Chapter 680: Spiteful Fangirls

"I hope he chokes on his tiny little wrinkly dick."

Leia’s voice came through the group call flat and venomous, the kind of anger that had stopped being loud two hours ago and calcified into baseline.

"On stream. In front of his fourteen viewers and his three fake girlfriends who clap like trained seals every time he gets a kill."

Sarah snorted despite herself. "He has way more than fourteen viewers. Like, tens of thousands more."

"I bet half of them are bots he bought to pad the numbers." Leia waved it off and leaned back in her chair, the creak audible through the mic. "You know what gets me? It’s not even the kill-stealing. Kill-stealing happens. It’s scummy but it’s a strategy I can understand. It’s a competition, after all. And it’s not even Ash. Ash is a clown. He’s an exhibitionist with a camera drone and an ego that writes checks his skill can’t cash. I can deal with clowns."

She paused.

"It’s the other one. Chinedu. That smug little wave he does every time they show up, like he and Kai are old friends who just happened to bump into each other at the same monster. ’Hey there!’ Like it’s casual. Like he’s not there on orders to suffocate Kai’s growth. That’s what pisses me off. Ash is at least honest about being a piece of shit. Chinedu pretends it’s all fun and games while he drives a spear through everything Kai and the girls worked for."

"His posture is really annoying," Sarah admitted.

"Thank you! He can suck on the clown’s wrinkly little dick for all I care. They’d make perfect butt buddies."

"You seem very fixated on wrinkly dicks today," Sarah noted.

"It’s not like I checked." Leia’s voice carried zero shame. "But I can tell. One look at the guy is enough. You can just see it in his face."

"Sure, Leia."

Sarah shook her head and let it go, because arguing with Leia about her alleged dick-detection abilities was a road that only led to worse places.

Sarah was curled up on her bed, watching Kai’s stream page refresh to the same dark screen it had been showing for the past couple dozen minutes. The little offline indicator sat there like a headstone. She refreshed again. Nothing.

She was angry too, for the record. She just didn’t need to curse about sucking wrinkly dicks every thirty seconds like some people.

Emilia hadn’t spoken in a while.

That was the part that worried Sarah more than anything Leia was saying. Leia loud was Leia normal. Leia was born mid-rant and would die mid-rant, and the people at her funeral would nod and say yes, that tracks.

Emilia quiet meant Emilia was building toward something.

"Em?" Sarah prodded gently. "You still there?"

"I’m here."

Two words. Clipped.

"Just... processing."

Leia’s rant paused. Even she had the self-awareness to recognize when the quiet one needed floor space.

The silence lasted about four seconds.

"He called Kai a fag," Emilia said.

Her voice was steady. Too steady.

"On stream. On a live broadcast, in front of however many thousands of people were watching that trash fire of a channel, Ash looked up at Kai and called him a fag. And nobody did anything. The Association didn’t flag it. His squad didn’t try to correct him. Chinedu stood right there and smiled."

"Em..."

"I’m not done."

Sarah closed her mouth.

"Kai’s stream hit one million concurrent viewers during the Borer Queen fight. One million. Do you understand what that means for a combat stream? Most S-tier awakened fighters with years of brand deals and production teams behind them don’t break six figures on their best day. Every team in the competition had the same stage, the same promotion, the same televised format backing them, plus their own individual promotions. Fifteen guilds with the same exposure. And Kai’s the one who hit seven figures, because nobody else is insane enough to fight monsters thirty levels above them and win."

She took a breath.

"The day before that, he averaged five hundred thousand across the full stream. Five hundred thousand people watching him navigate terrain, plan engagements, talk strategy with the girls. Not even fighting. Just existing in the field, and five hundred thousand people thought that was worth their afternoon."

"The numbers were climbing every day," Sarah added quietly. "After the rest day, when they came back and started pushing north into the high-level zones, I watched the analytics tick up in real time. Every fight was bigger than the last. Millions of people who’d never cared for Valhalla’s Sinners were suddenly watching this squad of rookies punch thirty levels above their weight class, and instead of dying, they were creating history."

