Xerxes is a Warlock. Standard class. Standard spells. One very non-standard problem: her patron is a Twitch chat.
Not a demon lord. Not an eldritch horror. A cacophonous flood of usernames, donation alerts, and emoji spam that lives inside her head, commenting on everything she does. They suggest terrible tactics. They donate mana when she's about to die. They demand she cast Light] on the tank's helmet for fifty gold. And sometimes - just sometimes - they're the only thing keeping her sane in a world that's starting to feel like someone else's game.
Because Xerxes knows something the NPCs don't: the world is a simulation. The architecture is lazy. The physics are suggestions. And the people she's fighting alongside - the stoic tank, the cynical rogue, the faith-obsessed cleric, the tragically underleveled bard - they aren't characters. They're people. Real, breathing, bleeding people who think their tragic backstories matter.
They do matter. She's just not sure how much anymore.
When a routine dungeon crawl turns deadly and the party loses one of their own, Xerxes finds herself dragged into a conspiracy that reaches the highest levels of power. A suspiciously perfect Paladin. A missing caravan. A sealed chest older than the gods themselves. The Chat wants chaos. Her party wants survival. And somewhere in the broken geometry of a road that shouldn't exist, something ancient is waiting.
The loot tables are rigged. The NPCs are too real. And the viewers? They can't look away.
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