Villain Ch 1830. I DIED TO BONDAGE
[Warning! The villains will come to claim what's theirs!]
The system alert painted itself across every player's screen in bold, demonic red.
Font? Dramatic.
Effect? Pulsing like a heartbeat.
Subtext? You're about to die.
And the servers?
Split.
Players who didn't participate in the event—those just here for XP farming, market flipping, or casual fishing—barely blinked. "Not my circus," they thought. "Not my corpse."
They kept fishing. Farming. Sitting in towns pretending to AFK while secretly watching the drama unfold.
Because even if you weren't a target, that didn't mean the villains couldn't kill you.
It just meant they probably wouldn't.
Probably.
For the rest?
The marked ones?
The players with glowing epic-tier loot—the ones holding fragments of the Emperor's stolen relics?
They were ready.
Or so they thought.
Some fled. Straight into forests, caves, undercity ruins—wherever the map dimmed and detection signals lagged.