"They were breaking conventions," Leia said, and her voice had shifted from angry to something more analytical. "The way awakened combat is supposed to work, you don’t fight twenty-eight levels up. You don’t even fight twenty levels up unless you’ve got S-tier with you and a full squad with redundant healers. Every guide, every training manual, every piece of conventional wisdom says you farm within your bracket and level steadily. That’s the way you don’t kill yourself."

"The viewership reflected it," Emilia said. "The streams were accelerating. Every fight that should’ve been impossible and wasn’t drew more people. The competition format gave them a stage, and Kai was putting on the kind of performance that makes careers."

"Was," Sarah said.

"Now he’s walking in circles. For hours. Picking targets, navigating carefully, spending twenty minutes filtering for the right monster, and then arriving to find a dozen New Dawn fighters already engaged with it." Sarah’s teeth clenched. "The stream was dead air. Beautiful dead air of a man being suffocated in real time, and the chat knew it. The mood shifted so fast. People were furious. They could see what was happening. Two interceptions in a row at targets Kai had specifically chosen? Nobody bought that it was coincidence."

"Because it wasn’t," Leia hissed. "That’s coordinated denial strategy. Magnus sent his guild’s entire rookie operation to shadow Kai, to steal every viable target in his range while farming those kills as a bonus. Classic resource denial. You don’t have to beat someone at full strength if you can starve them."

"And then the clown. Cooperating with New Dawn when Ashbound is third in the standings and New Dawn is first." Sarah’s voice carried the quiet fury of a woman who’d done the math and hated every digit. "They have zero reason to work together unless someone offered Ash a deal. Which means Magnus bribed the man who called Kai a slur on camera."

"I wonder why he cares so much for Kai... It’s not like he dates that bitch of a daughter of his or something." Leia muttered. "What was her name again... The eldest..."

"Selena Ashborn. And Kai would never date such a snobby bitch!" Sarah decreed.

The call went quiet again, all three of them sitting with the same ugly picture.

Then Emilia spoke.

"Do you remember when Kai hired us? He called us into a group chat. The three of us, his biggest fans, the girls who’d been moderating his streams for free since we were given the opportunity because we loved what he was building. And he said, ’I want to make this official. I’m offering each of you a hundred thousand a month as paid moderators and community managers for Valhalla’s Sinners.’"

Sarah remembered. She remembered the exact sound her tablet had made when it hit the floor because her hands had gone slack.

"A hundred thousand," Emilia repeated. "A month. For a job we were doing for free. For a job we were happy to do for free, because watching Kai and the girls was the best part of our day and getting to be part of it felt like winning a lottery we hadn’t entered."

"I cried," Sarah said simply. "I hung up, screamed for my mom, and cried for twenty minutes. She thought someone had died. Then she cried with me when she realized what was going on."

Leia huffed. "I didn’t cry."

"You screamed so loud your neighbor filed a noise complaint."

"That’s different. That’s joy expression. Culturally acceptable."

"You did it at three in the morning, Leia."

"I struggled to fall asleep that night."

Emilia didn’t laugh, despite the fact that normally, she’d be giggling loudly by now, full of joy.

"He didn’t have to do that. He could’ve kept us as volunteers forever and we would’ve stayed. He knew that. He offered the money because that’s who he is. He takes care of the people who are loyal to him."

Her voice dropped, still steady, still controlled.

"That’s the man they’re doing this to. A man who pays three fangirls more than most people earn in a year because he thought they deserved it. A man who fights monsters that should kill him so his girls can grow stronger. A man who turned off his stream, killed his own momentum, because the situation got so bad that continuing to broadcast meant letting his enemies set the terms of his content."

"Em..." Sarah started.

"I hope they die."

"Em..."

"Don’t ’Em’ me, Sarah." The softness in her voice had curdled into something that didn’t belong there. "I hope a monster finds them. I hope some disgusting creature crawls out of that mountain range with enough teeth to make every single one of those people understand what it feels like to be hunted. The way they’ve been hunting Kai."

Leia blinked.

Sarah forgot to breathe for a second.

"I hope Ash screams for help and nobody comes. I hope Chinedu waves at it and it bites his hand off. And I hope whoever’s controlling the camera keeps rolling so the whole world can watch."