Slaying Fixed-Nicks, Slaying Trolls

July 14th, 00:00.

With ten minutes left until the scheduled IP ban on the Adrian Empire took effect, the board was ablaze with panic and hysteria.

Then, the exact second the clock rolled over to the 14th.

Every single soul from the Adrian Empire, who had once accounted for a massive chunk of the gallery's traffic, vanished into the void in the span of a breath.

"They really... have all been driven out, myo."

"Yep."

If they had shown even an ounce of restraint, I wouldn't have gone this far. I had never once resorted to a permanent regional IP ban, not even when trolls spammed tactical nukes of the most eye-melting gore and depravity across the front page. The assassins who had literally pressed a blade against my neck were already rotting in the earth, but the imperial degenerates who had pointed those blades indirectly still remained.

Crunch.

I steadily chewed on a raw carrot Myoran had shared with me, quietly observing the boards.

"It's starting."

Before a single day had even passed, the decimated post refresh rate began to stir with fresh life.

Users who had managed to break through the borders and flee the Empire were already beginning to surface.

Only two days had passed since the IP ban took effect, yet the gallery was already flooded with harrowing tales from users who had bolted from the Empire. Still, the reality of the situation surprised me.

"So it wasn't just because of the gallery ban after all?"

Adrian had been decaying from within for decades. Squandering tax revenues was simply par for the course. Corrupt quartermasters routinely cut soldier rations with equal parts sand, graft was rampant across every administrative branch, and the direct purchase of noble titles through bribery was practically an open market. The sudden IP ban had merely been the stray spark dropped into an overfilled powder magazine.

I pulled up the moderation console, navigated to the blacklists, and located the IP belonging to Lloyd, the knight whose leg I had once cauterized with Albothyl, before clicking unban.

"I need eyes on the ground if I'm going to follow the internal situation."

And true to form, the very second his connection was restored, Lloyd began uploading live, real-time dispatches from the heart of the imperial capital.

So the bloodline of Adrian was finally coming to an end. The long-lived elves regarded the entire tragedy with utter indifference. To them, human civilizations were little more than ephemeral blooms—dazzling in their zenith for a fleeting second, only to wither into dust before an elf could finish a long nap. Like so many tyrannical monarchs before him, Crown Prince Frederick seemed destined to be dragged from his throne and executed by the mob.

Except this imperial royal had prepared a rather disgusting twist.

"What in the world..."

The Crown Prince had abandoned his own throne room and bolted. Worse, he had burned every scrap of civilian grain behind him. While the gallery sat stunned in disbelief, another fresh post surged to the top of the feed.

It was a valid question. The entire imperial heartland was in open rebellion, with angry militias converging on the capital from every direction. By what conceivable route could Frederick have slipped past this encirclement and reached the North?

The answer, as it turned out, was infuriatingly simple.

The moment his initial scheme to assassinate me fell apart, Frederick had made up his mind to slip out under cover of darkness. Instead of braving the roads, he had marched his troops outside imperial borders entirely, taking a massive detour through the monster-infested outer wastes to circle north.

"This is getting absurd."

The territory of the Adrian Empire was monstrously vast. Even if more than half of its outer provinces had been swallowed by demon beasts, the core imperial estates and the northern territories were still intact. In particular, the North was a frozen bastion where Duke Isaac's word carried far more weight than imperial law.

On top of that, the North held massive winter granaries that were completely unaffected by the fires in the south. Because I had IP-banned the entire empire, the Northern populace remained largely blind to the revolution boiling across the southern basin.

"Not like I can just unban the region either."

Lifting the ban now wouldn't miraculously inspire the Northern nobility to band together; most of them were staunch loyalists bound to Duke Isaac's ledger. With aberrant rifts fissuring across the provinces and mutated demon beasts clawing at the settlements, a protracted civil war would spell total extinction for the human realm.

Frederick was trolling with absolute abandon. Just as I was rubbing my temples trying to devise a clean counter, an unexpected user popped up in the comments beneath the Crown Prince's manifesto.

The forgotten urban legend herself—Soon-to-Die Vampire—had materialized in the thread.

"Holy crap."

My jaw dropped at the photo she had uploaded. It was the first time I had ever caught a clear glimpse of her full, unsealed physical form. Clad in an aura of pure, innocent stillness, she gripped a scythe easily twice her height with effortless grace. She was the living incarnation of the legendary Truesilver Blade.

Yet not everyone among the imperial ranks was reduced to tears. Standing firmly before the scattering ranks, one man had drawn his sword and was glaring straight up toward her silhouette.

Duke Isaac.

Naturally, the gallery exploded over the high-stakes confrontation unfolding in real time. The moment Soon-to-Die Vampire blocked the path, nobody gave a single damn about Frederick's pathetic flight anymore.

Seeing the flood of notifications urging me to intervene snapped me right out of my daze.

"Right. I should do my job."

I hastily pulled open the moderator panel, navigated through the system features, and drafted a brand-new post.

I had finally found the perfect way to farm that missing chunk of moderator EXP.