Let's Settle This with Incitement and Fabrication

I sketched out LovePeace's claims in brief.

The same novel as mine.

Someone had possessed a body inside The Talentless Mage Dreams of Becoming an Archmage, and that person was uniting the other races to wipe humanity off the map. If so, it was reasonable to assume the mysterious transmigrator was someone of enough stature, at least within our novel, to sway multiple races.

A few candidates came roughly to mind, but guesswork alone wasn't enough to filter them cleanly. So I decided to dig through LovePeace's posts.

In the Extinction Gallery, the private-message function stayed locked unless an admin sent one first. That meant the chat logs with Transmigrator A — the one who had supposedly spoken with LovePeace — would still be sitting right there.

He might have deleted them, but I'll deal with that if it comes up.

Using the admin tools, I pulled every comment LovePeace had ever written into one place and sifted through them.

As always, an endless flood of trivial comments only a peace-obsessed roleplayer would write. Among them, one entry stood out.

Found it.

I jumped straight into the post and checked the comments from the top. Every single reply was secret, which meant that under ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠normal circumstances only LovePeace — the original poster — and the commenter, a user named Revenger, would have been able to see them. As admin, I could read every secret comment.

Just like this.

As LovePeace rattled on, Revenger hurriedly explained what he was about to do.

"What a load of shit."

The second I saw Revenger's comment, the curse left my mouth out loud.

Some of it was true, but the framing was pure bias from end to end.

Let me make one thing clear: the interspecies world war that left tens of millions of living things dead was not started under human leadership. A succubus had illegally crossed into human territory and killed a noble family's heir, and that became the spark. Species friendly to the succubi and species friendly to humanity split into camps and went to war.

And the "species friendly to humanity" barely amounted to elves and dwarves.

Orcs, trolls, fairies, succubi, minotaurs — any race with intelligence but with forms, languages, and cultures clearly alien to humankind — lynched humans as a collective. The Human Alliance, made of only a handful of races, began collapsing almost immediately, and humanity took damage beyond words in the process. The one who flipped that front was me.

Mass-slaughter magic.

After monopolizing hidden pieces and fortuitous encounters for years, after brushing past death thousands upon tens of thousands of times, I had forged five mass-slaughter spells in the first year of the war — drawing on every scrap of magical knowledge, every item, and every weapon I could get my hands on, even turning enemy soldiers into living test subjects. Of those five, the most infamous was Blood Shower.

It was a mass-slaughter spell that weaponized the blood of every living thing within a set range into a horrific attack. After more than a year of continuous fighting, the earth was soaked in the blood of tens of millions, and the power of a spell that drank all of that blood was nothing short of overwhelming.

For months, a rain of blood fell from the sky, and every living thing it touched melted. The blood those melting bodies shed rose back into the heavens and fed an even greater storm, and across the months Blood Shower was active, living creatures died in numbers too vast to tally. That the succubus coalition — which had been crushing us under sheer numbers — finally raised the white flag and surrendered was, to a massive degree, Blood Shower's doing.

Yes. A war broke out. And countless living things died. That much is fact. But—

If not for the succubi's deceptive practices — their habit of taking human captives, slaughtering them in atrocity, and working them like slaves — the war never would have started in the first place.

I am not justifying my massacres. Borrowing other people's words, I am the worst butcher in human history. But I had no other option either. To keep from dying, I had to kill others. ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠The interspecies world war was never going to end until one side abandoned everything.

Revenger went on to explain why he was drawing his sword again so late in the game.

I understood the circumstances well enough, but that alone could not be the real motive for war. Could it? After years of silence, starting a war now? There had to be a trigger.

Reading further through the comments, I found it.

Revenger followed up by posting several photos.

Fuck... so this is how it lands?

What he had screenshotted was part of a research journal I had posted on the Extinction Gallery not long ago. Pointing at the screenshot, he went on.

This bastard just called me a half-witted idiot...? A vagrant? A beggar...?

I was, for the record, a fully intelligent person. And I currently lived in a Magic Tower that might as well have been a palace.

Sure, I spent my time electrostimulating erogenous zones, testing vertical reciprocating motion with telekinesis, faking sniper shots a hundred and fifty times over, averaging three hundred posts a day and fifteen hundred comments — but even so, hearing it put that way was offensive.

At the same time, I was relieved. Revenger clearly believed I was someone other than McDeras. He had even framed me as a completely non-threatening presence. He couldn't possibly not know that I could read these comments, and yet he had made the mistake of leaving them up — which meant being dismissed as an idiot wasn't entirely a bad thing.

If Revenger had ever reached the admin-equals-McDeras hypothesis, he would have wiped these comments immediately instead of leaving them sitting here.

Haa...

So this was how it turned out. I had shared the research journals as factual material — to put down the board riot and gauge the reaction of Ready Outside's operator — and never imagined they would come back as a nuclear bomb.

But it was fine.

To sum it up: after reading my journals, he had found pieces that filled gaps in their own research, become convinced of the limitations of my mass-slaughter magic, and decided to exploit that opening to invade.

A perfectly rational line of reasoning. In truth, my mass-slaughter magic only achieved its full power when vast numbers of corpses and blood already carpeted the battlefield. Even after a single use, the aftermath was severe enough that it couldn't be cast at a moderate stage of a war. The textbook approach was to wait until the bodies and blood piled high, then detonate everything at once.

But anyone who charged in banking on the shortest possible war would have to accept catastrophic losses even if they won.

Maybe they could even lose.

But that wasn't a problem.

The moment my posts became part of their grounds for going to war, I had already as good as won.

Time to use the SNS method.

S: Settle it with incitement

N: and fabrication

S: Let's fight it out.

I immediately put up a post.

Exactly ten minutes after the post went up.

As expected, he took the bait.

This was where the real match began.

From this point on, humanity's fate would hang on my replies.