*Yaawwwn*

  Slamming his car door shut, Clyde stretched his limbs, which had become stiff from the commute.

  ‘New day, new dismay. I can feel it – that old guy definitely messed something up while I was gone.’

  Beep.

  He remotely locked the car behind him while absently scratching his neck.

  ‘Well, who knows… maybe he did something useful for once.’

  The team leader’s shiny scalp flashed through his mind.

  ‘Haha, who am I kidding?’

  Creaak.

  “Clyde, you’re here!” A coworker greeted him as he entered the office.

  “Hi Jayden. Yes, unfortunately.” He passed an empty desk. “Team leader gone AWOL again?”

  “Nah, he’s just grabbing coffee.”

  Clyde winced. “Five-minute coffee, or six-hour coffee?”

  “Probably five-minute this time. He’s been surprisingly proactive this morning; So much so that I think he might have actually been inspired by something.”

  “Inspired…? No, never mind; I don’t care. There was a new patch this morning, right?” He approached Jayden and held his hand out expectantly. “Gimme the notes.”

  Jayden appeared to hesitate for a moment before narrowing his eyes and passing some papers from his desk. “How did you know I’d have a hard copy?”

  “Because you live in the stone ages. Alright, let’s see…”

  Clyde’s eyes navigated to the first line.

  [Unique class ‘Deadsh-

  Crack!

  His grip immediately tightened, causing the paper to crumple in his hand. Taking a deep breath, he prepared his mind before trying again.

  A silent pressure emanated from Clyde, causing not just Jayden, but also the other employees in the room to focus their attention on him.

  Jayden smiled bitterly. “We uh, we tried to dissuade him, but he didn’t listen.”

  “Haah…” Clyde cradled his face in his hands. “F*ck.”

  “Although it’s clear targeting, it… could be worse! At the very least, it should be much easier to defend this than to deal with the backlash over the ban.”

  “Ban? What ban?”

  “Kkh!” Jayden’s face instantly filled with regret. He forgot that Clyde wouldn’t be aware of what happened; now he was stuck being the one to break the news. “That, er… well it wasn’t actually a ban, per se. Gun’s account was just suspended for a few hours last night.”

  “Suspended? Why?”

  “We weren’t sure if Gun hacked the system, so Derrick gave the order to shut off his account while waiting for instructions from the higher-ups. In the meantime, his account was tagged as ‘suspended under suspicion of cheating’.”

  “WHAT?!” Clyde was incredulous. “How could you just go and ban him without any evidence?!”

  “Th-that… It wasn’t me who did it! I wasn’t even on-shift yet!”

  “Gah-rghh!! That stupid… There’ll be hell to pay from the media for this.”

  “Hell to pay for what?” A domineering voice came from the entrance. “Hey, I could hear you from all the way out in the hallway; tone it down a notch.”

  Embodying his usual bad-tempered demeanour, Derrick strolled into the room with a takeaway coffee and plonked it down on his desk.

  “Why the hell did you ban the archer before getting proof?! Have you gone senile?”

  Freeze.

  As though a chemical reaction had occurred, everyone in the room simultaneously dropped what they were doing to listen in, anticipating a good cutscene.

  “Senile?!” Derrick was taken aback. Still in his late forties, he’d never experienced that sort of insult before. He didn’t like it. “You’d better watch your tongue, Clyde! I won’t sit back and tolerate your unwarranted slander!”

  “Unwarranted?! Do you even realise what you’ve done?”

  “What I’ve done?? You’re acting like I’ve committed some sort of great atrocity by locking someone’s game account for a few hours. Go on, tell me just exactly what I’ve done!”

  Click.

  In the eyes of the other employees, a triple-set of large health bars seemed to appear above Clyde’s head. Jayden also heard music.

  “Oh, I’ll tell you. In announcing the DIVE technology could have been hacked – without any credible evidence to back up that assertion, mind you – not just the company, but America’s entire national security is put at risk. Mass hysteria, market crashes, political fallout – those are just a few things that could happen because of your trigger-happy, brainless suspension. Our country’s allies use DIVE for military drills with confidential equipment, so this could even spark an international incident.”

  “Wh–” Derrick appeared lost for words for a moment. “…That’s ridiculous! You’re being absurdly overdramatic. If things were even remotely that serious, I would have gotten a call from senior management by now–”

  RRRIIIINNG!

  Immediately upon finishing his sentence, Derrick’s phone started ringing.

  “…”

  With visible anxiety, Derrick brought the phone out of his pocket and stared at the screen. “…Ah, It’s just my girlfriend.”

  “Haah,” Clyde sighed. ‘Wait, he has a girlfriend??!’

  The room showed more shock and horror to this single statement from Derrick than Clyde’s entire talk of national security threats.

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  ‘Ah, no, I need to focus on important things right now!’ Clyde wrenched himself back to focus. Doing his best to reset his emotions, he tried to gather more information, “Derrick, you lifted Gun’s suspension because the executives gave you the all-clear, right? Have you checked how the damage control is going?”

  “Hm? Damage control? Be more specific.”

  Derrick was preoccupied with typing out a message to his girlfriend.

