The Final Week (2)

Honestly, I wanted nothing more than to hit post right then and there and demand to know what the hell was going on.

But the moment I reached for the compose button, a feeling settled over me — a gut-deep certainty that I absolutely should not write anything. The second I did, something dangerous enough to crush me would come looking.

No — this wasn't just a feeling or a hunch.

It was more like memories that had no right to exist were replaying, one after another, inside my head.

I took the omen for what it was, pulled my hand off the compose button, and decided to shut up and lurk for a solid three minutes first.

And once I actually committed to reading through everything, I finally figured out what the problem was.

The gallery was on fire over one question: roughly how many points did you need to crack the rankings?

Of course, three minutes of skimming wasn't enough to piece that together on its own.

I had no idea who they were, but some genuinely helpful anonymous poster had laid out a pretty detailed summary — and that was how I caught up.

Of course, no matter how well-written that post was, at the end of the day it was still just a compressed, edited version of everything currently floating around, with a few personal opinions sprinkled in. So I went ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠and read a few more posts from the self-proclaimed Speed Waaaagons crowd, too.

On top of that, two weeks of piled-up drama had gotten extreme enough that I figured I'd better keep my head on straight. I dove back into the gallery and started reading everything I could find.

And a little while later—

Nice. Completely understandood.

I realized the source of this deranged, grotesque controversy was the gacha-fail post I had uploaded — and I felt my brain melt into warm, liquid mush.

All I'd done was bomb a twenty-pull and casually flex the consolation reward points that came with it. And these people had been fighting over that for more than two solid weeks.

You're still going at each other over something that stupid?

I couldn't make sense of it, but the world had always been full of weirdos popping out of nowhere. I decided this was just another one of those situations, accepted it, and moved on — for the sake of my own mental health, if nothing else.

Then I looked at the comment count on the post that started it all. Nearly a hundred thousand.

Yeah. Turning off notifications was the right call.

No matter how I spun it, casually silencing those alerts without a second thought had been a genuine stroke of genius.

But the very next day, the whole ranking-points drama sank without a trace.

The reason? Despite zero update notices of any kind, a brand-new feature nobody had ever seen before had been added to the game — and some user had just discovered it.

Of course, the first post to go up had nothing resembling real evidence beyond a single image. So the gallery's chronically paranoid majority zeroed in on the fact that the poster was an anonymous user, and most of them left the whole thing under a cloud of suspicion — just some random troll fishing for attention.

In the process, there was a minor incident involving some idiot who — despite having been dropped into this world for nearly a full year — was only just now realizing his base had computers. But aside from that, the morning's drama got written off as pure anonymous trolling and, like always, got buried under the bigger ongoing ranking-points controversy.

As time wore on, though, reports from victims claiming their reward points had been plundered started pouring in one after another.

And right as the victims kept coming, the perpetrators — the ones actually plundering the points — started showing up too.