Chapter 376: Streamer Vs Barbarian [1]

Leon stood naked in the forest and felt nothing.

Not even the scrape of a branch or the give of soil.

The air moved against his skin and reported no temperature.

His bare feet met the ground, and the ground didn’t quite meet them back.

Sound arrived late, as if the trees were rendering audio on a delay.

Voices carried through the trunks.

Familiar.

Too familiar.

The cadence of people he had led and fucked and failed to hold above a red sea, warriors arguing, a woman’s short laugh that might have been Sira’s, the grunt of someone settling a weapon.

He walked toward them because standing still in a forest that didn’t acknowledge his weight was worse.

The clearing opened the way it always had.

Spawn point.

The first three goblins who had died under a body that was not yet his and then was.

The place the game had dropped a streamer into a red-haired frame and called it a second life.

"What is happening to me?"

No system answered.

Only the loop of bird-sound that had died earlier and the louder human noise ahead.

He pushed into the bushes.

On the far side of the leaves, a man stood with his back partly turned, bare to the waist, red hair, the body Kane remembered from the inside.

No Mjoldr. No scars from Giants or Hydras or a fragment’s burn.

Early. Clean.

The barbarian at the start of the board.

Leon’s own words came out of that mouth.

"I am Kane," the red-haired man announced.

"And I am here because this tribe is dying. You are leading these people straight into death."

Lain stopped a few feet away and slammed the head of his warhammer into the ground.

"You have a bold tongue for a dead man. I led this clan through the harsh winter. We survive because of my strength."

"You survive by hiding."

Kane took a few steps closer.

"I know exactly why your people are starving. Three weeks ago, you ordered a raid on the eastern trade route, but you misjudged the merchant guard patrols. You lost twelve good men because you ignored the scout reports about the new mercenary hires. Your leadership is weak, and your tactical decisions are worse."

A loud murmur rippled through the gathered warriors.

Leon’s stomach turned.

He had said those lines.

He had enjoyed the rising tension.

Meta-knowledge as a club.

"How do you know about the eastern road?" Lain demanded.

"I know a lot of things."

The barbarian smiled.

"I know you traded your best hunting grounds to the Shadowclaw tribe just to secure a peace treaty that they are currently planning to break next week. I know your people are eating boiled tree bark while you hoard the last of the dried meat in your personal hut."

"What is he saying?"

"Our chief would never."

Lain ripped the warhammer from the dirt and pointed it at Kane’s chest.

"Lies. You are a cowardly spy sent by the Shadowclaws to sow discord in my ranks. I will crush your skull and mount it on a pike to show them what happens to traitors."

The fight was short.

Leon had forgotten how short.

The barbarian body moved with a confidence the streamer frame had never earned; inside the hammer’s arc, a hand on the wrist, a knee, a twist, the warhammer turned into a liability.

Lain hit the dirt hard.

Kane’s fist followed.

Then stillness.

The tribe’s murmur became a different sound entirely: the sound of a hierarchy finding a new top.

Leon watched his own hands kill a man for the first time and felt nothing in his borrowed-naked skin except the urge to look away.

He didn’t look away when the red-haired Kane wiped blood on his trousers and turned toward the tents.

Thora was there.

Younger.

Sira beside her, orange hair, already loud.

The barbarian’s gaze moved over them the way Leon remembered moving over loot tables and quest rewards: assessment, appetite, the easy arithmetic of a game that had told him conquest was the point.

"You two," early-Kane said.

"With me."

Leon’s mouth shaped a no that made no sound in the leaves.

He knew what came next.

The tent.

The first claims.

The day he had treated them as content, bodies to clear, affection to unlock, a stream highlight if the NDA had allowed streaming this deep.

He hadn’t known their names would still matter when a tsunami took them.

Leon ran.

The forest still didn’t feel him, but it let him pass.

Branches snagged nothing.

His naked streamer body crossed the dirt toward the chief’s tent, Lain’s tent, Kane’s tent now, while the tribe’s attention stayed on the corpse and the sudden vacuum of command.

He shoved the hide flap aside expecting blood and skin and the beginning of every wrong permission he had taken.

The tent was empty of women.

Only Kane stood inside.

Red hair. Bare chest. Fresh blood on the knuckles.

The same height the streamer remembered from the inside of a different skull.

Golden-hour light from the smoke-hole cut across a face that was Leon’s and was not.

The barbarian looked up.

For a moment neither of them spoke.

Then the red-haired man tilted his head, curious the way a wolf is curious about a shape that should not be in the den.

"Hey."

Leon’s voice came out thin.

"Stop. Don’t—Thora and Sira. Don’t do what you’re about to do. They aren’t—this isn’t a loot table."

Early-Kane’s mouth curved.

"You’re me? And naked. And standing in my tent talking about women I haven’t touched yet."

He took a step closer.

"What are you supposed to be? A guilt spirit? A failed load of my own face? This is a fucking game."

"I’m you," Leon said.

"Later. After Berakamon. After the Giants. After the sky went red and the water took them. I’m what happens when you treat the whole board like a conquest playlist, and the extraction finally kicks. They’re real. Thora is real. Sira is real. Misha—"

"Misha?"

Kane’s eyes narrowed.

"You’re babbling future patch notes at a man who just killed a chief. Bad manners."

"I’m telling you not to start the way I started."

Leon’s hands were fists and still felt nothing.

"Don’t take them into this tent like rewards. Talk to them. Let them choose without the system glowing over your heads. Or when the tsunami comes, you will stand in red water and watch Thora say she loves you while your fingers open, and you will not get to put it back."

Kane laughed once.

"A naked figure of myself walks out of the trees and lectures me about love and tsunamis. Either you’re a system trick or the gods finally grew a sense of humour."

He rolled his shoulders.

"I don’t care which. You’re in my tent. You’re between me and what I claimed by right of the weapon. Move, or I move you."

"I’m not—"

Kane hit him.