John Doe stared at the screen like it had personally wronged him.
The cursor blinked at the end of the final line, smug and rhythmic, as if it was clapping. Congratulations, you've finished. You've created literature.
He didn't clap back.
He rubbed his eyes, then leaned closer, reading the last sentence for the fourth time as if proximity would make it better.
And then the heavens split open, and the SSS-Class Divine Dragon Emperor Sword God smiled.
He exhaled through his nose.
It wasn't good. It wasn't even pretending to be good. It was the kind of sentence you wrote at three in the morning while your brain was actively shutting down and your only fuel source was spite and warm energy drink.
But it was done.
That mattered, didn't it?
John opened the author dashboard and clicked "Publish."
A tiny loading wheel spun. A green tick appeared.
Chapter Uploaded Successfully.
For a second, it felt like winning. Like he'd just reached the summit of some personal mountain, planted a flag, and could finally look down at the wreckage of his own procrastination.
Then he clicked the "Reviews" tab.
The mountain immediately collapsed onto him.
The page took half a second to load, and in that half second John's heart lifted with the optimism of a man who had never been punched in the face by the internet.
When the reviews appeared, that optimism died a clean, quiet death.
He scrolled.
One star. One star. Two stars. One star again.
A few had the courtesy of being zero effort.
"Slop."
That was it. No punctuation, no explanation. Just the word, like it was a diagnosis.
Another review had slightly more passion.
"THIS IS SO ASS ðŸ˜ðŸ˜ðŸ˜"
John's jaw tightened.
He scrolled further, refusing to accept that the universe was this cruel. Surely, somewhere in the digital abyss, there was a decent review. Someone who got it. Someone who understood the artistic vision of The SSS-Class Regressed Demon King's Hidden System.
Instead, he found this:
"The power system makes no sense. MC gets SSS skills for breathing. Side characters exist to glaze him. There are no stakes. The author thinks 'SSS' is a personality trait."
John's fingers twitched over the mouse.
He scrolled again.
"Why is the tutorial arc longer than the war arc. Why is the war arc three chapters. Why does the MC become a god at chapter 9. Why did I read 80 chapters of this."
Another:
"Author doesn't understand 'balanced'. Also doesn't understand 'plot'. Also doesn't understand 'grammar'. But hey at least the MC is named John Doe so we don't have to pretend he's a real person."
John's mouth opened, then closed again.
He hadn't even noticed he'd named the protagonist John Doe when he first started. It was supposed to be temporary. A placeholder. The sort of name you used when you were sketching out the first draft and promised yourself you'd fix it later.
Later had never come.
It was still there.
A review further down simply read:
"This novel is what happens when you put a 'Top 10 Overpowered MC' compilation into a blender and drink it."
John sat back in his chair, the cheap gaming seat creaking like it was judging him too.
Okay.
Sure.
Maybe it wasn't perfect.
But people were dramatic. Review readers were always dramatic. They treated web novels like academic literature and then got mad when they weren't reading Shakespeare.
He clicked his tongue, reflexively defensive, as if the internet could hear him.
"Alright," he muttered to the empty room. "Fine. Whatever. You people don't know what you want."
His eyes flicked to the view counter.
The numbers were… decent, actually.
Not amazing. Not trending. Not "quit your job" money.
But people were reading.
And reading meant something. It meant engagement. It meant potential.
It meant—
A notification popped up.
New Comment on Latest Chapter.
John's shoulders tensed. Like touching a hot stove, he clicked it anyway.
The comment was short.
"Bro I'm convinced you're writing this to punish us."
John stared at it, expression blank.
Then he laughed, sharp and humorless.
"Punish you?" he repeated. "Punish you? You clicked it!"
He closed the tab like that would somehow close the opinion.
His eyes felt gritty. His brain felt overworked. He'd been grinding chapters for weeks like a machine, waking up, writing, eating something that barely qualified as food, writing again, collapsing.
He deserved a break.
He deserved the kind of break where he could do something brainless and soothing, like watch someone else get bullied online instead of him.
John opened YouTube.
The homepage loaded with the usual algorithm sludge—gameplay clips, drama thumbnails, outrage bait. He was about to click the first thing that looked mildly entertaining when a title caught his eye.
His stomach dipped before he even processed it.
The thumbnail was unmistakable.
It was his novel cover.
The cover he'd made in ten minutes using a free template and a stock image of a guy holding a glowing sword at a forty-five degree angle.
The title was brutal:
"THIS IS THE WORST WEB NOVEL I'VE EVER READ (I'M SERIOUS)"
The creator's face in the thumbnail was frozen mid-scream, mouth wide open, eyes bulging, as if the existence of John's writing was a personal assault.
John's fingers hovered over the mouse.
The rational part of his brain—small, quiet, and frequently ignored—said: Don't click that.
The emotional part of his brain—the one fueled by ego and sleep deprivation—said: Click it. Click it now.
John clicked it.
The video loaded. An intro played—loud music, quick cuts, neon text. Then it cut to the YouTuber sitting in a chair, wearing a headset, with a mic positioned like he was about to interview the president.
