The Approaching Shadow of Death

Every gallery on Interrunner erupted into chaos. KAR and Leos—the two names that had been steamrolling the popular boards for days—had finally collided head-on.

Where every gallery on Interrunner had once been steeped in fear of KAR, people were now openly mocking and dismissing him.

First impressions mattered. KAR's threat—post this to popular or I'll kill every person I run into—had been built entirely on terror. Once that terror lost its momentum, nothing remained but a hollow shell. While everyone else had been watching their backs and trembling, Leos had not only fired back at the man directly but had even posted the corpses of confirmed raiders. The crowd, suddenly feeling as if they'd gained an ally of their own, surged forward on pure herd instinct.

KAR seemed desperate enough to post another corpse photo—but the reaction this time was nothing like before.

Even setting aside the crushing downvote ratio, the clearest difference was the flood of mockery pouring into the comments.

Watching it all unfold, Pakol spat a string of curses.

"Fuck! These bastards dare mess with me? Find out where every last one of them is!"

"Pakol... you know Interrunner's admins won't even cooperate with the Empire. There's nothing we can do either."

"That's just because you lot are useless."

Pakol backhanded him across the face. Berow fell silent for a moment, then spoke again.

"I'll look for every method I can. But if I find them—then what?"

"We kill every one of those worthless pieces of shit. Nothing-special trash who dared mock me."

Berow let out a short sigh, then logged into Interrunner and sent a message to the administrators.

The reply arrived fast and short. Berow shook his head and glanced at the men around him. One by one, they stepped toward Pakol and tried to reason with him.

"Calm down, Pakol. That LEO bastard—we can just kill him when we run into him later, right? From now on, before we kill anyone we meet, we make them open their Distance. If they've logged into Interrunner, we check their nicknames. Keep killing long enough and that guy's bound to turn up eventually, yeah?"

"That's not the problem. Our point supply just got cut off. What the hell are we supposed to do about that? Fuck... we were so close."

Pakol stared blankly at his Distance.

In frustration, Pakol pounded the ground at random. The men nearby only watched his face and carefully averted their eyes.

Crafting and selling a High-grade Artifact would have been the equivalent of hitting a massive lottery—an absurd amount of money. Even without selling it, the value was enormous. In a world where monsters threatened every living soul, a top-tier artifact that could protect him, obtained without spending a single coin, was priceless.

But more than anything, what Pakol wanted was a weapon for killing people. Among the higher-grade artifacts, weapons designed to slaughter humans efficiently were plentiful.

"Damn it. If I get a High-grade Artifact blueprint, I can use it to track people down, kill them, post the pics to popular again—infinite loop."

"Boss... maybe we should just craft a Mid-grade Artifact blueprint for now?"

"We've only got five hundred points left, and you're telling me to buy Mid-grade now? Forget that—if we don't deal with that LEO bastard, we can't do a damn thing anymore. No matter how many people we kill, these assholes are just going to keep mocking us. You saw the comments. 'Kill LEO first,' they said. Those sons of bitches..."

Pakol furiously tapped out replies in a rage, but all that came back was more mockery. Until now he had reigned over Interrunner like a king; in a single moment, he had become the joke of the site. And every bit of it had been set off by one post from Leos.

"Anyone coming our way?"

"Not a soul, Boss... but isn't this dangerous? If we expose our address this directly—"

"Expose it, and then what? Fuck, if we want this Safety Zone to ourselves, we have to make it obvious we're here. After the Red Gate incident, where do you think everyone's going to pour into? A Safety Zone where monsters don't spawn is going to get famous fast. Even if we don't publicize it, every living bastard nearby will come here, and whoever finds it will start posting. Then what happens to us? We're dead. Even if we're experts at killing people, if someone's breaking in from every direction twenty-four hours a day, is that a Safety Zone? That's hell. Better to broadcast our location like this and scare the local scum so bad they don't even dare hang around."

"..."

Interrunner. Before, it had never held this much power—but after the Gate crisis hit, it had exploded into a massive community no one could afford to ignore. The reason was simple. With the magical communication networks either severed by the Gate disaster or buried under crushing Imperial censorship, Interrunner was the only place with smooth access and zero censorship of any kind.

The operators never intervened directly—enough so that even Pakol's corpse photos stayed up. Gallery moderators and deputy mods would step in to clean things up to some degree, but only within their own galleries.

The main and deputy mods of the Raider Gallery where Pakol mostly operated were raiders themselves, so they never filtered or regulated those photos. That freedom had let him run wild—only for him to end up mocked even by fellow raiders.

Other raiders snickered as if none of it concerned them. Being an anonymous community, plenty of the voices weren't real raiders at all—just people who'd flooded in for the mockery.

One of those posts caught Pakol's eye.

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As the arguments flew back and forth, Pakol flung his Distance to the floor and muttered under his breath.

"Fuck... yeah, and what the hell is a nobody like him gonna do? Said he was coming to find me—turns out he was just a chicken shit after all."

His mood lightened a little. Chuckling, he started typing a new post.

Not long after the man posted, Leos's new thread went up.

A short, spare title. A post with not a single word of text. Within moments, more than five hundred upvotes started stacking onto it.

Pakol stared blankly at his Distance.

There, uploaded for everyone to see, was a photograph of him and his men—taken from a distance.

Pakol drew his sword and frantically scanned the surroundings.

Somewhere nearby, the man called LEO was watching them.