"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.
"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."

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