Witch Hunt (2)

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Right before the witch trial could proceed, I had banged out the post as fast as my fingers could fly. A standard discussion thread wouldn't have pulled enough eyes in time to delay the execution, so I resorted to shameless rage-baiting. Predictably, the comment section erupted into a total dumpster fire.

Through the sheer power of my masterful administrative rhetoric, peace was promptly restored. Three condemned people stood tied to wooden stakes in the public square. Judging by how eagerly the villagers were shoving burning torches toward the pyre, they would have been charred corpses if I had intervened even ten seconds later. With the proceedings brought to an uneasy halt, someone stepped forward to lodge a protest.

What a legendary username. From the look of things, he belonged to the church presiding over the trial.

"Writing bullshit with such pompous flair," I muttered, my brow furrowing. Burning people alive over delusions and fairy tales? "Get lost."

My mouse hovered over the ban button, ready to strike without bothering to ask questions. Then my gaze drifted toward the dining table. Penny was sitting there, happily devouring a fresh cream cake in place of breakfast. Come to think of it... Penny was an actual demon, wasn't she? Could witches actually exist here?

This was a post-apocalyptic fantasy realm where an elf posted on a forum using cutesy internet honorifics. Regaining my composure, I addressed Cardinal Albert with measured calm.

Even in a barbaric medieval setting, framing someone without a complainant was difficult. While corrupt regimes occasionally fabricated crimes out of thin air, this local tribunal hadn't reached that level of bureaucratic evil yet.

The supposed victim was a forum user named Alster. The photo attached to his profile, however, told a very different story. He looked robust, well-fed, and entirely unscathed—hardly the picture of a man ravaged by demonic curses.

Every limb was intact, and he had the build of a lumberjack. He didn't look like a victim; he looked like a perpetrator. Trembling as though recounting an unspeakable nightmare, Alster began to testify.

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"Wait, is he actually telling the truth?" He certainly looked the part of an ordinary peasant—gainfully employed, with a fiancé awaiting him at home. Just as I wondered if I had jumped to conclusions, Alster continued in a voice choked with grief.

"You absolute piece of shit, you just confessed to a crime."

He was an unhinged rapist playing the victim. I glanced at the live relay image again. Tied to the stake stood the real victims, tears streaming down their dirt-smudged faces as they looked out into the crowd. All of them had likely been branded witches under similarly grotesque pretexts. There was no need to hear another word.

I called up the administrator dashboard, opened Alster's profile, and dug through his post history before dropping the receipts directly into the thread.

The coward had bragged under an anonymous handle, then switched everything to private once the situation blew up. But there were two things the fool hadn't accounted for.

"Did you really think you could play the victim in my backyard?"

First, deleted or hidden gallery posts were never truly erased. And second...

To me, private visibility didn't exist.

I smashed the ban hammer without an ounce of hesitation.

And just like that, the criminal was vaporized from the network, leaving behind nothing but a modest stipend of Moderator Points.

The gallery users watching the spectacle began muttering among themselves in terror. Naturally, the cardinal running the trial wasn't spared from the fallout.

"Still haven't come to your senses, have you?" The Head Mod held many privileges, and editing another user's display name was one of them.

The cardinal suffered his first taste of institutional normalization. But things didn't stop there.

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Countless eyes had witnessed the truth. The mob in the square shifted in an instant.

"Well then... looks like somebody's gotta burn, doesn't it?"

What kind of world was the Middle Ages? It was an era where a few casualties a day barely raised an eyebrow. Vigilante justice was a time-honored, beloved hobby of the common folk.

"Wait—wait, please!"

The witch trial instantaneously transformed into a Reverse Witch Trial. Stripped of his holy title in reality as well as online, Cardinal Albert was hauled off his dais by enraged peasants. Alster was dragged to the wooden stake, bound tight, and given a warm farewell amid roaring flames.

Even so, the root cause remained unaddressed.

"Wait... this was an everyday occurrence?" Realizing that these trials had been routine entertainment across the continent before the Great War, I knew I had to intervene systematically. "If it were just a theological spat, I wouldn't care, but..."

This involved the lives of gallery users, which directly affected my own point economy. As I pondered how to police the entire continent, a notification popped up on my screen.

It was the Gallery Doctors—the mobile task force I had funded and directed since the Black Death outbreak. Perhaps because I had supplied them with proper medical texts and modern hygiene manuals, they possessed a far more progressive mindset than the average peasant.

One of them addressed me directly.

It was HullyunghanDoc, my undisputed number one operative in performance metrics. Watching his broken, machine-translated dialect flicker across the chat, an idea struck me.

In a medieval world, only one method of mediation truly worked: overwhelming physical force. Conveniently enough, I possessed an elite mercenary force of plague-mask-wearing bruisers ready to deploy.

"Whew. Did that take care of it?"

Satisfied that the continent's witch-hunting fever had been doused in ice water, I leaned back, intending to browse the Hall of Fame threads in peace. Just then, a direct message chime pinged on my interface.

"The Doctors again?"

Surprisingly, the message came from one of the victims who had been tied to the stakes.

"Ah, the user who was tied up earlier." A warm sense of accomplishment filled my chest. Whatever else had happened, I had saved an innocent person from burning alive.

It was a heartwarming conclusion to a dark affair. Or so I thought, until her next message arrived.

"...What?"

She was an actual witch? My mind went blank, fingers freezing over the keyboard. Unbothered by my stunned silence, the user continued typing away happily.

By the time I hammered out a reply, she had vanished from the session.

"No... It can't be, right?"

Dread curdling in my stomach, I reopened the main forum feed.

"...Ah."

A genuine magical assassination had just taken place.