Lewd System: Every Scream and Moan is EXP Chapter 411: Fan Pages and Other Horrors

’So she’s an outsider too. And she used Jax Rayne, not Jaxon Sterling, which means she knows me out of Aeroria and not off Earth.’

’But who? Judging by her maxed-out stats, she had to be a major character from the game.’

He didn’t bother dragging it out. "No offense, but... Zia Forger... yeah, that’s not ringing a single bell."

The amusement she’d been wearing since she walked out of the dark slid clean off her face. It stayed gone for a second or two before climbing right back into place.

"So you paid attention to neither me nor the last thing I ever said to you."

She sighed the way a teacher sighs at a paper she’d already given up on. "I told you to remember my name. I told you we would be meeting again. Sooner than I planned for, admittedly, but here we are."

"I don’t have the patience for riddles tonight," Jax said flatly. "Explain yourself."

"You’ve clearly forgotten what it felt like to be played by a man in the final round of the academy entrance test. I haven’t. Every second of it is still sitting exactly where it landed."

Her voice stayed pleasant, which somehow made it worse. "The way you mocked me. The way you never took me seriously, not for one moment, right from the start. You used me as a practice dummy to learn the feel of your Eryndor."

Jax went digging back through the very first tournament he’d played after waking up in Aeroria, back when the whole world still felt like a menu screen he hadn’t finished reading.

There had been a girl. An early elimination, one of the first bodies he dropped while he was still working out what the Plain Blade could actually do. He’d thrown out whatever she screamed at him afterward, but something surfaced now, something about meeting again.

"Ah. So you’re the thunder girl." He rubbed the back of his neck. "You know what I don’t understand? Why people like you spend more time planning revenge than working on yourselves."

"Look around you, Zia. Every person bleeding out on this field is lying there because you or somebody like you decided to carry a grudge with my name stitched on it."

His voice hardened. "This is a real world. Same as ours. Those are real lives, and all of you are spending them like respawns."

"And going by that level of yours, I’d put money on you having done something monstrous to get it."

"I think we’ve got a misunderstanding," Zia said. "A grudge? Against you? Absolutely not, and why on earth would I."

She rolled one shoulder. "The second part is fair, though. I’ve put a great many people to sleep. But if you intend to stand there and lecture me about it, then I’m clearly not looking at the same man who taught me that the moment a player lets his emotions pick his moves, he has already lost the game."

"And if I hadn’t taken those lives, somebody else would have. The weak get erased here. That’s the whole job description we were handed at the door before we even teleported to this world."

"This world was finished the second our feet touched it, and nobody knows that better than you. Every participant will go as dark as they need to for one wish. One wish that rewrites an entire life."

She spread her hands. "Who exactly do you imagine is leaving that on the table?"

Jax’s fist closed at his side, and the anger wasn’t the worst part of it. The worst part was knowing she’d landed the hit.

A wish handed down straight from a god was the one fantasy every living person had held in their skull at some point, usually somewhere around three in the morning.

"Then answer me this," he said. "If there’s no grudge, why the hell are you coming after me?"

"Ah. That one’s a little complicated." She looked delighted to have been asked. "Let’s start from the beginning, then."

"I hated you for spoiling and delaying the dream I had worked toward my entire life. Entering the academy meant earning a name for myself and climbing high enough to restore my family’s honor."

"I resented you on the entire ride home, with the staff and the other students aiming that soft, sorry look at me the whole way. I hadn’t even scraped the eligibility score."

"But resentment doesn’t keep well. It turned into admiration, and then admiration turned into something with an uglier name. The more I watched you, and I watched all of it, every game, every opponent you dismantled, the harder it pulled."

"There was a wall of status between us and no sensible way through it, so I made myself a promise instead. That one day I would break every single thing standing in the way until you were mine."

"I know how that sounds. Childish. Possibly outright stupid." Those eyes didn’t drift off him for a second.

"But you will never understand what it was like watching an anomaly like you appear out of nowhere. Nothing like any man I had ever known. Charming without trying, overwhelming without effort, the sort of person an entire room turns to look at while he’s busy doing something else."

"And before I noticed it happening, the dream I’d spent my whole life chasing quietly changed its destination... and the new one was you."

"I’m also well aware I’m not the only one standing in that line." Her tone curdled. "There’s a queue of them. Married, most of them. Rich, all of them. Buttering up Paige Rayne and sitting patiently on their hands, waiting on your mother’s approval."

"...What the hell," Jax said.

"You really don’t keep up with anything, do you. There are fan pages, Jax. Plural. Organized ones with schedules." She reported it the way an executive reports a rival firm’s earnings. "That alone is reason enough for me to move first and stay ahead of every last one of them."

"So I’ve been playing this game like my entire future is sitting on the board, because it is. Nobody is walking off with my wish."

"And for that, I’ve spilled more blood than you’d care to picture." Then her head tilted, and the sweetness drained out of it. "Although you’ve gone and derailed my schedule again. Slowed the whole thing right down. You really do have a talent for it."

Whatever showed on Jax’s face was confusion enough that she went ahead and explained.

"One of my three cards was Throne of the Nine Hells. It lets me walk into the nine hells and hold a conversation with whatever’s down there, demons, or the souls still rotting on that ruined ground."

She smiled. "I’ve shaken hands with a few of the demon lords. The ones the upper realm was genuinely afraid of. They’ve promised me my victory, and all they want in return is their incarnation."

’Echidna,’ Jax said inwardly. ’I’ve heard the nine hells thrown around before, but what is it actually? And demon lords, is that something different from the demon king back in the demon realm?’

’The nine hells is where demons came from in the first place, dear.’ Echidna sounded like she’d rather be discussing anything else on the menu.

’And if my memory hasn’t rotted through, the entire place was built for a single purpose, which was the destruction of Luminera. The fallen gods made it.’

’They carved out a space connected to Luminera so they could raise an army inside it. Their corruption alone spat out demons by the thousands, and when even that wasn’t enough, they poured out every last drop of their own life energy to make what we call the nine demon lords. Then they stopped existing entirely after giving them birth.’

’The one they used to call the god of prosperity gave birth to the demon lord of greed. Passion soured into lust, courage curdled into wrath, and so on down the list. You can work out the pattern.’

’As for the scale of them, Zeus went up against exactly one, and Zeus was overpowered by her.’

’But still they were killed. Their pride finished them off soon enough, mind you. Not one of them would work alongside another, so Luminera simply united and took them down in sequence, each one on his own turf, inside his own domain, inside his own tower.’

’And a demon lord’s soul no more dies than a celestial’s does. The story has it that all nine are still sealed where they fell.’

’As for that demon realm your lot frets about now, it’s nothing but the descendants of cowards who ran from the war.’

There was a pause, and when Echidna spoke again there was none of the usual smugness anywhere in it.

’So no, I don’t believe the girl is lying. And that frightens me, because if even a handful of those nine girls manages to put flesh back on, this world comes down all over again.’