Cyber Witch-Hunt (1)

Goroshi. The cyber witch-hunt.

It was a piece of slang imported directly from the internet communities that served as the blueprint for the Demon Lord Gallery. Broadly speaking, it referred to the malicious act of singling out a specific user, dredging up their past history, and launching a coordinated offensive against them. In simpler terms, it was targeted character assassination: public defamation, relentless verbal abuse, and the unsparing exposure of every humiliating flaw.

In ordinary internet communities, users had various methods to shield themselves from such witch-hunts. They could set their post history to private, maintain an immaculate forum record, strictly avoid posting anything controversial, or post exclusively through anonymous accounts. In the Demon Lord Gallery, however, no such sanctuary existed.

Set your post history to private? The gallery crawled with transcendent entities who could casually warp the interface's foundational magic to peel back hidden archives in seconds.

Maintain a clean, wholesome community life? Expecting a clean and wholesome lifestyle after voluntarily setting foot in the Demon Lord Gallery was an absurdity in itself.

Refrain from posting controversial material? To demon lords, even the most mundane diary entry or innocent question could be forged into lethal ammunition for a witch-hunt. Making the impossible possible—that was the very definition of a demon lord.

Post exclusively under anonymous handles? In a forum saturated with beings possessing absolute, infallible photographic memory, an anonymous handle offered zero camouflage. Too many regulars effortlessly retained the dynamic IPs of tens of thousands of individual posters.

In the end, there was only one foolproof way to avoid a witch-hunt in the Demon Lord Gallery: lurk in complete silence without ever writing a single post or leaving a single comment.

Unfortunately, I had already authored far too many posts and comments to pretend to be a mere lurker. Which meant, quite simply, that it wouldn't be the least bit surprising if a witch-hunt came knocking on my door next.

The entire fiasco had begun innocently enough. Before preparing a meal for Astrea, I had checked on a question I posted the previous day. Rather than offering helpful answers, the comment section had deteriorated into a hotbed of baseless conspiracy theories triggered by a single stray remark. Before I realized what was happening, my thread had split into two warring factions: bloodhounds looking for an excuse to launch a witch-hunt against me, and defenders aggressively pushing back against an unwarranted target.

Assuming they would get bored and drop it soon enough, I had skimmed through the brawl, closed the interface, finished making food, and sat down to eat and talk with Astrea. My questions regarding the humans of Jupiter and the espers of Mars—the Human Alliance and the Martian Federal Republic—had yielded thorough, extensive answers. Naturally, our conversation stretched on far longer than anticipated. After we finished, I spent another three to four hours sourcing the daily necessities required for Astrea's stay. By the time I finally reopened the gallery, nearly eight hours had slipped by.

When I activated the forum interface to relax after dinner, the first thing that greeted my eyes was an alert icon pulsing in frantic, relentless spasms.

"...Is this a bug?"

My humble thread, which had barely held a hundred comments earlier that morning, had skyrocketed past a thousand. With every real-time refresh, the counter ticked upward with terrifying momentum. What on earth could have happened to make my thread detonate like this?

Apprehension gnawing at my gut, I clicked the post open.

I was staring straight into a digital bloodbath.

"Are you kidding me...?"

Watching the comment section spill past ten full pages was truly a sight to behold, though entirely in the worst way possible. It took considerable effort and a lengthy scroll through the sheer mountain of text to trace the chain of events, but I eventually pieced together the origin ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠of the inferno.

It had all started with a single, throwaway comment.

What was likely meant as a passing joke or an offhand quip—"Did the newbie meet a Hero or something?"—had been seized upon by a pack of chronically online demon lords. They aggregated fragments of my previous posts, fabricated baseless circumstantial evidence, and transformed an idle thought into an indisputable fact within minutes. From there, wild rumors proliferated out of thin air: "The newbie is colluding with a Hero!" and "The newbie is dating a Hero!"

These fabrications, stoked by additional waves of bad-faith disinformation and dismissive trolls, had inevitably morphed into a grand ideological debate: "Is it permissible for a Demon Lord to fraternize with a Hero?"

The resulting battlefield was now laid bare before me. And I didn't mean that metaphorically—my innocent thread had been forcibly reclassified by the system, moved out of the Q&A section, and deposited squarely into the debate category of the Arena Board.

