Ethan opened the platform rankings and chose his targets in less than a minute.
He had already done the real work before this.
The names were not random. The audiences were not random. Even the likely reactions were not random.
One creator was a male gaming streamer who called himself Blaze King.
Most nights he streamed League, battle royales, and whatever smaller games happened to give him an excuse to yell at strangers.
His appeal was not refinement. It was volatility. He got angry quickly, talked faster when he was losing, and had the kind of audience that showed up as much for the explosion as for the game.
The other target was Wendy Frost.
Her channel was broader.
She did variety streams, gaming, food, outdoor segments, and the occasional singing stream when chat pushed hard enough.
She had a softer voice, cleaner image, and a much wider audience mix.
If Blaze King created noise, Wendy could create attachment.
Both were self-made.
Both were large enough to matter.
More importantly, neither had the kind of institutional shielding that made interference annoying instead of useful.
Ethan flexed his fingers once and brought up the intrusion tool he had prepared.
By future standards, the program was crude.
By present standards, it was more than enough.
He had no interest in wrecking anyone's machine or doing anything loud enough to trigger the wrong kind of attention.
He only needed a brief disruption, a forced redirect, and a moment when irritation could be turned into curiosity.
That was all.
He started with Blaze King.
The streamer was in the final circle of a match, fully locked in.
His reactions were sharp, his aim steady, and his chat was moving so fast it looked like a waterfall.
Ethan watched without expression.
Five minutes passed.
Then ten.
Finally, with the match at its most important moment, Ethan pressed the key.
On Blaze King's stream, the game stuttered.
Then it froze.
Then it crashed.
"What the hell?" Blaze snapped, leaning toward the monitor. "It crashes now? Right now?"
He relaunched the client immediately.
It failed.
He tried again.
It failed again.
The more he clicked, the more obvious it became that this was no normal crash.
Ethan had already touched the client. Until he removed the block, the game was not coming back.
Blaze's mood detonated on schedule.
His chat followed right behind him.
"High-tech sabotage from the enemy squad."
"Bro got sniped by malware."
"Final-circle mental collapse."
Blaze jabbed at the keyboard hard enough to make it rattle. "No, seriously, what is this? It doesn't crash all night, then it dies here? This is garbage."
He tried to close the stream and call it a night.
Ethan denied the request.
Blaze clicked again, harder this time. Nothing happened.
His jaw tightened.
"Did my computer catch a virus?"
The words had barely left his mouth when a swarm of browser windows burst across the screen.
He cursed and started slamming them closed one by one, but one of them was already loading a page with a dark fantasy interface and a polished title card.
Arcane Realm.
By the time his cursor reached it, the page had finished loading.
A soft chime rang through the stream.
Then the game opened.
Blaze stopped moving.
The production quality hit first.
For a browser game, the visual presentation was absurd.
The lighting was rich without looking muddy.
The art did not have the cheap, hollow gloss that usually screamed mobile slop.
The background music came in low and melancholy, and the first old man on the screen felt disturbingly real.
Not realistic in the technical sense alone, though it was that too.
Real in the way his posture, eyes, and expression suggested a whole life before the player had even clicked anything.
The old man looked toward the screen and spoke in a weary, gravel-edged voice.
"Kid, your mom is so hungry she's eating tree bark. Are you really going to keep standing there?"
Blaze stared at him.
For a second, he forgot to breathe.
Then his face twisted.
"What do you mean my mom is eating tree bark?"
The scene changed.
A thin middle-aged woman appeared, clothes worn down, face gaunt, but still trying to smile like she did not want her son to worry.
"Sweetheart, I'm fine. Don't listen to the village chief. Go chase your dream."
Blaze recoiled as if the line had hit him physically.
"What dream?" he blurted. "Who wrote this?"
His chat exploded.
"GO FEED YOUR MOM."
"You ungrateful son."
"This is illegal. I'm emotionally compromised."
"Whoever designed this opening is a menace."
The audience count ticked upward almost in real time.
Ethan watched it climb and felt nothing at all except confirmation.
The old village chief reappeared.
"There's a class instructor in town today. If you pass his test, he'll give you a weapon. With a weapon, you can hunt. If you can hunt, your mother won't starve with you anymore."
