Chương 10: The Shirt He Would Not Wear

Meno's hand hovered over the stream controls while chat turned his room into a crime scene. Links stacked faster than he could read them. His leg kicking the blanket. His pillow getting punched twice with all the threat of an unpaid intern. His own voice yelling about "choosing suspension like it was a build." He hit End Stream. The dashboard dimmed. For a second, the apartment made too much sound. The cooling tower rattled. The VR rig clicked as it finished opening.

Somewhere in the wall, a pipe knocked once, like the building had also watched the clip and wanted to contribute. Meno told himself he ended because sulking live for eight hours was bad content. That was almost true. He opened the game account panel with his wrist still throbbing. [Account Suspended: 7: 58: 42] Reason: Exploit Abuse — Portable Training Object Invalid Interaction.

"Seven fifty-eight," he said.

"You waited until the passive menu." The panel did not care.

"You let me farm half the valley. You let me kill orcs. You let me kill players. You let me hit Level 15. Then you changed my build options into three identical jail cells." Still nothing. He clicked the little store icon beside the bug credit because anger needed a new target. [Bug Finder Credit: 1] Redeemable Reward: Veyrath Bug Finder T-Shirt The preview loaded. It was white. Cheerful. Clean. Across the chest, a smiling cartoon beetle wore a tiny adventurer helmet and held a magnifying glass.

Under it, corporate-blue text read: I HELPED IMPROVE VEYRATH! Meno stared at it. The shirt's sleeves had little golden exclamation points.

"No." He closed the store. Then opened it again, because disbelief required a second look.

"No." He closed it harder. The bug credit remained on his account, smug and useless. His phone buzzed every few seconds. Clips. Tags. Follower alerts. People he did not know sending laughing skulls. He flipped it face down, then flipped it back up because silence was worse. The Meta Desk was live. He clicked before he could stop himself. Sera Voss and Mina Calde sat under clean studio lights with the polish of people who had slept, showered, and never been punished by a rogue AI.

The graphic behind them did not show Meno. It showed BrineSaint. Meno sat up straighter despite himself.

"Of course." Sera's stylus rested between two fingers.

"While the PrayerBeadGod suspension dominates social feeds, the more important leaderboard story may still be happening in the western jungle routes. BrineSaint has revealed Dawn Bastion, and the core ability Radiant Aegis is proving exceptional for attribution-controlled dungeon funneling." A broadcast overlay appeared over the footage. [BrineSaint | Class: Dawn Bastion — Level 21 | Ability: Radiant Aegis] Meno's mouth twisted. The dungeon looked nothing like Emberhollow. Dense green light.

Roots crawling over stone. Moss creatures walking on crooked legs. Rootbound mobs with bark armor and glowing spores in their chests. Three low-level ranged DPS sprinted through side chambers, tagging mobs and dragging them toward the entrance room. They were undergeared compared to BrineSaint, but fast and practiced. A walking moss brute swung at one, missed, and joined the pack. BrineSaint stood at the entrance with his shield planted. He did not look frantic. He looked ready.

Gold-white light erupted from the shield. The entire pack locked around him, roots, moss, and spores pinned in place by a radiant wall that pulsed with every impact. Mina pointed toward a support player behind him.

"That is their Hymn Architect. The ability on screen is Chorus Surge, a stacked offensive amplifier with a narrow timing window." The support lifted both hands. Lines of music-like light wrapped around BrineSaint's shield and the ranged DPS. The three DPS burned the packed mobs to half health, then turned and sprinted out through the dungeon boundary. The Hymn Architect left with them. BrineSaint stayed. The mobs dropped below half. The party list flickered as the others exited the instance share window.

Then BrineSaint's shield detonated. The radiant pulse finished the pack. XP numbers collapsed into him alone. The other four players reentered. The pull began again. Sera's voice stayed smooth.

"Clean XP attribution control. The damage contribution, party exit timing, and Radiant Aegis finisher combine into a repeatable support funnel. Current evidence suggests it is legal dungeon routing under launch rules." Meno laughed once. It came out sharp enough to hurt his throat.

"Legal," he said.

"That's cute." Mina folded her hands.

"The difference between optimization and exploit abuse is likely system-defined ownership. BrineSaint's squad is using party state, dungeon boundaries, and ability timing. PrayerBeadGod's suspension involved exploiting an invulnerable training dummy to grief other players." This content has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

"Collateral," Meno said.

