Ashforge was quiet.
Too quiet.
Ethan perched in a jagged outcropping high above the ruins—unreachable by normal traversal. His back against the crumbling wall of a collapsed skywalk, knees drawn up, a single scope-lens mounted on his mask. He wasn't moving. He'd been still for seventeen minutes, counting every sound, watching the terrain like a sniper without a rifle.
A soft rustle came from below.
Not wind.
Footsteps.
Too soft for corrupted NPCs. Too clumsy for patrol AI.
[Movement Detected | 92 meters | Three Entities | Silenced Gear Equipped]
He toggled passive trigger mode and slid his finger across the interface in a slow, practiced motion. His HUD lit with micro-signatures—motion-reactive tripwires, decoy lures, auto-triggered scatter shots, and a new device he had been testing: a Delirium Anchor, which caused short-term directional desync for players who entered its field.
He didn't engage.
Not yet.
Discipline wasn't about firepower. It was about patience.
The intruders crept through the ruins, scanning with low-frequency radar. Their cloaks shimmered under the flicker of forge-fire and broken moonlight. Guild tags hidden. No names. The way professionals move when they're being paid off-record.
Third-party mercs. Goldfarm enforcers maybe.
He waited for the front scout to step between the two crumbled pillars just beyond the collapsed forge ramp.
Click.Snap.Pulse.
A scatterblast slammed upward from the earth. Not a kill—just a stagger. The lead player tumbled into a wall, disoriented.
The second ran to help. The third hesitated.
And Ethan moved.
He dropped from the high ground, slamming his boot into the third player's back mid-air, driving them face-first into the rubble. The impact was sickening. He landed cleanly, whipped a scrap-blade across the second's throat, then rotated and buried his dagger in the spine of the first.
[You have killed: Unidentified (Lvl 8)][You have killed: Unidentified (Lvl 9)][You have killed: Unidentified (Lvl 8)][Loot Claimed: Null | Gear Self-Destruct Triggered on Death][Data Fragment Acquired: "Ghost_Contract_v2"]
Ethan rolled the fragment between his fingers before uploading it to the toolbelt.
Encrypted, but recognizable.
A black-market tracker contract, digitally signed by a known data laundering farm: BishopGrey Holdings. Based out of Taiwan. Known for targeting solo players who disrupted their monetized zones.
They'd just sent three off-record bounty hunters after him.
He smiled.
That meant his stream had started costing people real money.
Back in the bunker, he encrypted his own message.
It was short. Direct.
"Send more."
He bounced it through three dummy servers and fed it into the deep-forum bounty board they used for coordinating black-ops PvP contracts. It would be seen.
Let them come.
He needed the pressure. He needed them to sharpen him.
When he logged out, it was nearly 5 a.m. local time. The air in the apartment was stale and hot, the window cracked just wide enough to let the street noise seep in—faint horns, the buzz of morning delivery drones, and someone coughing in the alley below.
He stood, still in his compression gear, and pulled his hoodie over his head. No shower. No food. Just sweat and instinct.
He left the apartment without locking the door.
The gym was empty when he arrived.
Old concrete, stained mats, and fluorescent lights that flickered when you hit the bags too hard. It wasn't a place for selfies or content. It was the kind of gym where blood was cleaned with towels, not apologies.
He wrapped his hands in silence. Then stepped into the ring alone.
One minute shadowboxing.Three minutes with a 60-pound dummy.Two rounds on the bag.Push-ups until his arms trembled.
No crowd. No camera. Just sweat, breath, and pain.
His strikes were faster than last week.
His footwork smoother.
The latency between intention and execution—shrinking.
He paused for water, and his reflection caught in the mirror—hair matted to his skull, dark circles under his eyes, fists red and raw.
He didn't look like a streamer.
And that's exactly what he wanted.
Later that afternoon, while the world was logging into Mythos Online, Ethan went to a coffee shop two blocks from the old corporate district. Wore a hat low over his eyes. Paid in cash.
He brought a burner pad—no personal logins, no biometrics—and connected to an isolated node under a spoofed IP. Then opened the VibeNet back end through the dummy account tied to AshenGrim.
The clip from last night—the one of him baiting the mercs—had already been downloaded and reuploaded across multiple subchannels. Someone had added slow-motion, synchronized beats, and even a kill-count overlay.
[Estimated Value: 2.4M plays][Estimated Ad Split (Masked): $1,150]
He watched the footage in silence.
Not for ego. For timing.
For micro-mistakes.
The second kill had been clean.
But the third?
He was two milliseconds slow on the cross-step after the slam. His shoulder hadn't rotated properly into the follow-up. In a higher-tier fight, that gap would've gotten him punished.
He filed the clip under a new tag: Corrective Reps: Set 03.
A soft beep cut through the ambient jazz of the café.
Message received.
He opened it.
Subject: Response to Message 'Send More.'We saw what you did. Some of us remember you. Your past doesn't scare us. Your future should.You've just been added to the Slate.They don't just hunt you in-game now.Welcome to the real leaderboard.
The message dissolved after reading—timed, encrypted, scrubbed.
He leaned back and finished his coffee.
Then left, calm as ever, hands in his pockets.
Outside, the neon of early evening began to flicker to life—signs advertising streaming boosters, augmented reality packages, and rank-based discounts for local influencers.
A group of teenagers walked past wearing merch from one of the big-name streamers.
They laughed. Talked loudly. Flashy gear, no awareness.
Ethan stood at the edge of the sidewalk and watched them pass.
Then turned, and walked the opposite direction.
Not to be noticed. Not to be followed.
Just to keep moving forward.