  “Are the media reporting it, or did you manage to quash the story? I assume you gave Gun some compensation, then announced that it was an internal mishandling, something like ‘Gun is confirmed not to be using cheats, we assure you that DIVE is completely secure…’ something like that?”

  “…!” Derrick glanced up at him.

  Clyde stuttered, “…Y-you did announce it right? That we lifted it?”

  “…No, the higher-ups didn’t instruct me to do anything like that, just to quickly give the guy back access to his account,” Derrick spoke quickly, “They would’ve handled that themselves, right?”

  Clyde stiffened. “Jayden, quickly run over to PR and go check! Tell them to put out a statement if they haven’t already!”

  “Okay!” Jayden grabbed his phone and sped out of the room.

  Derrick watched him race past. “You’re really overreacting. People won’t care that we suspended just a single player for a few hours.”

  “Not if it were a normal suspension, but it was under accusations of hacking… Did you give him any compensation? Tell me you at least gave him some compensation.”

  “Compensation for what?!” Derrick boomed, irritation seeping into his voice. “You’re starting to piss me off! That guy was suspended under fair grounds, and the things he used were overly powerful, so I nerfed them! Is that not our role here in the balancing team? If anything, he reaped the benefits of us accidentally buffing his class, so he should be grateful!”

  “Grateful?” Clyde scoffed. “You really…”

  “Are you done complaining yet?” Derrick interrupted him. “We have work to do. I want to look at the other archer class skills before that guy breaks them. This will be the last time he makes fools out of us. I’ll make sure of it.”

  “Are you being serious right now? You’ve already made five bullet points in the patch notes targeting a single f*cking person and you’re not even satisfied?! There are nearly four million people playing the game, yet you obsess over this one guy like a sh*tty fairytale cartoon villain.”

  Derrick snapped, “Do you really need to question EVERYTHING that I do?”

  “Maybe if everything you did wasn’t so PATHETICALLY STUPID then I wouldn’t have to!”

  “There it is again – more insults! I wonder if you’d stay so mouthy after I reported you to HR! With the things you’ve said to me in the past few minutes, they’d probably fire you five times over!”

  “If anyone got fired, it’d be you. You’re so hopelessly incompetent, I’ll be shocked if you’re not a nepo-hire.”

  “You– …Everyone in this room just saw your pathetic attempt at bullying. If you had any self-awareness, you’d be embarrassed.”

  “You think I’ll take advice on morals from the guy who launched five targeted nerfs at a single player you didn’t like? After that level of bullying, he might be crying somewhere feeling like his dreams were just crushed.

  …

  …

  “I got nerfed directly??!!”

  Seated in a horse-drawn carriage, Max read through the new patch notes as he passed through the streets of the capital city.

  “That’s insane! Are patch notes personalised? No, they wouldn’t be… That’s seriously insane!!”

  Max felt a massive ego-boost after seeing the first few lines of the patch notes. His class was right there! On the first few lines! It was as if, despite the game having three million players, the devs were trying to say: “You’re so strong that we need to go after YOU. SPECIFICALLY.

  “Hehehe,” Max made a weird laugh, prompting the coachman to shoot him a look.

  Not before posting an image of those initial notes to his social medias, Max read through the rest of the patch, picking out the most important points.

  “Titles are so limited now?” Max felt a little disappointed. He worked hard for those titles. Well… not really, but it would have been nice to have them anyways. “My level is twenty-one, divided by five is four-point-two, so I should have five slots…”

  He spent some time deciding which titles to use before eventually deciding on his top five:

  “Hmm… Actually, it seems like I can change them around whenever I want, so I’ll just use charm-boosting ones while I’m in the city.”

  Although Max still had no idea what charm did, he’d managed to get an employment offer from the crown prince of the kingdom yesterday, so it was most likely working in some way or another.

  …The other patch notes didn’t seem very significant, but he still decided to read through some of them for entertainment purposes.

  “…” It was a bit alarming that these things needed to be implemented at all, actually. “They really just threw ‘refreshments’ in there like it would make me forget, huh?”

  “Sir, are you okay?” The coachman, who’d listened as Max talked to himself for some time, finally couldn’t take it anymore and spoke up. “By any chance, are you possessed by an evil spirit?”

  “Usually a few thousand, but none right now,” Max responded since he hadn’t started streaming yet. “More importantly, how far are we from the palace?”

  The coachman seemed to tremble slightly, but replied, “W-we are only a few minutes away, sir. As you can see, the palace is at the end of the main road ahead.”

  Max directed his gaze in front. A large, dark-stoned castle entered his eyes, partially obscured by fog. There was no fog in the main city district, so this phenomenon had likely been created using magic. More importantly…

  ‘Why does it look like a villain’s lair?!’ Max observed the palace in the distance. ‘Palace? No, it looks like a fortress! A villainous fortress!’

  Wasn’t a palace meant to be a bright, colourful and lavish building, maybe even with banners and flags scattered around? If so, what was this drab, monochromatic defensive structure? It had tall walls and even watchtowers at regular intervals.

  Max rubbed his chin. “Wait, wasn’t I meant to be a personal bodyguard? Won’t my job just be really, really easy then?”

  “…”

  “…Nooooo!!”

  This was the worst possible outcome.