"No," she said quickly. "Sorry. I wasn’t questioning anything."
Ash looked forward again, already locking onto a priority target as his interface lit up with combat prompts. "Good. The decision to partake in porn was yours. You signed the contracts. Furthermore, your father should be joyous to have an A-tier in his commoner family. You bring in more money in a month than he did his whole life. He’s retired from his commoner job with the funds you brought home, so slap him around if he acts like that again. You don’t get to judge the breadwinner of the family."
"... Let’s just focus on this for now," Brittany sighed.
They crested the final rise together, the terrain opening into a wide kill zone already marked with scorched earth, shattered stone, and half-dissolved monster remains. Ash’s team was there ahead of them, spread out in a loose formation that balanced efficiency with camera coverage, interface icons hovering faintly above each member as combat data streamed in real time.
Trisha stood near the center, twin blades resting against her shoulders as she laughed about something Stacy had said. Stacy herself leaned against a broken pillar, staff planted at her side, expression relaxed but alert as her eyes flicked between the battlefield and the incoming pair. Both women were A-tier like Brittany, carefully selected, polished, and folded into Ash’s inner circle after the guild’s offer had been made clear: power, wealth, and protection in exchange for loyalty and content.
Brittany slowed slightly as they approached, her gaze drifting despite herself.
For just a heartbeat, her eyes met his.
He stood a little apart from the others, spear resting against the ground, posture rigid in a way that had nothing to do with readiness. His name was Elias, A-tier vanguard, Ash’s longest-serving teammate who was kicked from the team after the decision to form a harem was created, and someone Brittany had known since long before rankings, guild contracts, and cameras had dictated their lives.
They’d grown up two streets apart, trained together, awakened within months of each other. Back then, he’d been her constant. Quiet, dependable, always there.
Now his eyes looked duller. Elias was here as a member of the secondary team, meant to protect Ash and the girls so they could fight with reckless abandon and look good. Elias and the others were here to pick up the slack, deal with less interesting monsters, investigate areas that were not cinematic, and the like.
There was something unfinished in the way he looked at her, a weight that had nowhere to go. He’d wanted to confess for years, but Ash’s rules had been absolute: no relationships within the team. Professionalism above all else. He knew Brittany was all-in on her life as a member of the Ashbound guild at the time, as she enjoyed the benefits of being an awakened in such a prosperous environment.
Thus, he accepted her rejection before it was ever spoken, telling himself that waiting was enough, that maybe someday...
Then Ash had taken all of them.
All the girls.
The rule had vanished overnight when it favored Ash. And Elias had been left standing exactly where he’d always been, except now there was no illusion left to cling to. He looked at Brittany not with anger, but with quiet defeat, as if the door he’d never been allowed to knock on had been torn down and sealed behind someone else.
Brittany’s chest tightened. She looked away first.
Stacy noticed the newcomers immediately and raised a hand in greeting. "Yo. How’d the shoot go?"
"It was okay, nothing noteworthy," Ash replied without breaking stride, eyes already scanning the updated battlefield map hovering from the hologram on his wrist artifact. He stopped at the center of the group and spoke to his two girls after ensuring he smiled into the cameras for the lady viewers. "How’s it looking out here?"
Trisha shrugged, casual but confident. "We’re making steady progress. Nothing outside expectations."
"Good," Ash nodded. "We’ll push another sector, then rotate cameras and reset formations. Keep it clean."
The team shifted instinctively, falling into place as if pulled by invisible strings. Brittany took her position, but her focus lagged for just a moment.
Across the field, Elias tightened his grip on his spear and looked away.
The battle resumed, clean and efficient, but beneath the surface, not everything moved according to plan.
Time blurred after that.
The kill zone was cleared in disciplined waves, with elite packs isolated, cleaved, and harvested with practiced precision. Cameras drifted where Ash willed them, catching controlled bursts of spectacle, clean finishes, polished angles. The Ashbound team moved like a machine that had rehearsed this exact outcome a hundred times already.
Eventually, the tempo eased.
Stacy dropped down onto a slab near the perimeter, armor drenched, chest rising and falling as she wiped sweat from her brow with the back of her gauntlet. Her blades rested across her knees as she leaned back and let her interface bloom open in her mind.
Then she froze.
Her breath caught.
"...Wait," she said, pushing herself upright. "Ash."
He was a few steps away, methodically cleaning monster ichor from his blade with a cloth while speaking nonsense to the female viewers with a cocky, handsome smile on his face. "What happened?"
Her eyes widened as she focused harder, scrolling through the live feeds. "The Sinners are back."
He didn’t look up. "Oh? They finally released another video?"
"No... They’re streaming."
That earned his attention. He glanced up with a frown forming. "A variety stream?"
Her head snapped side to side. "No. They’re..." She swallowed. "They’re fighting."
Ash’s hand paused mid-motion.
"Interesting. I thought they’d pack their bags. They must not have a better idea where to garner attention from."
He opened his own interface, flicking through channels with a mental command.
Trisha did the same a second later, her casual expression fading as her eyes tracked unseen motion. Brittany followed instinctively, and the moment the feed resolved in her mind, she gasped.
On-screen, chaos.
Not staged chaos. Not polished spectacle.
Real combat.
Kaiden was there, moving through a swarm like a force of nature, the battlefield itself bending around him. The girls fought beside him with a ferocity that made the Ashbound engagements look restrained by comparison. There were no perfect angles, no deliberate pacing, no pauses for the camera to catch up.
And the numbers...
Brittany’s stomach dropped as the metrics updated in real time.
Viewers flooding in. Engagement spiking. Retention climbing instead of dropping.
All without adult content in a week. All without scripted beats. All without a marketing budget. All without as much as a notice of ’hey, we’re live in 3 hours, come watch!’
No... they just start streaming, and like a loyal butler, the Awakened Media Platform brings them all the viewers they could ever ask for.
"They’re insane..." Trisha muttered under her breath.
Brittany felt something cold and electric settle in her chest.
Certainty.
’I was right.’
This wasn’t luck. This wasn’t noise.
There was something fundamentally different about the Sinners. Something their projections hadn’t accounted for. Something no amount of scheduling or optimization could manufacture.
Ash stared at the feed in silence with his jaw tightening as the stream continued to climb.