Chapter 2

That flicker of chaos on their stream was all the confirmation Ethan needed. Sarah and Mark were masters of presentation, not substance. Their whole operation was a fragile illusion.

When the stream came back online, Sarah' s voice was tight with forced cheerfulness.

"Wow, you guys! You love 'Chrono Rift' so much you broke the internet!"

Mark laughed, a little too loudly. "That' s what happens when you have the hottest game on the market. The servers can barely keep up with the demand."

They blamed the fans, the platform, anything but their own shoddy infrastructure. They spun the failure as a mark of success. It was a lie, slick and practiced, and their audience ate it up. The incident was forgotten in a wave of new giveaways and coupon codes.

Ethan closed the browser. He didn't need to watch them anymore. He needed to work.

He spent his days and nights coding, fueled by cheap coffee and a burning sense of purpose. He lived on the fringe of the gaming world, in forgotten forums and small Discord servers where real developers and hardcore players talked shop. It was there, in the digital back-alleys, that he started his surveillance.

He didn't follow Sarah's mainstream channels. He followed Mark. He dug into Mark' s history, his past projects, his forum posts from years ago. Mark wasn' t just unoriginal, he was a thief. His digital footprint was a trail of abandoned collaborations, angry accusations from former partners, and suspiciously similar-looking "prototypes."

Then, a new announcement dropped. "Chrono Rift: The Shattered Isles," the game's first major DLC. It promised new lands, new enemies, new everything. The hype was immediate.

Ethan felt a cold dread. He downloaded the press kit, looking at the concept art. One image, a twisted, crystalline tree, made his blood run cold. He dug out his old "Nexus" hard drive again, navigating to a folder labeled "Scrapped Ideas." There it was. An almost identical drawing of a crystalline tree he' d made in college. He' d even posted it on a niche world-building forum back then, a forum where a user named "M-Dev" had asked a lot of specific questions about the concept.

Mark.

The "illegal looting," as the outline in his mind called it, was happening again. Mark wasn't just riding the coattails of "Aetheria's" stolen hype, he was actively pillaging Ethan's entire creative past to prop up his shallow game. He was stealing the very soul of "Nexus."

To everyone else, Mark was a genius. To Ethan, he was a grave robber.

He saw them on a podcast a few days later, gloating about the DLC.

"Where do you get these incredible ideas?" the interviewer asked Mark.

"I don't know, they just come to me," Mark said with a shrug, as if he were a vessel for some divine inspiration. "I dream of these worlds, and then I just have to create them."

Sarah looked at him with what she probably thought was adoration. "He' s a true visionary. That' s why I left my old life behind. I saw this raw, unstoppable talent in him. Someone like... my ex... he was just a hobbyist. Mark is the real deal."

Ethan felt a bitter laugh escape his lips. A hobbyist. She was calling him a hobbyist while her new visionary partner was stealing his college drawings. They didn't even see him as a threat. They thought he was a broken man, a failed developer who had faded into obscurity. They had no idea he was in the shadows, watching their every move.

He didn' t rage. He didn' t post angry comments. He began to gather the evidence.

Every night, after a long day of rebuilding "Aetheria 2.0" with the small but passionate community that had found him, he would put on his second hat. He became a digital archeologist. He took screenshots. He used the Wayback Machine to archive old forum pages where Mark had discussed concepts that were eerily similar to other indie games. He saved every conversation, every piece of concept art, every line of code that Mark had ever posted under his various usernames.

He created a folder on his computer, encrypted and backed up in three separate places. He named it "The Reckoning."

Meanwhile, "Chrono Rift's" success soared. The pre-orders for "The Shattered Isles" broke records. Mark and Sarah bought a new house, a sprawling modern mansion in the hills. They did a nauseatingly cheerful tour of it on her stream, showing off their new life built on lies. Their power and influence grew with every dollar they made.

They were on top of the world, untouchable.

Their success was a constant, oppressive weight. It felt like they were getting stronger while he was still struggling to get back on his feet. But with every piece of evidence he saved, with every line of code he perfected in "Aetheria 2.0," he felt his own strength returning.

They had built a castle of glass. And he was quietly, patiently, gathering the stones to shatter it.