"I hope Ash screams for help and nobody es. I hope Chinedu waves at it and it bites his hand off. And I hope whoever’s controlling the camera keeps rolling so the whole world can watch."
Neither had a response to that.
"I’m serious," Emilia decreed, and the worst part was that she sounded like it. "Every single one of them chose this. They chose to ruin a good man’s life for a paycheck. So yes. I hope they get exactly what they deserve."
Nobody spoke for a good few seconds, listening to the usually kind and timid girl’s loud huffing now that her rant sounded to be over.
Leia let out a slow breath. "Well. Someone chose violence today."
"She’s not wrong, though," Sarah said quietly.
"No. She’s not."
They sat with it. Three women in three different rooms, connected by a group call, united by the specific fury of people who loved someone they couldn’t protect.
And they were not alone.
Across the millions of followers Valhalla’s Sinners had accrued, the sentiment was shared. Forums were on fire. ment sections had turned into war zones. Clips of Ash flipping Kaiden off and calling him a fag were being reposted alongside clips of Kaiden’s Borer Queen kill, side by side, the contrast doing the work that no caption needed to. Fan artists were drawing Kaiden standing over Ash’s broken body. Thread titles ranged from measured analysis to unhinged death threats that moderators couldn’t delete fast enough.
The people wanted blood.
They wanted to see their Blood Knight stop running, stop circling, stop being the bigger man. They wanted him to turn around, look at every person who’d wronged him, and do what his title promised. The fangirls wanted it for romantic reasons. The bat enthusiasts wanted it for the spectacle. The casual viewers wanted it because everyone loves watching a bully get hit back.
But Kaiden’s stream was dark. And the last thing any of them had seen before it cut was a man pushed to his breaking point, walking away from yet another stolen kill while his enemies laughed behind him.
It wasn’t a picture that inspired hope.
Sarah refreshed the stream page again. Still dark.
"He’s been offline for nearly an hour now," she said. They all knew. They’d been there when Kai had looked into the camera and said ’the stream is over,’ and the broadcast had died. They’d watched the viewer count drop to zero and the chat freeze mid-message, thousands of people cut off mid-sentence.
It was the right call. They understood why he’d done it. The stream had bee a liability, a live feed of his position and his intentions that the New Dawn members were almost certainly using alongside whatever other surveillance they had on him. Every word Kai said on stream was intelligence for the enemy.
But understanding why didn’t make staring at a dead feed any easier.
"He has a plan," Leia said.
Sarah looked at her tablet. "You think so?"
"I know so." Leia’s voice had shifted again, from angry to the particular certainty she got when she was analyzing Kai’s decisions like game mechanics. "Think about it. When has Kai ever turned the stream off? Like, never. Not during the Borer Queen fight when they were getting ripped apart. Not when Ash first showed up and started stealing kills. Not when the chat was going insane with worry during the worst moments or when he was getting bashed by Maximilian’s lunatics. He kept it on through everything because the stream is part of his strategy, it’s content, it’s brand, it’s leverage."
She leaned forward. The intensity came through her voice.
"He didn’t turn it off because he gave up. He turned it off because whatever he’s about to do, he didn’t want the enemy to see it ing. And he didn’t want us to see it either, because we’d react, and the scout might be close enough to hear the stream audio."
"That’s... a lot of assumptions," Sarah said carefully.
"Name one time Kai acted without a plan."
Sarah didn’t have an answer for that.
"Exactly."
More silence. Emilia was quiet again, the outburst spent, but the emotion still there in the way her breathing came through the mic.
"We could check," Sarah offered. "Ash’s stream is still live. If something’s happening in the field, we’d see it from his perspective."
The reaction was instantaneous.
"Absolutely not." Leia’s voice carried the disgust of a woman who’d just been offered a plate of live cockroaches. "I would rather gouge my eyes out with a rusty spoon than give that man a single view on his analytics."
"I second that," Emilia said flatly.
"I’m not saying we enjoy it, I’m saying we could get information about..."
"Sarah. That stream is the POV of the man who called Kai a fag on live television. I am not watching it. I am not contributing to his metrics. I am not giving him the satisfaction of one more viewer even if he’d never know."
"Even for intel?"
"Even for intel."
Sarah didn’t push it. She didn’t really want to watch either. The suggestion had been practical, surface-level practical, but beneath it sat a fear none of them were saying out loud.
Kai and girls against two S-tier awakened and twenty-two fighters backed by one of the three largest guilds in the country. All in a zone filled with monsters dozens of levels higher than them.
The math was horrifying.
And none of them wanted to see that math play out from the camera of the people winning.
"So we wait," Sarah said.
"We wait."
They waited.
Emilia pulled up the Valhalla’s Sinners channel analytics for the fourth time in ten minutes and stared at the flatlined viewer graph. Leia opened a forum thread about the petition and started reading ments without engaging, which for Leia was the equivalent of meditating. Sarah refreshed the stream page again because her thumb apparently couldn’t help itself.
The seconds dragged.
One minute. Two. Five.
Sarah was posing a mental list of things she’d say to Ash if she ever met him in person, which was both therapeutic and anatomically creative, when the notification hit.
All three of their panels chimed at once.
Valhalla’s Sinners — STREAM LIVE
Sarah yelped.
Emilia screamed.
Leia’s chair slammed forward so hard the creak was a gunshot through the mic.
Three women clicked in perfect sync.
The feed loaded.
And what they saw was nothing they could’ve imagined.
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