more than over the requirement to reach rank 3. Based on the numbers the system has put forth thus far, the female fans are enough. We’ll just need to rope many of them in."

Luna’s whisper came next.