Winds of Change (2)
If I had to describe the state of the gallery right now... yeah, it looked almost identical to back then. Specifically, back when the Heroes had launched that small-scale retaliatory invasion. Back then, a horde of forum users had shrieked in terror, copy-pasting desperate spam over and over while panicked demon lords running for their lives threw total fits across the board.
Yet there was one difference—or rather, a massive difference.
"Why is the gallery so..."
...Clean?
The question tumbled past my lips because the usual troll posts were nowhere to be found. Even after hitting refresh over and over, combing through page after page of the board, barely one troll thread surfaced for every fifty posts. For the Demon Lord Gallery—a community that ordinarily maintained a miraculous one-to-one-to-one ratio of normal posts, shitposts, and pure malicious agitation—this was nothing short of a divine miracle.
Some of the gallery's most notorious trolls were degenerates who wouldn't stop shitposting even while their own castles were being sacked by Heroes, gleefully utilizing their final moments to slander other demon lords who had fallen before them. One lunatic had even recorded his own decapitation at the hands of a Hero and uploaded the uncensored footage straight to the board. Madmen like that were practically a daily occurrence here.
Yet now, right in the middle of this massive, blazing scandal, those very same trolls were dead silent.
From an omniscient demon lord's perspective, it was utterly incomprehensible.
Having posted a thread brimming with bewilderment at the sudden outbreak of civility in the Demon Lord Gallery, my notifications lit up with several replies within seconds.
Users I hadn't seen in a while—people with whom I had forged a strange, begrudging bond over time—responded with their usual fiery enthusiasm. Reading through their comments one by one, I pieced together the broad strokes of the situation and fired off a rapid barrage of follow-up questions.
Anyone else might have cursed me out as a helpless newbie too lazy to search the archives, but who cared? I wielded the almighty, invulnerable shield of being a gallery novice.
Goo-goo gaga, I'm a newbie. Answer my questions, please and thank you.
With answers riddled with unfamiliar terms like "Soul Binding," "Annihilation," and "Complete Annihilation," I had no choice but to hastily type out another inquiry. It served as a stark reminder of just how little I actually knew about Pandemonium.
A brief comment brawl erupted, but it didn't last long. Before long, Odin delivered a bundle of documents straight to my inbox.
To summarize: demon lords originating from Pandemonium had a fragment of their soul bound to Pandemonium itself. Even if they met total destruction or death in their native dimensions, they could resurrect within Pandemonium's walls. That was why there were lunatics who kept browsing the gallery even as Heroes lopped their heads off.
This time, however, the playing field had drastically shifted.
The reason the trolls had gone silent was remarkably simple: even demon lords didn't have three or four spare lives lying around.
Until now, they had the formidable backing of Pandemonium and the solid life insurance of having their souls bound to its core. That safety net had emboldened them to troll and stir up chaos with joyous abandon, as if tomorrow didn't exist. Now, both safeguards were gone. In other words, etiquette and morality had been forcibly beaten into the trolls through shock therapy. That was the current reality of the gallery.
Never mind the minor detail that this "shock therapy" had crossed the line into sheer, unadulterated terror.
"Brutal. Absolutely ruthless."
Having pieced together the state of affairs, one question remained in my mind. It made sense that the trolls were keeping quiet because they were literally being shredded in real time. But why were certain veteran fixed-nicks—who were every bit as mischievous as those trolls—acting so subdued?
Synthesizing what Moses had told me in Pandemonium with my conversation with Solomon, what was currently taking place was almost certainly a "cull." A process to weed out the useless demon lords before the Hero subjugation began, executed by forces hailing from Hell. It was a move that killed two birds with one stone: resolving friction between Pandemonium and Hell while trimming the fat to leave only useful demon lords behind.
The methods were undeniably extreme, but it was certainly the most decisive and effective solution available. Not that I had any right to complain about brutality, given that none of this harmed me in the slightest.
In short, useless demon lords were being purged in real time. Yet certain registered users never fell into that "useless" category. One glance at their posts and comments was enough to glean their seniority, and whenever those fixed-nicks showed up in the Arena, their raw power operated on an entirely different plane compared to ordinary demon lords.
They could have stirred up trouble to their hearts' content without facing any consequences. So why were they holding back?
That lingering doubt didn't last very long. Almost as if they had merely been biding their time, mock-troll threads by the fixed-nicks suddenly began flooding the board.
As expected, the gallery denizens never failed to meet expectations. Threads started by fixed-nicks began filling up the Best Posts board at a ridiculous pace—fast enough to make one suspect an upvote bot.
(Upvote Bot: A dimensional coordinate randomizer previously manufactured by a mage-turned-demon lord. It allowed multiple logins from various dimensions in an instant to mass-upvote posts.)
Watching the forum unfold, my three or four months of experience browsing this board warned me that something was brewing. A colossal pile of firewood was being stacked, and all that remained was for someone to toss in a match.
My gut instinct was spot on.
Starting with the fall of that user crying out Solomon's name, desperate gallery users consumed by a genuine "I'm not going down alone" mentality erupted from every corner of the forum, unleashing their deathbed lucidity as their final proof of life.
Gore disguised as ordinary threads was the baseline. Some slipped gruesome imagery between lewd photos, while others encoded images that morphed into horrific jump scares if your eyes lingered on them for more than a few seconds. Terror posts masquerading as moderator notices popped up sporadically, alongside grotesque shock posts disguised as innocent questions.
A few users had even manipulated the gallery's system scripts, demonstrating the dark art of automatically popping open new windows the second anyone so much as glanced at the comment section... and nobody needed to be told what was waiting in those freshly spawned windows.
In the blink of an eye, the gallery became a swirling chaos of trolls, moderators, and fixed-nicks masquerading as trolls. The entire community devolved into an all-out digital warzone.
And that frantic spectacle told me exactly one thing.
"That's enough internet for today."
It was time to close the gallery and return to reality.