What Can I Do?
I tried to reply to the comments that treated my complaints like the natural price of wearing a mod badge, hoping to spread word of how unfair it all was.
That thought lasted about three seconds.
Whether they treated the whole thing like some kind of fun little game, or whether every troll on the board had smelled blood and piled on just to keep poking at my nerves — or whether the stress and rage that had already been stacking up simply detonated over this one incident and locked my entire focus onto it — I couldn't say for sure.
But after reading every last one of those posts and comments, I slipped into a state of absolute blank expression so complete that Jessica, who had been watching me, flinched and took a step back.
Then, quietly, I wrote a single post and uploaded it to the gallery.
And whether the gallery users sensed something off about the post I'd written, the moment they saw that I'd locked the comments, they immediately started flagging it as dangerous.
Some of them still hadn't caught on and kept pulling aggro for no reason.
At this point, I had no intention of staying a mod any longer anyway.
I released the limiter I'd been holding in my heart, opened not the gallery but the Community Administrator Menu, and began a wide-area delete-and-ban campaign — wiping every troll post I could see from the gallery, deleting their trading-post listings as well, and simultaneously locking them out of chat, the gallery, trading, and the auction house all at once.
Of course, there was a minor snag in that I was so busy with this that I completely neglected my actual fleet —
"Commander, there's nothing particular on the schedule today… and Oxianor says she's entering rest mode for the day due to personal circumstances."
"Hell yeah."
— but Jessica, who had read the room, immediately declared a full-day stand-down, so I decided to pour every scrap of my attention into stress relief via gallery-wide mass deletion.
Realistically, of course, what Icarus was doing was pure insanity. Most of the gallery users declared that one of the mods had lost his mind and filed reports with the other mods and the admins they called "Ju-ttak," pushing for a "return to normalcy."
The problem was that the mod who received the situation report happened to be Menaldo — ranked 10th, a lone-wolf solo player just like Icarus…
"Nah, I was already pissed as hell. He's going off, so I'm going too."
— which, for the trolls currently being swept away by Icarus's mass bans and deletions, only had the effect of summoning reinforcements.
On top of that, once Menaldo relayed the situation to the other mods —
"Hell yeah. I've liked that guy since the first time I saw him."
— Indefatigable, ranked 7th, declared the move manly the moment he heard Icarus had taken point, and joined the mass-deletion campaign.
"…There are too many pieces of trash. I should help as well."
"Sometimes, for the sake of farming, you need a little slash-and-burn."
Laura, ranked 5th, and Sorimseung, ranked 8th — both of whom had been suffering under the gore-image terrorism and trading quiet complaints about it — piled on as well. A gallery that had already been getting shredded by a single mod now found itself under a full-scale assault from five of them.
Before long, the gallery was under the merciless delete-and-ban offensive of mods who were now permanently on station with zero wait time. The trolls who had always been there — their presence diluted only by the sheer volume of traffic — vanished without a trace, and the gallery's atmosphere became, of all things, pleasant. A bizarre result.
Give us a proper reward, you bastards. (2)
Of course, if the remaining mods had moved to check them during the process, Icarus's righteous uprising would have been crushed on the spot…
"Well, honestly, the idiots do need a little grinding down."
Betelgeuse — who didn't mind trolling in-game but had no patience for people whose only hobby was trolling the community — was on board. And then there was Arcadia, who for reasons unknown was launching full-blown obsession attacks at Icarus.
Heueung… if it's what Lord Icarus wants…
"Clan leader, shouldn't we be intervening in that?"
"People from our own clan are saying they got hit by the gallery mass-deletion and want us to get them unbanned…"
"…Wouldn't it actually be better to use this opportunity to look friendly toward that Icarus user and try to recruit him into our clan?"
"Oh…"
"You thought of that? That's a solid idea."
The clan leaders of the two great rival clans had tacitly given their blessing to the whole affair. And beyond them —
"We don't really… need to stick our noses into this one, do we?"
"Agreed."
— Raksha, who at the self-introductions had been too busy getting his looks rated to properly introduce himself, but who led Rotten Water, a large clan that ranked among the top ten within the Xenobia Empire; and Arto, clan leader of Dragon, a clan straddling the Earth Federation and the Xenobia Empire — both of them were either neutral or actively friendly toward the situation.
But Antares — ranked 1st, and currently leading Humanity, a clan that by sheer numbers edged out even Betelgeuse's Loki — was another matter.
As part of a plan to quietly monopolize administrative "power," he had stirred up the gallery's firepower by agitating the dregs who hadn't managed to join Loki. Watching that firepower collapse in an instant, he felt a quiet irritation.
"…Those things are even more worthless than I expected."
"Indeed so, Commander."
He gestured for the "superhumans" who had been combing his flowing blonde hair to stop, unable to hide his disappointment at how hollowly the trolls had been suppressed — far beyond his projections.
But that didn't change anything.
"Commander, Loki and Justice say they won't get involved in this matter."
"Tch. Then any further involvement on our part would be risky as well."
More than anything, the current of events was what it was. Antares ran the numbers in his head for a moment. Setting aside how deeply unfortunate it was that the trolls he'd so carefully "sponsored" had such a short shelf life, he found no reason not to cut them loose, and quickly addressed his adjutant, Messiah.
"Tell them we concur with that opinion, Messiah."
"Understood."
And so, with the backroom consensus aligning in that fashion, most of the gallery users — for the first time in a very long while since being possessed into this game, or rather, for the first time since possession at all — got to experience a pleasant gallery.