"Do these people really have nothing better to do than manufacture drama out of thin air?"

More than anything, having them wage a faction war inside my thread was excruciatingly inconvenient. Notifications pinged relentlessly, yet disabling alerts entirely would risk missing direct private messages or critical forum updates. Wondering if the flame war might finally run out of steam, I spent a few minutes skimming through the real-time brawl. Far from cooling down, the argument was escalating so violently that they seemed on the verge of opening an interdimensional rift just to settle it with fists.

Left with no alternative, I was forced to resort to drastic measures.

Eradicate the source of the conflict.

The solution was simple: delete the post.

With a few swift clicks, I terminated the thread just as it was barreling toward the 1,100-comment milestone. Since the debate hadn't yet spilled into the general discussion board and the most egregious agitators had already been scrubbed by the newly appointed moderators, purging the epicenter of the argument ought to smother the flames for good. Satisfied with my logic, I watched the post vanish.

My instincts appeared to be vindicated. The notifications stopped multiplying like a swarm of locusts, and the debate showed no signs of bleeding out into the main forum. Just to be safe, I used the search function to check for any recent threads regarding Hero-Demon Lord fraternization, but the results only brought up discussions from weeks ago.

"I should have just deleted it this morning," I muttered with a faint twinge of regret, settling in to enjoy my evening browsing now that the crisis had been averted.

I chuckled at a few typical, madness-laden front-page posts, amused by the gallery's usual brand of insanity. But a brief slip of the hand accidentally routed me away from the recommended tab and deposited me on the general board, where one particular title caught my eye.

Newbie? Censorship and suppression? Pissing them off?

I couldn't resist clicking. Granted, there was always the risk that it was bait designed to hook me, or perhaps a disgruntled keyboard warrior deploying memetic tactical curses out of spite for the deleted thread. Still, I didn't hesitate. With seventy-eight comments already posted, surely someone would have flagged it if it contained hazardous payloads.

My gamble paid off. The embedded image was merely a screenshot of my deleted thread's comment section. The author's argument was straightforward: they couldn't understand why I had suddenly nuked the post in the middle of a perfectly good debate. It wasn't an unhinged hit piece. In true Demon Lord Gallery fashion, the poster was simply annoyed that their fun little flame war had been interrupted before they could score a rhetorical victory.

The replies were largely in the same vein—"Should've just let them fight it out," or "He's a newbie, he probably doesn't know keyboard warrior brawls are our traditional pastime..." Nothing catastrophic.

The real problem was what came immediately afterward: mentions of my name began proliferating at a terrifying rate.

In the ten or so minutes I had spent distracted by ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠the front page, simple mentions had metastasized into a full-blown controversy. Even as the moderators swung their banhammers with merciless efficiency, several persistent users continued to fan the flames, blowing the narrative completely out of proportion—almost as if a coordinated faction was deliberately trying to orchestrate my public ruin.

Fueled by fresh fabrications, the witch-hunt erupted into an uncontrollable blaze.

"...These absolute lunatics."

Despite being the subject of the controversy, my rapid-fire clarification threads—bordering on spam as I desperately insisted, "That's not what actually happened!"—did nothing to extinguish the fire. It was like spitting into a volcanic eruption.

While some posters busied themselves embellishing the rumors, others launched direct, vitriolic snipes at me, cheered on by spectators praising their blunt aggression. Fortunately, the vigilant moderators intercepted these posts before they could infect the front page, banishing them straight to the Arena Board and sparing the general feed from further contamination.

Yet, another thread soon rose to prominence.

The situation was bizarre enough, but what truly pushed the absurdity over the edge was another post that appeared right on its heels.

"...Why are these people defending me so terrifyingly hard?"

The aggressive, suffocating coddling from the veteran fixed-nicks was only pouring gasoline on the fire. What had I ever done to earn such militant protection? Was blatant, shameless favoritism even permitted under forum policy? Had everyone collectively forgotten that community guidelines existed in the first place?

No matter how I looked at it, this gallery had long since abandoned every basic function of a normal community. How it managed to remain functional and populated across the eons was an utter mystery.

In the end, I had no choice but to spend the entire night glued to the interface, waging a desperate, exhausting campaign to extinguish the colossal inferno known as the "Newbie Controversy."