Cyber Witch-Hunt (2)
"…Did you sleep well?"
Starting the morning with Astrea's soft greeting felt distinctly surreal. I had never imagined the day would come when I would greet the morning sun on Earth with another living soul speaking to me. In truth, throughout my entire life, I had hardly ever experienced someone wishing me good morning, making the moment all the more unfamiliar.
"I slept well. What about you, Miss Astrea?"
Truth be told, I hadn't slept a wink. I had spent the entire night glued to the gallery; sleep was an impossible luxury. When I factored in the sheer agony of extinguishing drama threads and shielding myself from an all-out cyber witch-hunt, it had been one of the most grueling, uncomfortable nights I had endured in years.
"…I slept very deeply," Astrea replied hesitantly, as though confessing to a luxury she didn't deserve.
A few quiet inquiries followed—whether she needed anything for her bed, whether anything felt uncomfortable—before we sat down to the breakfast I had prepared. After eating, Astrea returned straight to bed to sleep again.
To an outside observer, her lethargy might have seemed bizarre, but having listened to her explanation earlier, I understood completely. According to her, the numerous artificial esper abilities forcibly grafted into her body were still clashing violently against one another. Suppressing that internal havoc required every ounce of her innate ability—her cellular regeneration. In practice, she was running a high-grade healing ability twenty-four hours a day without pause.
Running an ability around the clock… It would be weird if she wasn't exhausted.
No matter how subtle an esper ability might seem, using it constantly devoured both the user's mental fortitude and physical stamina. It was only natural she felt drained. Even in my case, it took absorbing close to a hundred Gate cores before I could maintain my abilities for extended periods without fatigue. On top of that, she had been deprived of proper nutrition for God knows how long, which only multiplied the toll on her body.
Maybe I should have hoarded some supplies back then.
A pang of late regret twinged in my chest. Even if my body no longer required sustenance from food, had it really been necessary to incinerate every scrap of provisions I came across while clearing the rubble? Looking back, during my first few years alone on Earth, I had been completely out of my mind.
Like a rabid madman, I had spent months razing entire metropolitan areas to the ground with my powers, rebuilding from scratch, and systematically destroying every stash of food, luxury goods, or military ordnance I uncovered. I had acted as if I could rewrite history and erase the very fact that humanity had ever walked this earth—a fanatic consumed by spite and stubborn pride. Because of that scorched-earth phase, finding food and medicine now meant trekking out to regions I had never visited or hunting down sealed underground bunkers.
"No point crying over spilled milk."
Dwelling on regrets and wallowing in self-pity wouldn't change the past. The only thing I had any power over was the present. That left me with very few practical choices.
Gotta keep the Hero fed.
Save a person—even if that person happened to be a Hero, the sworn enemy of Demon Lords. That was my current job, and the choice I had made so my future self wouldn't have to look back in disgust.
Perhaps someone up there had taken pity on the sweat and tears I spent fighting forum fires all night, because today's scavenge proved remarkably fruitful. By pure stroke of luck, I stumbled across a massive underground shopping complex preserved beneath Northern Europe. How I had failed to notice it across twenty long years baffled me, but Earth was a vast planet after all, and human perception had its limits.
I returned to the hideout laden with intact canned goods, preserved rations, and basic household necessities, instantly brightening up the austere mansion. Though in Astrea's case—
"…A place to sleep is really more than enough for me…"
She seemed convinced that four walls and a mattress were already an undeserved blessing. Regardless, once the hideout had been tidied, we sat down for dinner. Since I had no genuine physiological need for calories, I merely pecked at my meal. Astrea, on the other hand, cleanly devoured enough food for five grown men, leaving me thoroughly impressed.
Once dinner concluded, she promptly climbed back into bed as expected, leaving me with a sprawling stretch of empty time. From around eight in the evening until five the next morning, nearly ten hours of dead silence stretched out before me.
My options for killing those hours were limited at the best of times: reading, taking a walk, staring blankly into space, or browsing the gallery. In the past, scrolling through threads consumed the vast majority of that window. Yet ever since Astrea fell from the sky, my urge to reach for the forum had steadily dwindled.
Part of it was the simple realization that rather than squandering hours on shitposting, I ought to spend that time on something remotely productive. More than that, hearing Astrea recount the grim reality of humanity's remnants had driven home a stark truth: I didn't have the leisure to sit around giggling at virtual banter anymore.
Instead of hanging out in the Demon Lord Gallery just to shoot the breeze, the time had come to return to my original purpose: treating the forum strictly as an intelligence-gathering terminal. My home dimension was already starring in its own post-apocalyptic ruin. If things collapsed any further, there wouldn't even be ashes left to sweep. The last thing I wanted was to end up as the final soul alive in the universe, using forum addiction as a pathetic coping mechanism to flee reality.
Maybe I should hone my abilities a bit more.
After running through physical conditioning and polishing off several books, having completed what felt like a respectable quota of productive labor, I finally booted up the Demon Lord Gallery.
