It was a standard route for new hunters to join the Alliance Military for a few tours with Fortress Defense to gain some experience, make a little money, and then either join a Guild or look for a desk job.

Kofi didn’t want a desk job. He couldn’t stand the thought of it.

It was why, at thirty, an age where most Hunters were upgrading their seniority to the higher ranks, Kofi Odai was still waiting for a Guild to take him in. He’d been waiting for over thirteen years.

When he first awakened his personal rune, his family came together and generously paid for boosting services that provided captured demon-beasts for him to kill personally and quickly earn white merit.

Kofi’s newly unveiled 1st tier Defensive rune earned a lot of attention because of the way it equally strengthened his entire body, an important prerequisite for personal runes wanting to go the highly valued ‘perfect defense’ path that the best tankers in the world relied on to dominate in conflicts.

It won him a scholarship that payed for the much more expensive second tier boosting service to safely earn the necessary amount of White Merit to upgrade the personal rune to the 2nd tier.

From the early morning to the late afternoon, Kofi took a knife and ended one monster’s life after another, desperately tracking his merit earnings. After that day, Kofi refused to eat anything that used to bleed.

And what was it for?

When he activated his highly anticipated second tier defensive rune, instead of his body glowing with a second layer of rune protection like they all hoped, only his ten fingers shimmered like polished steel.

It took less than half an hour for them to take back everything they had given him.

The scholarships, the contracts and the promises, nothing was sacred when treasures were unveiled as trash.

Friends were cheaper than farts and even his family decided he was too great a disgrace and that their reputations couldn’t survive being associated together, lamenting their failed investments. Even his maternal grandparents who raised him when his birth parents abandoned him became physically unwell after all their stress.

So he left.

He joined the Alliance Military and hoped his advanced defensive training for would give him the edge to be a competitive Tank in a solid group of newbies and gain fame and recognition from the Guilds that would trigger an epic bidding war where Guildmasters of the Top Five would appear and personally offer their daughters’ hands in -

A harsh shove nearly tossed Kofi across the corridor, painfully crashing him into a wall. Howls and cackles resounded through the halls as another group of entitled elites showed their ‘dominance.’

“Sorry grandpa, didn’t see you there.”

He’d heard that before. At least twice before that very day, in fact. Wasn’t this little prick the one from lunch? Did he have no other lines? Were bullies out of material already? That was… kind of sad.

Kofi refused to engage as he brushed himself off and didn’t give anyone the satisfaction of responding to the stream of cringe attempts at baiting his aggression. He had better things to do with his life.

Like watching his favorite AR streamer, MeowMeowPrincessBitty.

Kofi already knew deep down that he had no future as a Hunter. At least not as a living one.

He just had a difficult time letting go, and watching MeowMeowPrincessBitty be fucking adorable for five hours straight helped him cope with the stress of the illusion of his dreams threatening to collapse around him.

But that night, his life was about to change forever.

MeowMeowPrincessBitty was arrested for fraud.

She wasn’t a nineteen-year-old college student entertaining thousands with her cute cartoonish Augmented Reality features.

He was a forty-six-year-old dude that was tricking hundreds out of thousands of merit a month in order to ‘help her pay for college’ with a voice and facial alteration AR features. They weren’t even the advanced ones you had to pay for. Just the free filters.

Kofi wasn’t sure if he wanted to live anymore.

Nothing was sacred.

What was the point when he couldn’t even trust AR streamers to at least be the claimed gender?

That’s when he saw it.

An icon for a room with only a few hundred people inside, with a picture of the cutest fluffy animal he’d ever seen. He needed more of that, right that second.

Without even looking at the title of the room, Kofi, needing the comfort of something cute and fluffy, clicked the red bunny.

A flash of lightning and the booming of thunder briefly illuminated the black silhouettes of malevolent fingers creepily reaching towards inky black skies.

“Moth-!” Just as he was about to hatefully leave the trap room, a little black nose and red muzzle poked into the frame from below, while two red furry tips poked down from above.

“I’m not wearing this right,” a little voice cutely pouted, with just the right amount of inflection to pierce the coldest heart right in the feels. And to make it perfect, a second red and fluffy long eared character with just the fluffiest white cheeks and little white tipped fluffy paws floated into the frame on a small floating disk pulsing dimly with green light.

“It’s fine, it’s fine. Move your ears out of the way! Come on, get it together!” scolded the new bunny. The image was adjusted and the invading fluffiness were cleared from the shot, and fully focused on Commentator Bunny.

“Ahem, ahem!” The little red bunny holding a tiny little white mic cleared its throat, tilted its head to the side and made a cute pose, “Welcome to the first episode of Sophie’s Views! I’m Sophie! This is my view!”

