Demonic Po*nstar System

Chapter 963: A Dying Breed

Nikki Vale, twenty-two, was four floors up doing a try-on haul livestream for a hundred and fifty viewers, and she had felt the algorithm abandon her in real time.

It was the crowd noise that told her first, the whole atrium tilting toward the fountain like water finding a drain, and then her own chat, all hundred and fifty of them, typed some variation of OMG ECLIPSE IS THERE and left. All of them.

Even WerewolfAssLicker_44, and WerewolfAssLicker_44 had been in her chat since she’d started.

Nikki stood on the fourth-floor mezzanine with her ring light and her stabilizer gimbal and looked down at the fountain, where a red monster in a sundress had a little girl sitting on her shoulders.

The kid had both hands around the horns like handlebars. Her mother was down at ground level apologizing with both palms up and doing it continuously, and the demoness was laughing far too hard to accept any of it.

The old bitterness came up Nikki’s throat with the reliability of heartburn.

She had been twelve years old during the golden age of egirls, doing her homework in front of the era’s queens raking in millions for playing video games badly in a push-up top or doing bikini bathtub streams.

Her whole adolescence had been one long apprenticeship for that throne.

She had arrived at it to find the mana apocalypse had burned the entire kingdom down.

Nobody wanted hot girls next door anymore.

The market wanted awakened, glowing, impossible people punching monsters on livestreams, and eight years of grinding had gotten her a hundred and fifty viewers and a parasocial relationship with WerewolfAssLicker_44.

The lucky sluts had gotten famous for existing. For putting their tits on camera and smiling.

She did that too! A lot!

But only real weirdos like WerewolfAssLicker_44 cared.

And now the freaks were in her mall, farming her foot traffic.

Nikki watched the fountain, and the plan arrived whole, with no risk assessment anywhere in it. Rage bait was the one economy left where a civilian could still get rich in an afternoon.

She rode the escalator down with her camera rolling.

Getting close was easy, because the family was not hiding and the crowd around them churned. She held the phone out at arm’s length and put a shake into her voice.

”Guys, I’m honestly scared right now,” she told a chat with nobody left in it. ”Like, these things are just allowed to be in public spaces? With kids around? With actual children? Somebody has to say it.”

Forty feet behind her, the actual child was still up on the demoness’s shoulders and had graduated to steering.

A woman with a stroller gave Nikki a long look on the way past.

Nikki logged the look as engagement.

The little girl came down off the horns a minute later, handed back to a mother who started the apologizing over again from the top, and the demoness collected her smoothie off the fountain wall.

Then the red one turned, and Nikki saw her window, and walked briskly into the stationary demoness spine-first.

The collision went nowhere, obviously. It was a collision with the Manifestation of Carnage, who had not chosen to move. Nikki bounced, committed to the bounce, wailed, and began her descent toward the marble, camera swinging to capture her own fall.

She never reached the floor. A hand caught her by the back of the jacket, entirely gently, and set her upright.

”Careful, human,” Calypso said. ”You’ll hurt yourself.”

”DID EVERYONE SEE THAT?” Nikki screamed, at a volume she had practiced. ”IT ATTACKED ME. THE MONSTER PUT ITS HANDS ON ME. I HAVE IT ON CAMERA. I’M PRESSING CHARGES. THESE THINGS SHOULDN’T BE AROUND HUMAN-”

She got no further, because two mall security guards arrived at her elbows from a direction she had not been watching, moving with the brisk purpose of men who had been told exactly where to stand about thirty seconds ago.

The older one reached her first. ”Ma’am, you’ve had a fall. Let’s get you looked at.”

”Get your hands off me, I’m live-”

”Then you can be live at first aid, ma’am.”

Every one of the forty-odd phones recording it caught the politest removal in the history of retail. The streamer walked toward the exit between two uniformed men who were unfailingly gentle with her, and neither of them slowed down for a single thing she said.

”Guards had her before she was back on her feet, guild leader,” said the small voice through the bead in Kaiden’s ear. ”She never got within reach of anyone.”

Kaiden looked at nothing in particular and answered nothing at all, and four floors up, the woman who owned the voice went back to sweeping the crowd.

Calypso watched the guards go, sipped her smoothie, and looked down at Bastet.

”I caught her nicely, I thought.”

”You did,” Bastet agreed. ”You set her back on her feet like a broom, and she never once noticed you had hold of her.”

Kaiden’s interface pinged. Nyx, from the compound, watching forty feeds: ’Handled. Enjoy your date, Kai~’

...

Nikki posted the clip from her car, cut at the eleven-second mark, captioned ATTACKED BY KAIDEN GREY’S MONSTER AT MERIDIAN GALLERIA. FULL STORY DROPPING. THEY CAN’T SILENCE ME.

For nineteen minutes, it worked.

It worked better than anything she had posted in eight years.

She sat in the driver’s seat with the engine off and both hands shaking around the phone, and she let herself believe it. She had been right the whole fucking time.

The number went up like a flare, ten thousand, then ninety thousand. Quote posts howled about monsters in public spaces, and three outrage accounts with seven-figure followings reshared it inside the same minute. Her phone lit up with follow notifications in a waterfall she had dreamed about her entire life.

Then the mall got home from the mall.

A teenager’s account with a frog avatar posted the first counter-clip, forty seconds, wide angle, no caption but a skull emoji.

It showed the same scene: the streamer visibly checking her framing, aiming herself, and walking backward into a demoness who stood completely still holding a smoothie, with a felinid queen beside her holding a stuffed caramel cat.

Then came the catch, the gentle set-down, and the word Careful, clearly audible.

The second angle was better. Slow motion made the third one worse for her.

By the ninth, someone had synced four of them into a grid with a caption reading POV: you attack the woman who held a mountain pass with an axe and she SAVES YOUR LIFE, and the grid was outperforming her original clip by an order of magnitude and climbing.

The internet, which loved a monster girl already and loved footage of a liar dying on camera even more, did the rest without being asked. Her follower waterfall reversed, and the outrage accounts deleted quietly, leaving her alone downstream holding the story.

By evening the arcade’s claw machine had a line thirty deep, and three separate fan artists had drawn the catch.

Nikki Vale spent the next two days reading about herself.

Two hundred thousand people knew her name by the end of it. Every one of them had shown up to tell her what she was, and not one of them had come for anything she had ever made.

She had studied the golden age her entire adolescence, and the golden age had exactly one lesson in it.

Attention was attention.

She opened the OnlyF@ns account on the third day.