Bloodlines Online

After talking with the demon woman he left without even asking for her name, he hoped he would be able to escape her clutches anyway so it wouldn't matter.

He was headed to the dungeon to wait for the others in his team as the game apparently had no way to message one another yet.

While waiting he wanted to explore the streaming tab though, he also secretly hoped that by streaming he could get some extra money if people donated to him the way the advertisers endlessly preached.

When he got his stream open it asked him to name it so he simply chose to call it "Hard Mode Dungeon Crawl" as it was an accurate description.

Since he was waiting he entered the dungeon just to do a run for anyone who may check it out.

The result was him ignoring his stream for some time while he breezed through the undead at the beginning.

When a stream is set up it gives the user an option to choose third person or first person and since he worried that his gaze may go to weird things he chose third person.

When he got to the boss room he absorbed the mana there to help his mana veins and core along like the rest of the dungeon but it wasnt potent anymore.

When he began the boss fight he was prepared to lose but he wanted to try anyway.

~

In the real world there were many people who spent their day doing nothing but scrolling through devices.

They would often be children or stay at home parents or even people who had passive income, the common factor amongst those who did nothing but scroll media all day was the fact that they did not have to work for anything.

These were the main people watching BLO streams for fun, the rest were those who did so for their job.

One such individual was looking through streams to find her next article, she worked for a gaming news website that had given her the task of finding anything that could be used from streamers.

The problem with public streams, she had learned, was how often these streams were just made for perverts.

On BLO's streaming service you could

select a level range to watch streams from, she had selected the 100-150 range and in these streams she saw that there were at least fifty streamers, of those streaming she saw that at least half were either trying to exploit the adult audience of the game.

One streamer was very egregious in fact.

An elven female player had taken to wearing more revealing outfits on her healer.

In the third person view this woman would do odd poses clearly trying to get a reaction and every few minutes she said the name of an account for a website that was making the poor reporter disgusted in this streamer.

"EnGuard, I'll be sure to block her from any stories i write. I shouldn't be shocked that degenerates are already trying to turn the game into an adult content farm."

She eventually left the stream to go look for others, that's when she found it.

A stream showing a dungeon crawl.

'Wait aren't most of those signed to the devs? This is perfect!'

Even if the stream wasn't a good player she would be one of the few to have a chance to write about a dungeon crawl without dev controlled footage, and it was a hard mode dungeon!

When she opened the stream she went back to the beginning of it and settled in to watch.

~

Ezekiel was battling the dungeon boss and abusing every strategy he had learned from his allies, he even exploited his knowledge of how the death mark skill worked to try to deal extra damage like Shade.

He currently had the boss at 25% hp and the giant skeleton was incredibly low as he wanted to keep its hp at a place where he could kill it whenever he wished.

During the many runs they had done they had learned that if they kept the skeleton alive instead of killing it before getting Diana to her next health threshold she would recreate the giant's shield rather than reviving it at full health.

Normally one would expect this to repeat the mechanic of the skeleton's own shield but this one didn't seem to.

If he mostly ignored the giant and used his extra speed to keep track of the two of them he could just run away and kite the bosses.

The others did not have his proficiency in mana sense nor did they have his proficiency in making mana shields so without them in his path he was flourishing.

He hoped the others never find out about this though since he worried how they would feel if they knew they held him back in his farming against Diana.

~

The journalist was furiously typing as she watched the mage battle against the necromancer boss of the dungeon, she didnt know how difficult the boss was but she knew from watching the official stream clips from the devs that a solo dungeon crawl wasn't easy at all.

By now she saw that there were hundreds of viewers to the stream and donations were flying in as comments surged.

"How does he have so much mana?"

"How is he fighting the boss like that?"

"I don't recognize those spells, is he using the same spell as the boss?"

"Hey isn't that the player Belial?"

"Yeah he was with War God."

"The big clans are going to poach him for sure."

"Poor war god, his clan won't have Belial for long."

When the battle was done it seemed as if the only one who was surprised was the player himself as he was cheering.

The next thing they knew a server message appeared as if the viewers were players.

~~~~~~~~~~

"Congratulations to player *Redacted* for being the first to complete a hard mode dungeon alone, rewards have been granted."

~~~~~~~~~~

It was at this point that the stream ended.