Epic Fail - Page 10

Chapter 6: Pixels, Blood, and Other Lies

I didn’t fight.

I didn’t march.

I didn’t even leave my room.

 

I just sat there—scarred, sidelined, ignored—watching the whole war of the world unfold on whatever glitchy streaming portals still worked in my part of the simulation.

Call it what you want:

Epic battle.

Divine reckoning.

Historic moment.

I call it content.

 

The war wasn’t noble. It wasn’t poetic.

It was just clickbait with corpses.

Men—flesh, fur, fang—throwing themselves at each other like code on the verge of crashing.

 

And leading it all?

My brother.

The one and only Ravn.

 

Except the Ravn they saw wasn’t the Ravn I knew.They saw a god. A legend. A warrior king with ten gleaming heads, ten perfect faces, ten hungry smiles.But I knew better.

 

I always knew better.

 

He only ever had one real head.

The rest?

PR filters.

Deepfakes.

Holo-masks.

Nine artificial faces designed to sell the myth.

To terrify the peasants.

To seduce the believers.

To make the streams look epic when in reality?

He was just a man with too much mascara and a very old grudge.

 

I watched the feeds—watched the ‘armies’ clash.

 

On one side: monkeys, half-cyber, half-mammal, waving crude weapons and hashtags.

 

On the other: the so-called demon army of Lank.OS, who looked more like an overfunded cosplay convention.

 

Blood splashed. Heads rolled.

A thousand deaths—and none of them mattered.

None of them were real.

The comments rolled faster than the swords:

‘#GloryToRam’

‘#DemonDown’

‘#SitaWillBeSaved’

 

And me?

I was sitting in my dead room, staring into dead screens, laughing so hard I could barely breathe.

Because the one they called the villain—the one they said caused it all—

Wasn’t even invited to the war.

 

I’d been deleted.

From the story.

From the feeds.

From the memory.

 

I swiped past clips of Hanuman—the monkey-boy burning my old city, his tail on fire like some glitchy mythological meme gone viral.

 

I scrolled through shots of S-Ita—pale, frozen, perfect as ever—still locked in golden silence.

And I swiped through image after image of Ravn, his ten faces glitching in high-res, smiling, roaring, preening for the cameras.

 

Only one head’s real, I muttered to myself.

The rest?

Just filters.

Just fragile code masking an even more fragile man.

 

And somewhere deep down, buried under rage and ruin, I almost—almost—felt sorry for him.

Because I knew.

We were the same.

Glitches. Errors.

Stories that no longer made sense.

 

The war raged.

The bridge held.

The bodies fell.

 

And me?

 

I lit another cigarette and whispered to the darkness: ‘Let it all burn. Let it all crash. I was never meant for this ending anyway.’