The guy smiled like a predator.
"Alright," the YouTuber said, leaning in. "So today we're talking about a web novel I found that is genuinely… and I'm not exaggerating… the most unbalanced, illogical, power-fantasy slop I have ever consumed."
John's jaw tightened instantly.
The screen displayed an image of John's first chapter, highlighted in fluorescent yellow like evidence in a crime documentary.
The YouTuber read aloud in a mock-serious voice.
"'John Doe opened his eyes and immediately received the SSS-Class Skill: Infinite Potential.'"
He paused, looked at the camera.
"Immediately."
He then read the next line.
"'John Doe smiled as his aura shook the heavens.'"
The YouTuber blinked.
"Bro, what heavens? He's in a cave. A dirt cave. The only thing shaking is the author's keyboard."
John's face flushed hot.
He leaned forward, elbows on his desk, as if he could physically fight the video.
"Okay," John muttered. "Yeah, no. Sure. Make jokes. That's easy."
The YouTuber kept going.
"Then he gets another SSS-class skill. And another. And then he gets a system reward, and the reward is… wait for it…"
He looked down dramatically.
"An SSS-Class weapon."
He looked back up.
"Now, you might be thinking, 'Okay, maybe this is some parody novel.'"
John's heart lifted for half a second.
The YouTuber smiled wider.
"It's not. It's dead serious."
John's heart fell back through the floor.
The video continued like an execution.
Screenshots of John's chapters flashed as the YouTuber highlighted random lines and read them in the tone of a teacher grading a failing student's homework.
"'The demon king trembled in fear, for he had never encountered such a handsome aura.'"
He covered his face.
"Handsome aura."
John's ears burned. That line had sounded cool when he wrote it. It had sounded… poetic. Aura was cool. Handsome was cool. Combining them had felt like a power move.
Now it sounded like a crime.
The YouTuber leaned back in his chair, laughing.
"And before the John Doe defenders come out," he said, "let me make one thing clear. I love power fantasies. I adore trash. I was raised on trash."
He spread his hands like he was confessing to something holy.
"But this? This is weaponized trash. This is trash that doesn't even respect the rules of being trash. It's like the author heard the concept of stakes and went, 'Nah, I'll just give him an SSS-Class Stakes Immunity.'"
The comments on the right were a wildfire.
"LMAOOO I READ THIS TOO ðŸ˜""THE AUTHOR GOTTA BE TROLLING""SSS-CLASS SLOP""JOHN DOE 🔥🔥🔥 (derogatory)""handsome aura is CRAZY"
John's hand clenched into a fist on the desk.
"You don't know anything," he snapped, voice too loud in the empty room. "You're reading it wrong. It's meant to be— it's meant to be—"
He didn't know what it was meant to be.
He just knew it was his.
And watching someone tear it apart like it was sport made his chest feel tight.
He closed the video.
Then reopened it a second later, like a man returning to a car crash because he couldn't look away.
He scrubbed forward to see what the YouTuber said at the end.
The guy leaned toward the camera, face suddenly serious.
"And to the author," he said, as if speaking directly through the screen, "if you ever see this… please, for the love of God, learn what 'balanced progression' means. Or don't. But at least put a warning label on it. Some of us weren't prepared."
He smiled again.
"And that's the end of today's torture session. Like and subscribe if you enjoyed my suffering."
John stared at the paused frame.
The YouTuber's grin seemed personal.
John's breathing was shallow. His shoulders were tight. His eyes felt dry.
He clicked off YouTube entirely, like it had betrayed him.
The room felt smaller.
His apartment was quiet in that way that made everything feel louder—his laptop fan, the hum of the fridge, the distant traffic outside.
John rubbed his face.
It wasn't fair.
He'd worked hard.
Sure, he hadn't planned every arc. Sure, the pacing was questionable. Sure, he'd spammed "SSS-Class" like it was punctuation.
But so what?
People read this stuff. People loved this stuff. There were entire empires built on trashy web novels with overpowered protagonists and systems and stat windows and demon kings and random girls falling into the MC's lap because his aura was, apparently, handsome.
It wasn't like he'd committed some unforgivable sin.
He'd written what the genre wanted.
And now they were punishing him for it.
John leaned back in his chair and stared at the ceiling.
His eyelids felt heavy. That exhaustion that lived behind his bones finally started to win.
He glanced at the clock.
1:47 a.m.
His laptop screen still glowed, the author dashboard open like a wound.
He should… sleep. Reset. Tomorrow he could fix things. Edit. Maybe start a rewrite. Maybe address feedback.
Or maybe he could ignore everyone and keep printing chapters out of spite.
He shut the laptop with a dull click, stood, and stumbled toward his bed.
He didn't bother changing. Didn't bother brushing his teeth. He collapsed onto the mattress like a man surrendering to gravity.
His mind still churned, replaying reviews, replaying the YouTuber's voice.
Handsome aura.
His lips twitched in irritation.
"If I wake up tomorrow," he mumbled into the pillow, "I'm deleting the whole thing."
The darkness didn't respond.
Sleep swallowed him anyway.