"They were standing there." He knew there was a rules distinction. Of course there was. BrineSaint had a full squad exiting before XP resolved. Meno had bribed a guard to steal a training post, turned it into a portable stack battery, murdered players with it, and then acted shocked when the AI slapped his wrist with a corporate beetle shirt. Knowing the distinction did not make BrineSaint's loop smell cleaner. He opened BrineSaint's stream. 2, 084, 311 concurrent viewers. Sponsor banners. Multi-cam layout.

Clean comms. Every pull looked like a team exercise. Every reset had someone else handling the boring part. Meno watched one more pack feed into Radiant Aegis. Then he shut it off.

"Support funneling," he muttered.

"I steal one post and become a public emergency." He spent the next hour pretending research was not just another way to avoid sleep. Fan maps had multiplied since launch. Half were wrong. A quarter were wrong maps reposted with arrows by people running entirely on energy drinks. The best public consensus showed Veyrath's main continent split into four major kingdoms: west, north, east, and south, each with a capital city near its center and zones spreading outward in rough danger bands.

Smaller towns, shrines, forts, garrisons, camps, and road anchors dotted the routes. Public maps were reliable only for Level 1–10 areas, decent for some Level 10–20 paths, and ugly past that. Emberhollow appeared on three maps as a dark smear east of a mountain valley, labeled 20–30? RAID EVENT? UNSAFE. One map had added a tiny cartoon post beside the orc valley. Meno closed that tab. His email reminder for the Monday interview sat under a row of new follower alerts. He opened it.

For several seconds, the message was just words on a white background. Time. Location. Attached meeting link. Position title. Dress code line that made him look at the wrinkled shirt on his chair. A normal person would keep it. A smarter person would keep it. Meno typed with two fingers. I apologize, but I need to withdraw from Monday's interview. Thank you for the opportunity. He stared at the send button long enough for the choice to gain weight it did not deserve. Then he clicked.

The email vanished into sent mail. He slept after that, badly and too late. Four hours broke into pieces of numbers. View counts falling like health bars. Rank 100 sliding away from him. Follower graphs flattening. Chain 100 lighting up, then turning into an empty bar. A white bug t-shirt crawling across his chest. He woke with his mouth dry, his stomach hollow, and the ban timer still running. The apartment reeked of stale sweat. He needed air that hadn't already been breathed.

Vernova hit him with sea wind as soon as he stepped outside. The coastal city did not care about his suspension. Skyscrapers rose toward the richer center, glass and neon stacked against a dark sea sky. His apartment sat far enough from that center that the skyline looked like something happening to someone else. Delivery riders cut through traffic. Drunk groups spilled from late bars. A woman in a silver jacket argued with an auto-cab. A man in office shoes ate noodles from a paper cup on the curb.

Ordinary people moved around him. Meno pulled his hood up and walked toward the cheap pizza place under the elevated rail. He almost made it inside clean. A guy near the door turned, stared at him, then stared harder.

"Wait," the guy said.

"Are you PrayerBeadGod?" Meno froze. The lie sat ready. Easy. Clean. No, wrong guy. The guy lifted his phone. On the screen, Meno's avatar stood amid dead orcs with a stolen post under one arm. The caption read: PRAYERBEADGOD GETS BANNED LIVE AFTER INVENTING POLE FRAUD. Meno closed his eyes for half a second.

"Yeah."

"No way." The guy grinned so hard it looked painful.

"Dude, that was the dumbest thing I've ever seen. In a good way. Mostly. Can I get a selfie?" Meno looked toward the pizza counter. The slices sat under orange heat lamps. They looked greasy, cheap, and real.

"Fine." The selfie happened. Then the guy produced a napkin and a pen from somewhere.

"Signature too?" Meno signed Meno. The guy looked down at it. His smile dimmed by maybe ten percent. Meno sighed, took the napkin back, and wrote under it: PrayerBeadGod The guy lit up.

"There it is." Meno handed it back.

"Never show that to me again."

"Absolutely showing everyone."

"Yeah, figured." Being recognized felt good. Then he remembered why they recognized him. He bought too many slices and sat in the corner with his back to the wall. The pizza was hot enough to burn the roof of his mouth, greasy enough to stain the paper plate, and real enough that his body remembered it had needs besides rank pressure.

