Feel the Weight of the Armband (3)

While the gallery burned, most of the users who'd been content to just sit back and watch finally reached their boiling point and erupted.

And as those spontaneous combustions went off one after another, the rest of the userbase simply kept munching popcorn with undiminished enthusiasm.

So everyone sharpened their blades, and sharpened them some more. Every so often they'd slip into little wars of attrition among themselves. And every once in a rare while, they'd grab each other by the hair and go at it for real. That lifestyle stretched on for a full week.

Everyone drew the blades they'd been honing for a week. As always, they blitzed through their daily quests first — and then the whole community practically radiated an atmosphere of pure, unfiltered anticipation.

But while they were all thinking that, the moment the clock hit zero, the notification that actually popped up was…

The kind of message that left me staring at it thinking, what the hell is this supposed to mean?

It was a first for me, and ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠I was thoroughly, completely baffled.

Of course I wasn't the only one feeling that way — the rest of the gallery was almost certainly having the same reaction.

"What kind of nonsense is this? Why start an update and then just… stop halfway?"

"I know, right? I don't think I've ever seen anything like this either."

For all I knew, this bizarre situation might only be happening to me. So rather than make a fool of myself, I dug through my status window first, just in case these bastards had botched something on my end.

After about ten minutes of thorough rummaging, I came to a conclusion.

Good. Nothing I missed or overlooked.

Confirmed it wasn't my fault, I immediately opened the chat window, ready to start roasting the developers.

But the moment I opened it, the sight that greeted me was this:

"…Hmm."

Messages were scrolling past at a rate of dozens per second. Clearly I wasn't the only one getting hit by this, so I opened the gallery window right away to check the public mood.

And just as the chat had already made obvious — sure enough:

It wasn't as if anyone had been fighting a multi-day, all-night mega-war. Word of an upcoming "event" had made everyone hold back on combat, stockpiling resources and fleets, and the whole front had gone quiet days ago.

Apparently our dopamine-addicted uncles simply could not accept this extended maintenance — or whatever it was.

Even though there was no real need to lose their minds over it, a frankly alarming number of people were having full-blown meltdowns in the gallery. The vibe was not good.

Of course, once you actually clicked into the posts…

…Are these people idiots?

That was the only thought that came to mind. Whether they had too much free time and spare brain cells, or whether their heads were genuinely broken, a bunch of mindless spammers were flooding every post and every corner of the gallery with pure garbage.

"Commander, I think those commanders have completely lost their minds."

"Yeah, they're a hundred percent gone."

While Jessica and I were having that brief exchange—

"Figures."

"Honestly, people have so much free time that their energy just overflows in the weirdest places."

"Tell me about it."

I nodded at the post from the rank-4 player, then closed the gallery to wait out the update and get back to my routine work.

And so, at the very hour when Icarus and the rest of the playerbase stepped away from the gallery and returned to their "daily lives"—

Inside the command center of the former Villain Alliance — the single largest clan in the game, built by gathering nearly every troll under the banner of "free-spirited play," now known as the Loki Clan—