The feed loaded.
The viewer count was already climbing. One thousand. Seven thousand. Twenty thousand in the time it took Sarah to blink, the number ticking upward so fast the digits blurred, because Valhalla’s Sinners going live after an hour of silence was the kind of event that traveled through notification chains like a shockwave.
But the numbers weren’t what mattered.
The screen was.
Kaiden’s stream showed his perspective. The camera captured what he saw, and what he saw was a basin of dark stone far below, crawling with movement. Monsters. Dozens of them, segmented bodies and bladed limbs pouring across the basin floor in a tide of chitin.
And in the background, something massive. A creature the size of a large building, mineral-plated, six-eyed, smashing the ground with enough force to send fissures racing through the stone. Every step it took cratered the earth beneath it.
"What’s going on?" Emilia yelped.
Sarah’s eyes were already scanning. The camera angle, the height, the downward perspective - Kai was on a ridge, high above the depths below, looking down at it like a man watching ants from a rooftop.
Then... Her eyes widened.
"Wait, there’s people down there!" Sarah shouted. "Those are fighters! Are those... is that New Dawn?!"
"The suckers!" Leia’s voice was sharp and immediate. She leaned forward, chair creaking. "That’s the two butt buddies’ teams! They’re all in the basin with those... what are those things?"
The chat was already moving fast. A wall of text scrolling at inhuman speed, tens of thousands of viewers pouring in and reacting to the same image: Kaiden Grey, standing above a battlefield where his enemies were surrounded by monsters and doing nothing just watching.
The same thought went through the minds of everyone who saw the stream.
’Why is he just watching?’
One hundred thousand viewers. The number hadn’t stopped climbing since the feed went live, and every new arrival found the same scene: chaos below, stillness above, and the growing, sickening realization that the stillness was the point.
Then Kaiden spoke.
"My beautiful angels."
His voice came through the stream audio warm and tender, the kind of tone a man used when he was proud of the people around him. The camera shifted as he turned to address his girls, and for a moment the basin disappeared, replaced by a glimpse of Luna’s grin and Calypso’s tail and Aria’s silver hair catching grey light.
"Our fellow awakened combatants are in a life-or-death situation." His tone was measured, the voice of a man addressing a civic responsibility. "It is our duty to help them out."
Sarah’s blood went cold.
Because she knew that voice.
"Oh my god," Leia breathed. "Oh my god!"
The camera turned back to the basin.
Kaiden shifted his stance, and the stream’s audio picked up something that made the viewers go silent at once.

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