"Please tell me they aren't still burning threads about me…"
I had practically martyred myself from last night into the early hours of dawn to douse the flames, and by morning, the forum had seemed to enter a lull. Given the goldfish attention span of your average Demon Lord Gallery poster, threads rarely lasted long unless fresh fuel was dumped onto the fire or someone instigated an all-out grudge match. By now, the feed should have rotated to a new scandal—or, if luck truly smiled upon me, returned to a clean, placid board.
That was what years of community experience told me to expect.
Unfortunately, I had forgotten the single most fundamental rule of the forum: common sense had been dead and buried here for centuries.
[HOT] Wait, what's wrong with punishing a Hero by confessing your feelings?
"…No matter how I look at this."
The fire hadn't gone out at all. The front page was practically screaming it in my face.
I won't name names.
Ever since the Pandemonium summit wrapped up, everyone with a brain noticed low-tier demon lords getting quietly 'pruned' behind the scenes, right?
You'd have to be a complete retard not to notice by now.
When I watched classmates and regular posters get liquidated in those cullings, I got it. Being weak means you die. That's the law of the jungle.
If you pick fights without thinking and end up dead, that's fair game.
I understood it intellectually, but you can't blame a guy for being terrified.
Over the past few weeks, I walked on eggshells every time I posted, watching every move I made in real life.
Because I'm weak.
Yet seeing some worthless nobody with zero strength strut around the forum acting like a hotshot just because they've got a clique-shield to protect them makes my blood boil lmao.
Why the fuck hasn't this piece of shit been pruned yet?
Reading just the top thread gave me a crystal-clear picture of the battlefield. No matter how you sliced it, that sniper post was aimed squarely at my head, venting fury at the fact that I dared to post freely without being squashed like a bug.
Skimming through the comment section revealed that this explosion wasn't merely triggered by my careless posting. Rumors of the high-tier culling that had leaked out of Pandemonium had pushed several mid-to-low-tier demon lords past their breaking point, and my sudden prominence had served as the lightning rod for all their accumulated paranoia.
Still, that didn't absolve me of responsibility. I sat there in quiet self-reflection, contemplating whether I should just log off for good.
"Logging off is just running away from the problem."
Abandoning the forum wouldn't resolve anything. Leaving now would make me no different from an arsonist who tossed a Molotov into the town square and fled into the night. My only viable path was to defuse the tension as best I could, clean up the mess, and tread far more carefully moving forward.
Whoever tied the knot has to untie it.
With the grim determination of someone walking into his own public execution, I refreshed the page and began combing through the trending posts. It felt eerily similar to an ordeal I had suffered through once before. After scrolling for a while, my eyes landed on a thread proposing an unexpectedly reasonable solution.
Do I expect that punk to write a whole manifesto defending himself? No.
Am I pissed that some weakling opened his mouth? Not really.
Is the clique culture gonna get fixed? Dream on, don't be ridiculous.
Do I feel bad for the pruned demon lords? Sure, I get it, but I'm not sticking my neck out for them.
Screw all the noise.
If you're reading this, newbie, write an answer post right this second.
Did you pick up a Hero, or didn't you?
Answer that single question and half the drama on this board evaporates overnight, got it?
I'm sick of watching brainless hate mobs clash with brainless white knights.
You Demon Lord Gallery bastards literally don't have a neutral gear, holy shit.
No, scratch that—you don't have gears at all. Who built a car that only has an accelerator?!
Just as the registered user PerpetualVirgin pointed out, the overwhelming majority of current board drama was built on wild deductions. Even with the formidable memories of demon lords who could recall my deleted query alongside every past thread I had ever touched, the actual factual basis they had to work with was razor-thin.
For beings blessed with transcendent intellect, spinning elaborate theories from breadcrumbs was child's play. But at the end of the day, deduction was still just deduction; it was not hard evidence.
Furthermore, demon lords hailing from Hell possessed an almost contractual obsession with verified facts. Once confronted with concrete, undeniable reality, the baseless smear campaigns would naturally run out of steam. In other words, posting a transparent, matter-of-fact statement detailing my exact situation was undeniably the most effective solution.
And yet…
"…That particular user gives me serious pause."
Having witnessed PerpetualVirgin's illustrious posting history over the years, I found myself hesitating. This was a man who literally coughed up blood whenever someone posted about romantic success—the self-proclaimed Eternal Commander of the Solo Army. Would someone like that ever listen to reason?
Even if I spelled it out in plain text—I merely picked up an injured Hero, there are zero romantic feelings involved—would that deranged gonik actually accept it? Not a chance in hell.
"Ah, whatever. Who cares."
Whether he vomited blood or cried tears of crimson rage was none of my concern. I was completely immune to any threat of Real-life Public Execution, and I had the filthy privilege of a high-tier clique-shield guarding my back on the forum anyway. At worst, I'd get cursed out in a few threads, have a bitter stalker tracking my posts, and eat one guaranteed downvote on every single thing I wrote.
Feeling a tiny shred of preemptive guilt toward one intensely lonely user, I opened the draft window and began typing out my official clarification.