Chapter 207: Mockery 1
Chapter 207: Mockery 1
The twenty terrorists who infiltrated the Academy, all identified from my memory, were now in custody.
Security had subdued them without much of a fight—hauled them off with embarrassing ease.
Twenty terrorists captured, zero casualties, and every face in the room was still grim.
I stayed on the sofa, scrolling through my smartphone.
The Incarnations and the old veterans had swept through the Academy during the chaos and now gathered in the kitchen, clustered together over cups of tea with their heads bent close.
"This is larger-scale than we thought."
"Eighty years to swell their ranks. No telling how big they've gotten."
"And these were people with spotless records. If an ability linked to brainwashing really does exist..."
Hushed voices, all of them weighed down by the mood. The Incarnations and the old soldiers traded murmurs.
Everyone looked pale except for Svetlana and the old man with the long pipe.
stopping an attack with no losses didn't mean the mood would be bright.
I remembered, from my past life: a shooting and bombing in Paris. Fewer than ten attackers. Hundreds of casualties.
A doomsday cult gassed the Tokyo subway with sarin. Five people. Thousands caught in it.
And now?
"A hundred and twenty is a lot for disposables, isn't it?"
"And every single one of them an Incarnation..."
One hundred and twenty drug-addled sacrificial pawns. Twenty infiltrators inside the Academy. A hundred and forty Incarnations—enough to rival a mid-sized city guild—and the enemy had burned through all of them as throwaway assets.
So how vast was the main force that could afford to discard a hundred and forty just like that?
Worse, all twenty who got into the Academy had passed through inspection without a hitch. A homemaker bringing her son. A retired soldier coming in for a medical checkup. Which meant the likeliest theory was a Fallen Constellation with the power to brainwash Incarnations.
"Now, now—don't just lean into the worst-case reading. Look at it from the other side. They threw over a hundred people at us, and all they managed to put a hole in was our director's stomach lining. If they don't even properly understand the Dream Demon's traits, they're cannon fodder with numbers, not coordination."
"Fair point. I do feel for the old director, though. Who expects a mom bringing her kid on a campus tour to be a terrorist?"
The pipe-smoking elder tossed out a joke, aiming to shift the atmosphere.
And really—these were people so arrogant in their chosen-people ideology it was almost laughable.
Hadn't the ones who targeted me, dismissing me as an Eastern Continent man, already been humiliated for that arrogance?
An organization big enough to burn through Incarnations by the hundreds was terrifying. But an organization that threw a hundred Incarnations into the fire and got nothing back because of carelessness and pride? The terror-image evaporated in an instant.
'Cannon fodder... The KKK in my old world went down the same way, didn't they?'
A stray piece of trivia surfaced.
In my past life, the Klan—besides the murders, rapes, and arson against Black people—was basically a retreat-level clown show: white hoods, burning crosses, walking in circles. Their leadership called each other Dragon and Titan and acted out ridiculous rituals. So when Superman used them as villains, the frame of "pathetic absurdity" stuck instantly, and they collapsed. A supremacist terror group 4.5 million strong, committing atrocities in major cities, reduced overnight to buffoons who wore hoods and called each other Lord Dragon and Lord Titan. That shift in perception destroyed them.
"In that case—"
When I spoke up, everyone's eyes turned to me.
I didn't know if it would work. But they'd earned a receipt.
※
What do people who believe in racial supremacy and eugenics actually want?
Simple. Tear everyone else down so they can claim to be the superior race. Use that claim to justify violence—treat it as a privilege.
The most effective answer isn't logic.
"Is this really going to work?"
"I don't know how well it'll work, but these kids are very good at this kind of thing."
"My, my... back in my day we were looking at morale-boosting Constellation propaganda posters. Now we're looking at this."
Irrational slander and vitriolic abuse—that's the most effective answer.
So there we were, heads together with war heroes whose names are printed in history textbooks, scrolling through an anonymous internet forum crawling with what might as well be cyber-wraiths: the Seonghwa Gallery.
A crudely pasted collage, zero effort toward quality.
A coarse black subtitle slapped on it, deliberately drawing the eye.
Lee Ha-rin, the only one of us actually comfortable with a computer, had thrown it together in five minutes.
— All Eastern Continent people are inferior
[Evil robot head with cheap red wig photoshopped on.jpg]
And the Western, Southern, and Northern Continents are the same.
The age of meat-sacks is over—the age of steel has come!