It tasted worse than usual because his head kept replaying BrineSaint's dungeon loop, the ban timer, and the fact that his first public real-world recognition came attached to a meme name he had chosen with his own hands. Back home, his inbox had become a landfill. Troll spam. Fake sponsor offers. Shirt memes. Prayer bead jokes. A message titled PORTABLE OBJECT LEGAL DEFENSE. Another titled WE CAN GET YOU UNBANNED from an address that looked like malware wearing a hat.

He deleted until one subject line made his hand stop. Subject: Black Market Access From: Aurelia. Meno opened it. Meno, I am willing to pay in-game gold for black market access. You are already paying the karma cost. You may as well learn what it purchased. No off-platform payment. Gold on delivery, in-game only. — Aurelia He stared at the message. She wanted his Disreputable access without having to farm negative karma. Or information about it. Or an introduction.

Or whatever the game had opened when his karma collapsed. The offer was careful. In-game gold. No off-platform. Clean enough to avoid the mythic-design enforcement stink. For three seconds, he considered it. Then he dragged the email into trash with exaggerated care. Aurelia pissed him off too much. He did not want her turning his public karma collapse into advantage for herself. He also did not want to admit that she had identified value faster than he had.

"Absolutely not," he said to the empty room. Then he searched himself, because apparently the day had more ways to punish him. The ban crashout clip had passed a million views. A compilation had more. The titles were worse than the pizza burn. PRAYERBEADGOD GETS BANNED LIVE STREAMER PICKS 8-HOUR SUSPENSION BUILD"DO NOT CLIP THAT" — CLIPPED INSTANTLY One edit zoomed in on his blanket-kicking foot and added boss music. Another froze his face on "Do not clip that" and turned it into a ringtone.

Reaction streamers argued whether he was a genius, an idiot, a cheater, a content farm, or proof that AI moderation had a sense of humor. Meno closed the search results. He lay down for the last stretch of the ban with his wrist wrapped, his phone face down, and BrineSaint's level climbing in his imagination. Sleep came in thin pieces and left quickly. Every time he checked the timer, the numbers had moved less than he wanted. When the final hour dropped under ten minutes, he stopped pretending to rest.

Shower first. Water second. Wrist wrap tighter. Shoulder stretch. Fingers open and closed until the stiffness gave by a fraction. He wiped the rig pads with a towel because even a bad life had hygiene breakpoints. Then he sat in the cradle and stared at the login panel. The timer hit zero. He did not restart the stream yet. He wanted one clean look before chat got its hands around his throat again. Veyrath accepted him. Blue shrine light formed around his boots. Riverbend Shrine. Not the capital.

Not a clean safe hub. The river near the orc valley, with mountain shadows ahead and the sound of water behind him. The stolen training post was gone. [Exploit Resolution Applied] Portable training objects no longer count as valid targets for Compound Swing. Stolen training equipment has been returned. [Karma remains unchanged.]"Of course karma remains." He opened the leaderboard before anything else, because the disease had survived sleep, pizza, shame, and suspension.

[Launch Leaderboard | Global Level Rank] [Rank 1: BrineSaint — Level 27] [Rank 2: Kestrel_Crownfall — Level 26] [Rank 3: JaxxonVale — Level 25] [Rank 4: Honeygrave — Level 25] [Rank 5: OxideChoir — Level 25] [...] [Rank 100: Unk — Level 18] [Your Rank: Unlisted — Level 15] Meno stared at the last line. Eight hours had not paused the race. His name had touched the board and slid off while he slept under a corporate beetle. The milestone icon still pulsed in his class panel.

[Class Milestone Resolved] [Passive Modification Acquired: Unbounded Chain] Compound Swing no longer stops increasing at Chain 100. Meno went still. The click had counted. The punishment had landed. The exploit had died. The post was gone. His karma was poisonous. His leaderboard name was still PrayerBeadGod. BrineSaint and every organized monster at the top had widened the gap until Level 15 looked like a joke. But the ceiling was gone.

Meno looked toward the orc valley, then toward the river, where Hookjaw Pike had once tried to eat his foot and the water still cut fast over slick stone. He opened the map.

"Fine," Meno said.

"Let's see if the AI considered the classic fish exploit yet."