Late evening of Throne Wars Day 3.
TitanCorp headquarters. Floor 42: PR Strategy Room.
After Veilrend fell in the chaos, Elara slipped quietly out of the game.
The Throne Wars raged on around her—a 7-day, 24-hour event with thousands of players still flooding in and out of the battlefield. System messages flashed like neon across the city HUDs, resurrection timers counted down, and streamers shouted into their mics.
But Fairyblade was already logged out.
She sat upright in her pod, unstrapped the neural tether from her wrist, and exhaled once—sharp and brief. In the dim corner of company capsule testing room, she opened her screen, yanked out the raw logs, and started printing. The pages spilled out hot and messy from the tray—battle data, player sentiment snapshots, timestamps of promotional overlay errors. Half the report was handwritten. The other half were scrawled annotations on top of AI summaries.
It didn't matter. She was late.
