Chapter 761: Scary Stream

The private wing was quieter with the team gone.

Kira and Rika had set up at the long table where the gear had been laid out an hour ago. Tablets, phones, two mugs of lukewarm coffee they’d made themselves because neither of them knew where anything was in this kitchen. The gear was gone. The team was gone. The only thing left was the feed projected from their interface.

They’d watched streams before. Thousands. New Dawn’s content division produced numerous awakened combat broadcasts, each one professionally shot, multi-angle, with commentary overlays and post-production polish. Rika had edited most of them personally. Kira had handled the scheduling and distribution. They knew what combat footage looked like.

This was different.

The feed was first-person. Kaiden’s perspective, raw, no overlay, no commentary track, no safety net of professional distance. When the Granite Tyrant had charged, the camera didn’t cut to a wide shot. It stayed locked to his eyes as forty tons of armored predator filled the frame and the audio was nothing but crunching stone and Luna screaming something anatomically creative at a monster that couldn’t understand her.

Rika flinched when Calypso took a hit that sent her sliding across the creature’s back. Kira’s hand found her sister’s under the table.

They’d never held hands during a New Dawn broadcast. Not once in all their years of producing combat content.

"They’re fine," Kira said.

"I know."

"Luna’s laughing."

"I can hear her."

On screen, Kaiden shifted stances and the siphoning field turned the Tyrant’s exposed wound into a faucet. The chat was moving too fast to read.

Forty-one seconds later, the Granite Tyrant collapsed into Bastet’s molten pool, and the twins exhaled at the same time.

"Okay." Rika pulled her hand back and straightened in her chair. "We need to get started."

"We’ve been at it all morning."

"You haven’t." Rika’s eyes found her sister with surgical precision. "You ended makeup early so you could shadow the boss around the building like a puppy."

"That’s legitimate assistant duties! That’s literally part of the job."

"Your job was helping me prep six women for a combat sortie. You did Luna’s face, who two seconds into it told you that you’re bothering her focus and then you suddenly had urgent secretary business."

Kira opened her mouth and a very convincing argument almost came out. Then she saw Rika’s expression and the argument retreated to safety.

"...Okay."

"So." Rika slid a tablet across the table. "You’re taking the forum audit. The mod team flagged forty-something posts overnight that need review."

"Forty?!"

"Yep. Extract all useful information and summarize it into points I can digest easily."

"Gh!"

Kira accepted the tablet and buried her grievances in scrolling.

They got to it.

The feed continued on Rika’s display, a secondary screen now instead of the main event. Every few minutes, a sound would pull their attention back. The wet crack of Calypso’s axe. A bass rumble that meant the next target had opinions about being hunted. Luna’s voice cutting through the chaos with language that would’ve gotten them into big trouble at New Dawn if it made its way into the video that would be published after the stream ended.

Here, it was just one of the many highlights.

Their eyes would flick to the feed, they’d wince, and they’d go back to what they were doing.

The door to the private wing opened softly.

Alexandra came in carrying a tray. Cookies, still warm, arranged neatly around a small pot of fresh coffee. She was dressed for duty, her hair pulled back, her movements quiet and practiced.

Kira looked up. "Oh, you don’t have to! We’re just employees, really. Don’t trouble yourself."

Alexandra smiled and set the tray down between their tablets.

"You’re working so hard for my friends’ sake."

"It’s just our job," Rika said, though her eyes had already drifted to the cookies.

"When was the last time either of you slept a full night?"

The twins looked at each other. The honest answer involved a number that would’ve only served to drive the maid’s point home, so neither spoke it.

Alexandra’s smile didn’t change. She just nudged the tray a little closer.

They took the cookies.

"Do you watch the feeds?" Kira asked, biting into one. Her eyes widened. These were excellent.

Alexandra shook her head. "I can’t handle the violence very well."

She said it simply, without apology, and moved to collect their old mugs.

The twins didn’t press. They knew who Alexandra was. They knew what had happened to her, and who had saved her. Alexandra didn’t want to watch the violence. Her focus was on making sure no one came home to an empty room.

On the feed, Kaiden’s team found their next target. The chat counter ticked past two million live viewers.

Kira and Rika ate their cookies, drank fresh coffee that was significantly better than what they’d made themselves, and kept at it.

...

The hours bled together.

Rika’s production grid sprawled across three tablet screens. Kira’s forum summary grew from bullet points into a document she was quietly proud of, even though she’d never admit that the forty posts had turned into sixty-two once she started pulling threads.

The coffee pot emptied twice. Alexandra refilled it both times without being asked, appearing and disappearing with a timing that made the twins wonder if she had spatial powers of her own.

The mod team was on fire. Kira could see the chat activity through the analytics dashboard and whoever these three women were, they ran a tight operation. Hate comments vanished in seconds. Hype trains were stoked at the exact right moments. Leia dropped an analytical breakdown of the team’s hunting pattern mid-chat that spawned its own comment chain four thousand messages deep.

Membership messages, that is.

Kira flagged it for the summary doc. Rika glanced over, read two lines, and nodded.

In the background, Alexandra hummed while she dusted the shelves. A simple melody, light and absent-minded, the kind of tune someone carried without realizing it.

...

The door banged open at sunset.

Luna came through first, talking before she was fully inside, her voice carrying the energy of a woman who had been screaming at monsters for eight hours and had not yet found a reason to stop.

"- and then it ROLLED, Cali, it actually rolled on top of you, and you just held its whole body up with one arm while Kai carved through its spine from below, that was the sickest thing I’ve ever -"

"Darling was magnificent." Calypso followed her in, axe slung across her back, dried ichor flaking off her armor with every step. A bruise the size of a dinner plate covered her left shoulder and she was smiling like it was a trophy. "The way he transitioned from Gluttony into Wrath mid-grapple... I felt the heat from across the beast’s back."

"Stop simping."

"Never!"

The rest of the team filed in behind them. Bastet and Nyx debating the timing of a spatial compression, Aria holding Kaiden’s hand as she walked, her hair catching the last of the daylight from the corridor windows, her face saying she could’ve been walking through a sewer and it wouldn’t have mattered as long as her fingers were laced through his.

They were beaten up. Exhausted.

But the mood was electric.

The group settled into the private wing like a tide coming in. Armor started coming off. Luna dropped onto the couch and groaned. Calypso leaned her axe against the wall with a clang.

Then stomachs took priority.

"Blondie Bestie." Nyx turned to Alexandra, who had been watching the procession with a warm smile. "What’s for dinner?"

Alexandra blinked. The warm smile turned innocent.

"Nothing?"

The room went still.