— The hell kind of old movie did you pull this from
— All humans are inferior, and Seong-buddies are the most inferior of all
↳ ah fuck off
↳ dropping facts in a shitpost thread, you bitch
— Of course they brought last century's meme, these old-ass villains can't help themselves lol
News of the Academy's terrorist incident had already leaked.
And into that fire we'd dropped fresh bait. The attention latched on instantly.
Like a fire truck full of gasoline spraying a burning building.
This world, naturally, had its own culture. Just as there were Constellations of motels, clubs, and nightlife, there were Constellations of poetry and art, Constellations of film and theater—one in every field. In a world with developed internet, surveillance drones, and android phones, a Constellation who preached superiority based on skin color and hair color was just a target for mockery.
To put it bluntly: The Sword That Severs the Yoke had black hair and could wrestle a space battleship with her bare hands. Who was going to point a finger at a superhuman who could leap into the atmosphere and call her inferior?
— At this point shouldn't we change the gallery's patron Constellation?
[Lethargic Nightmare walking in with coffee.jpg]
Suddenly bait is flying everywhere, is this not basically a bombardment order?
They threw us the Fallen Constellation as firewood—should we change the header image?
When else are we gonna hang a Constellation up and beat on him lmao
— bullshit, it's just bait getting traction, what fucking orders
— take the hint, you cunt
↳ they handed you something to chew on, so shut your mouth and chew lmao
— you get told you're clueless a lot, don't you?
↳ or a Seong-buddy with no friends to teach him social cues?
↳ you'd think after getting flamed this hard they'd delete
↳ that's exactly why they're a Seong-galler, zero self-awareness
— In the Eastern Continent there is a dish called seolleongtang. It is hot and white. Anyway, you're a dumbass.
Every now and then someone quick on the uptake or pointlessly serious would surface, only to get buried immediately.
This was the second Constellation-scale bait drop since the Heart of the Exiled Serpent.
People who'd tasted meat once knew the flavor.
— I'm red-haired and getting dragged into this, I'm pissed, upvote [31]
— Why Eastern Continent people are inferior [165]
— The end of the human era has come [2]
— Betting on even or odd: place your wagers, one-day bans on the line? [382]
Second time around, and they were rampaging even more viciously.
In this world, defamation of a Constellation normally meant that the First Incarnation, as the legal proxy, dragged even petty hate comments straight to court. But the Fallen Constellation had been designated a continental public enemy, with an automatic arrest order out for his own Incarnations. Which court on which continent was a terrorist Constellation going to send my Incarnation to?
Post the most obscene sexual insults, the most vile attacks on his family, and as long as it was funny, the upvotes poured in. Far from crossing a line—the line had been erased—and there were no legal repercussions. At worst, if the content was too extreme, the forum auto-mod would just delete the post. That was it.
No risk, high return. The abyss yawned open, and the cyber-wraiths ran wild.
"This... whatever else you can say about it, the propaganda effect is devastating."
"If we'd had something like this back in our day, we wouldn't have gotten frostbitten handing out leaflets."
"Now this part has me genuinely curious. If the mother was a polyandrous queen, do you count both parents together—does that make the total odd or even?"
"What are you even looking at over there."
"I'll bet one bottle of hoarded liquor on odd."
"Even. A carton of Southern Continent tobacco."
The bloodthirsty typing-war was enough to make eighty-year war heroes click their tongues in disbelief. The proof that hate comments could kill a person was being demonstrated in real time. Right now, scrolling down, you'd find a thread playing odd-or-even with the Fallen Constellation's parentage. No matter how long these old veterans had spent on the battlefield, seeing that past a hundred years old had to be disorienting.
War heroes who had jumped into the fight anywhere from their late teens to early twenties. People who'd spent at least fifty, sixty years on active front-line duty. I liked that about them—they chased practical results over face or honor.
"I hope those bastards react fast."
"And if they don't react? Won't they just collapse on their own?"
These were the people who had tossed over a hundred Incarnations into the fire as a probing move.
If they reacted right away, Svetlana's special forces would pick up the trail. If they didn't react right away, the cyber-wraiths simply got to enjoy themselves longer.
Isn't this just online defamation?
You might think so. But one thing was certain.
Those supremacist bastards could never, ever tolerate being mocked.
And sure enough—the man had a short fuse. Face gone as red as his own hair, he reappeared on the television screen.