The cutest prompter generated thing in the world tortured Kofi’s fragile heart by leaving the frame.

In its fluffy place was a scene that Kofi had to squint at for a few minutes to understand.

A man was punching and reshaping a literal mountain.

What an interesting prompt. He could totally see copy-cat content popping up when this blew up. Maybe a version where a mob of hoping lil dudes pounce and punch a mountain into something fun…

——

*MediCaDi: Miss Sophie! Can we hold up for just a couple hours?! Our president is racing to the nearest signal zone!

*ClubLio7G4: if boss found out you asked sir sculptor to pause while he was in the middle of his work, she’d break your legs.

*YetiPE: GG

*ArBIG: gg

*MediCaDi: No! Come on, guys! You know I meant well!

*ClubLio7G4: more like you’re trying too hard. What did you do? Did you break something in the boss’s office?

*MediCaDi:…..

——

It seemed there was already an established viewership.

“Starting from today, exclusive to Sophie’s Views, anyone can tune in directly through your Nexus Account!” the off-screen bunny commenter happily announced as the tiny human on screen jovially split a mountain’s base in two.

That was a strange thing to joke about. As if they could possibly link a human construct like live streaming directly to the Nexus, a highly advanced system far beyond anything humanity could hope to reproduce.

——

*LakersVu3: Its so weird! I’m watching and chatting directly on my Nexus screen! The &$%!

*ArBIG: woooooow!

*MediCaDi: BOSS!

*SSipsDeens: I never thought I could chat directly with my mind. Trip.

*ClubLio7G4: Trip.

*DaisiesInWintr: TRIP!

*MoonPrincessXOXO: TRIP!

——

“Trip,” Kofi muttered as the ephemeral screen that only the user could see which was mainly used by hunters, traders and craftsmen, was now also offering a tab to watch ‘Sophie’s Views’ when available.

It was green. He was watching it.

How? Why? What was happening right now?

Regardless of how justified his shock was, it didn’t change the strange reality of a live streaming channel being pinned to the home page of a magical trading tool that no one understood.

His attention was successfully attained. They did a great job with it.

Kofi wasn’t sure how many hours had passed since he’d started watching this guy have the absolute time of his life as he went crazy on the shiny black stones with his fists.

There was a very hypnotic rhythm in the way the guy punched out. After a while, Kofi was tapping his knees, keeping track of the destruction. After another bit, his breathing was in tune with the beat. Soon his feet were tapping a beat, and he had to stand.

Rusted steel beams stood inserted into the ground in the backyard for his training. He wanted to spend time with them.

The black-haired figure on his floating screen was leaping and swinging around the giant statue like it wasn’t the size of a mountain and it wasn’t insane he was supposedly more nimble than any S-Ranker Kofi’d ever seen, and having a grand time.

When was the last time he just enjoyed living?

Inspired by the rhythm of the mountain shaping strikes, Kofi started playfully hitting one of the beaten steel-beams with his 2nd tier hardened fingers.

His metallic fingers casually whipped out to the rhythm of his breaths and his steps bounced with a complimenting beat as he lost himself to feeling a new sensation.

A warmth was circulating in his core and flowed with the rhythm of his heartbeat.

Feeling an unprecedented physical sense of confidence, Kofi didn’t question what to do next. He simply reached inward and harnessed his vitality to flow with the rhythm of his attacks.

There were three thunderous metallic screams as Kofi’s ‘useless’ hardened fingertips tore three fist sized holes down the length of the structural steel.

It was a level of destruction that could get him reclassified as C-Rank, the highest a 1st cleansed elite could reach. If he played things right, he’d easily gain the resources to break through to 2nd cleansing and getting his very not-useless hardening rune to rank up and maybe his dreams of becoming an A-Rank would open again.

Kofi’s body was trembling with exploding emotions.

His path didn’t need to end here.

A new way forward had been opened up for him.

——

Sara wasn’t sure what she was watching, but it was the middle of her night guard shift and there was no one to tell her not to, so when a strange, cutesy icon showed up on her Nexus trading screen where she sold the dolls made of demon-sheep yarn that she nitted while at work for extra merits, she didn’t hesitate to neglect her eight-hour shift of watching nothing happen in the dark, to watch a shit ton happen to a dark mountain.

It was the strangest prompter film she’d ever seen, but it was impossible to look away from, and towards the end of her shift, when she was forced to get up and actually do something to justify her employment, her feet seemed to have a mind of their own in how they carried her from point A to B.

With her mind still swimming with the pounding beats and frantic footwork of the figure from the film, her own feet did a small bounce, a double tap and a firm step forward and instead of moving at the pace of a single step, Sara was at the end of a forty-foot corridor.

The scream came after a full twelve seconds of Sara’s breath being too shocked to exhale.