Blaze stared at the screen like he wanted to fight the person responsible.
The game had understood something important.
People would ignore a pitch.
They would ignore a product page.
They would ignore a normal ad.
But humiliation, guilt, and the sudden appearance of a suffering mother in the first thirty seconds of play? That got attention.
Blaze looked toward chat, then back at the game.
He could feel the trap, which only made it worse.
If he closed it immediately, everyone watching would clown him for abandoning his starving mother.
If he played, he gave the unknown developer exactly what they wanted.
"Fine," he said. "I'll play your stupid game. But if this turns out to be trash, I'm roasting whoever made it for the next month."
The game presented its first choice.
"Grandpa, I'll go take the test right now."
"Get lost, old man. Mind your own business."
Blaze stared at the options.
Then he stared at chat.
"That's not a real choice," he said.
His viewers agreed.
He clicked the first option.
A new panel appeared.
Choose character sex.
Enter character name.
Blaze blinked.
"So I just emotionally adopted this woman before I even had a gender or a name?"
He chose male and entered Blaze King.
Then the game began.
"Listen," he told chat, trying to sound casual again, "browser games are usually scams. We're just going to mess around, do the first task, get some food for... my mother, apparently, and then I'm ending stream."
No one believed him.
The audience was already too curious.
At first, the game moved like a normal stripped-down progression title.
He walked through the village, found the class instructor, and took the test.
But Ethan had tuned the early pacing carefully.
Every few minutes, the game gave just enough friction to annoy, just enough movement to reward, and just enough narrative insult to keep the player emotionally invested.
When Blaze finally completed the instructor's task, the class NPC looked at him with open contempt.
"You really are useless," the man said. "That tiny test took you this long. Pick a weapon and get out of my sight. Looking at trash like you ruins my mood."
Blaze leaned back in disbelief.
"Why is everyone in this game talking to me like this?"
His chat loved it.
Then he returned to the village.
The old chief was waiting.
"Blaze King, you really are hopeless. You took too long. Your mother already starved to death."
Blaze froze.
"What?"
The line landed exactly the way Ethan had intended.
Fast enough to feel unfair.
Cruel enough to create investment.
Before Blaze could fully react, the game pushed him home. There, the spirit of his dead mother appeared and looked at him with quiet sadness.
"Blaze, there was once a man who wanted to marry me. He was an imperial noble, a high-ranking mage. I turned him down because I couldn't leave you behind. Promise me you won't disappoint me. Promise me people won't look down on your mother."
Blaze's expression shifted from shock to something stranger.
The scene was melodramatic. Ridiculous, even.
And yet it worked.
Not because it was subtle. Because it was shameless.
Then the next figure appeared.
A sneering stranger.
"I told her you were a failure," he said. "Turns out I was right. You think I ever cared about her? I only wanted the thing she was hiding. Now that she's dead, it's gone forever."
Blaze's hands tightened on the mouse.
"Oh, now this guy shows up?"
The stranger vanished.
A system prompt appeared.
You have discovered a hidden encounter.
Under your mother's bed, you found a scroll: Blessing of the God of Magic.
Blaze leaned forward.
Chat went insane.
The game had finally done it. It had converted mockery into urgency.
The audience no longer wanted to see whether the game was bad.
They wanted to know what came next.
Ethan sat back in his chair and watched the numbers continue to rise.
He did not need everyone to play it immediately.
He needed contact.
He needed spectacle.
He needed one streamer with a big enough audience to become emotionally entangled in public, because once that happened, curiosity would do what advertising never could.
Blaze King was already lost.
Wendy Frost would be next.
He opened her channel on the second monitor and watched for a few silent seconds.
Different audience.
Different rhythm.
The same basic weakness.
People liked stories more than systems, and they liked saving someone more than they liked being sold to.
Arcane Realm could give them both.
Outside, rain still whispered against the apartment window.
Inside, Ethan's old hardware hummed under pressure while the first real wave of attention began to gather.
The launch had stopped being theoretical.
Now it was alive.
A/N: If you enjoyed the chapter, add it to your library and drop a power stone. It really helps support the novel.