Demonic Pornstar System novel Chapter 717

Chapter 717: A Strange Feeling

The Ironscale Charger hit the ground with a wet crunch and didn’t get back up.

Brittany pulled her blade free, flicked the ichor off the edge in a single practiced motion, and exhaled. Her arms burned and her mana reserves were low enough to feel it in her teeth, and it was the best she’d felt in months.

Trisha lowered her hands from across the clearing. The last of her ranged volley fizzled out, the air still shimmering where the bolts had punched through the Charger’s flank to pin it in place for Brittany’s killing blow. She was breathing hard, sweat cutting lines through the dust on her face, and she was smiling.

"Clean," Trisha said.

"Clean," Brittany agreed.

They’d been hunting for three days.

Three days of waking up without a comm buzzing in their ears, without Ash’s voice telling them which zone to farm, which angles to play for the camera drones, which fights to pick based on content value rather than experience yield.

Three days of just being fighters.

The mountains were beautiful and brutal, the kind of terrain that killed people who weren’t paying attention and rewarded people who were. The air was thin enough at this altitude to make every breath a conscious act, and the monsters that roamed the upper elevations were stronger and meaner than anything in the basin below.

Brittany loved it.

She cleaned her blade on a patch of moss and sheathed it, rolling her shoulders to work out the tension. Her body was sore in the good way, the deep muscle ache of a woman who had spent three days doing exactly what she was designed to do.

"You know what’s weird?" she said.

Trisha was checking her mana levels on her interface, eyes swiping through numbers with the easy familiarity of a ranged fighter who lived and died by resource management. "What?"

"Nobody’s watching."

Trisha looked up.

"I don’t mean stream viewers," Brittany said. She sat on the dead Charger’s flank, which was probably disrespectful to the monster but it was flat and she was tired. "I mean nobody’s watching us. Like, watching-watching. Ash used to have us on camera feeds twenty hours a day. Content review meetings. Performance evaluations based on viewer engagement. Remember when he told you to switch to a tighter chest piece because the analytics showed your viewer retention went up when you showed more skin?"

Trisha’s mouth pressed flat. "I remember."

"Kaiden didn’t even look at our gear. He looked at our levels, asked about our abilities, and told us that he believes we know what to do." Brittany leaned back on her palms. "That was it. Three sentences and he moved on."

"He has a lot on his plate."

"It’s not that." Brittany shook her head. "It’s that he genuinely doesn’t care. It’s an ’it’s irrelevant’ kind of not caring. We could be ugly as sin and he’d have said the same three sentences."

Trisha sat down across from her, cross-legged, and looked at the sky. "We’re not ugly as sin, though."

"No," Brittany said. "We’re not."

They weren’t. Both of them knew it the way all attractive women knew it, the way you knew the color of your own eyes. Brittany had the kind of body that content algorithms were designed to amplify, and Trisha’s features had graced enough promotional material to wallpaper a guild hall. Their looks had opened doors for them, and then those same doors had locked behind them and become cages.

"His girls didn’t even blink," Trisha said. "When we showed up. Luna looked through us like furniture. Calypso didn’t acknowledge we existed. Aria gave us a nod that was basically a receipt."

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