——

The greatest fighting forces of the greatest Guild in Luna City were gathered together to continue their interrupted tradition of watching the Silent Sculptor live-stream a magical process of transformation.

Over a week had passed since the last explosive reveal and they were getting worried that it’d never happen again, so when the announcement with the bunny logos went through the fan club networks of their favorite streamer’s abrupt return, their people went wild with excitement.

Now they were going wild for other reasons.

Almost everyone who watched their idol go beast mode for an entire night had comprehended something unique. All kinds of fist and palm techniques were reverberating with the sounds of hysterical laughter, and just as many were demonstrating strange and mysterious movement techniques as people moved fast, illusively, or with thunderous momentum.

The Heavens Piercing Guild had access to a vast library of advanced and esoteric martial tomes, with their most prized techniques capable of inflicting tremendous amounts of destruction. The reason why these new comparatively minor skills were so deeply cherished was because they were a product of their own enlightenment and thus were techniques most suited for them.

As a being that was baptized in the Origin moved with purpose in their eyes, his every action was in harmony with the laws, his intent reverberated through reality and lowered the threshold for spontaneous comprehension and enlightenment.

And it wasn’t just them.

When something unprecedented appeared on something everyone considered constant, people noticed.

Something like a red bunny icon appearing on the Nexus screen that Hunters and related professionals were constantly accessing was kind of hard to miss.

By the time the statue was completed and the strange fire was lit and the hordes of rubble monsters were being decimated by a handful of hunters in matching outfits, there were tens of thousands that watched a little Red Bunny cheer happily as the most peculiar sets of techniques that anyone had ever seen were used by hunters dressed like their cheering icon to decimate powerful enemies.

Which was fine, since all of this was obviously fake. An AI generated film released by the Nexus for some purpose that was yet to be revealed. There was no possible way any of this was real. The strange group in the chat that seemed to be playing make believe were reacting like it were real, which of course would have been amazing if it were so… but it couldn’t, possibly.

Someone in the chat identified the eerie mountain range as a real place.

The Jaws of Madness.

People began looking up the history and posting the incredible background of the streamer’s subject matter.

Why one side of the teeth like mountains was completely flat like a smooth polished table surface, while the other side looked like how every other developed parts of the old era were decimated and left rotting.

But the once desolation had a new feeling to it now.

The once perfect stone imprisonment that separated the two sides had been interrupted.

Two titans holding a single torch above their heads were gazing out towards both sides of apocalyptic destruction, new spacious paths winding between their four firmly planted legs where entire villages could comfortably settle into.

Warm orange rays from a torch’s flame that was the diameter of a small stadium illuminated the dark and the decay and felt like it was melting away all the world’s grievances.

There was no way all that debris could so easily disappear into magically expanding pockets of space. Even a 3rd tier spacial rune specializing in mass transport could achieve the same feats. Obviously, AI.

But from the tens of thousands who watched, nearly everyone benefited, to a degree, from small improvements in their movements to enlightenment in the use of powers and force.

It became difficult to openly criticize when everyone personally made gains, which only left the possibility that what they were watching wasn’t some cheaply generated AI prompt.

Was it… real then?

Then who was this person? These people? This bunny?

While it wasn’t what Jun had in mind when he asked Sophie for help in expanding his visibility, not having known about his own Nexus privileges as an Elder, all he cared about was one person seeing.

The message to his grandfather was layered, but on the surface, it was a declaration: I am here. I am beyond your reach. And I am no longer running.

Sculpting a mountain into a statue, live for the world to see, was an unmistakable display of power. Whether people believed it or not, didn’t matter - the Golden Lion would know. He would recognize the reality of their positions, the scope of his sinful grandson’s growth, and the boldness of his actions.

The son of Yu Min was a force in the world, not a fugitive.

But beneath that, there was another message: You no longer control the board. I do.

The confusion among the public about whether the feats displayed were real or not would create an environment of uncertainty, something his grandfather who established himself on false impressions couldn’t afford while maneuvering for dominance. By making his own existence public in such a surreal, almost mythic way, Jun was undermining his grandfather’s ability to keep his story suppressed and hidden. The legends were fated to spread, whether people believed it fully or not.

That uncertainty was disruptive.

Jun was sacrificing his secrecy and stepping into the light, fully knowing that doing so would put the ones he loved at even greater risk. But in return, they would gain momentum.

Allies will begin to take notice, potential enemies will hesitate, and hopefully those who serve the Golden Lion will start questioning whether he was still the most powerful force in the game.

Because if it wasn’t clear enough yet, he had no qualms about making a second statement.

 

 

---

 

This is not an extra chapter! I needed one more post for the Writathon on RR, so this is Tuesday's post in advance. I need a break lol.