The Red Dragon Lord is OP, but Insists on a Pop Culture Invasion! Chapter 158 - 156: Boycotting Cheaters Is Everyone’s Respons

Zog was in his cabin in the Northern Domain.

Despite having enough Gold Coins to swim in, he never liked living in overly large houses.

When he was young, he saw a movie called *The Shining*, and it left him with a deep-seated fear of large, empty houses.

He felt like a pair of creepy twins could pop out from every corner of a big house.

Even as an adult, the thought gave him the creeps.

Two Dragons, two humans, and an Elf were gathered around the card table.

They were in the middle of a tense and exciting playtest of Ferin Chronicles.

Under the grand-sounding guise of quality assurance.

Since it was a multiplayer ga with others present, Furin had reverted to her image of a dignified, mature woman.

However, her long legs under the table weren’t behaving, her toes dangling a high heel and swinging it back and forth.

’It must be a trick to distract ,’ Zog thought, remaining unmoved.

They had entered the final showdown. Zog was the Lord, and Furin was the Traitor.

The two Dragons had also made a bet: if Zog lost, he’d have to go back to the nest to sleep tonight. If he won, he could stay up and play gas for a whole week.

"Attack," Zog said, playing an attack card against Furin.

"Defend." Furin countered the attack.

Zog used his Berserker character’s effect: when an attack is defended against, he could draw a card.

"I’ll attack again."

"How? Aren’t you only allowed to attack once per turn?" Furin asked.

"Because I have the Revolver equipped. There’s no limit to how many tis I can attack each turn," Zog said, pointing to his equipnt slot.

"Then I’ll activate my effect," Furin said.

Furin was playing a Legendary Illusionist character. Her unique effect was that when attacked, she could make a "draw check." If the drawn card wasn’t an action card, the attacker would take one point of damage and have to discard a card.

If it was an action card, the defender would take one point of damage and have to discard a card.

With that, she flipped over the top card of the deck.

It was an equipnt card.

"Discard a card!" Furin said smugly.

Zog thought for a mont, then discarded the only defense card in his hand. He wanted to defeat Furin this turn.

"I’m attacking again."

"Defend."

"You still had a defense card? Why didn’t you use it before?" Zog was getting suspicious.

"Er... instinct," Furin said, not sounding very confident.

Zog drew another card. It was an attack action card.

"This is the final attack!"

"Activating effect check."

Furin flipped over a card from the deck again. It was another equipnt card.

Zog lost his last point of health.

"Haha, you lose!" Furin said happily.

"Wait!" Zog quickly extended a claw. Given Furin’s prior conviction of using an Illusion Technique to swap tiles in mahjong, he poked at the check card.

But there was nothing wrong with it.

"Co on, back to the nest with ," Furin urged.

"Nooo, it’s not even nightti yet!"

"ACHOO—" Just as Zog was in a "life-or-death" crisis, Saint El sneezed off to the side and said, as if casually, "Oh my, I seem to sll sothing strange."

A sll?

’That’s right, the sll!’

Zog imdiately leaned over the action card he had just drawn and took a careful sniff. Sure enough, there was a fragrant scent.

He then checked his other action cards one by one.

They all had the sa scent.

’This scent... It’s her perfu!’

Furin had used a ti-honored cheater’s trick: marking the cards.

That’s why she sotis chose to use her effect check and sotis didn’t.

’And using perfu, no less. Is she trying to cosplay as Mai Kujaku or sothing?’

"You cheated!" Zog declared with an expression of righteous, impartial justice, as if he were disowning his own kin. "I’m going to stay up and play gas for two weeks straight!"

He said it as if he were making so outrageous demand.

Ever since he got a girlfriend, this was the extent of Zog’s ambition.

"I was just doing it for your own good," Furin said, a little embarrassed. "Making you go back to the nest early... I just wanted you to get so rest..."

"Do you really think I can get any rest if I go back to the nest with you?" Zog’s voice was filled with a sob.

KNOCK KNOCK—

A knock on the door broke the slightly awkward atmosphere.

"Boss, Mr. Bane says there might be cheating in the auto chess duo queue ranked event."

said Assistant Zor from outside the door.

’Did they find out about the ti I secretly changed the probabilities for myself in the backend?’ was Zog’s first thought.

A couple of dragons cut from the sa cloth.

’No, that’s impossible. I didn’t even play in the duo queue ranked event.’

’Besides, I only did it once, and that was during the internal beta test, just to have so fun with a fully-built-out lineup.’

’Phew, I scared myself there for a second.’

Zog went and opened the door. "What’s going on? How did Bane find out soone was cheating?"

"The sa account beat him three tis in a row," the assistant replied.

"That’s not... I an, beating him three tis in a row sounds pretty normal." Zog almost laughed.

It wasn’t that he looked down on Bane, but given Bane’s skill level—forcing the sa lineup every ga and often tilting while rolling for units—even Zog could beat him many gas in a row.

You can’t bla the road for being bumpy when you’re the one who can’t walk straight.

"But he said his teammate in duo queue was Toto," the assistant added.

"Who?"

A mont later, Zog was face-to-face with an indignant Bane and Toto.

They were angry for different reasons. Bane was mad because he wasn’t going to get the one-day ranked champion title.

The account in question was already hundreds of points ahead of second place on the leaderboard, and the gap was only widening.

Toto, on the other hand, was starting to doubt her own skills. What if that person really was better than her?

’Wouldn’t that make a clown for coming here to complain?’

Although she was a Half-Elf who’d do anything for money and had very few scruples, she had her pride in one thing.

And that was gaming.

In all her decades, this was the first ti she’d found sothing she was truly talented at. Combined with her insane level of grinding, it had earned her her current status in the gaming world. She wanted to protect her title as number one.

So she had to take a gamble—a gamble that her opponent was a cheater.

"Give the match ID. I’ll have the operations departnt look up the ga records," Zog said imdiately.

It was better to believe it and be wrong than to dismiss it and be right. Besides, anyone who could beat Toto was, indeed, very likely to be cheating.

After all, this Half-Elf was the most absurdly skilled gar Zog had ever seen.

He would call her "half a step into the realm of TAS."

That is, using third-party tools to perform fra-perfect inputs.

Toto had reached that level all on her own.

The ga record was sent over quickly. It was a feature that hadn’t been officially released to players yet.

The backend would record player actions and key monts, then use that data to reconstruct a replay of the match.

The Red Dragon, Dwarf, and Half-Elf huddled together, watching the replay of the most suspicious match with rapt attention.

They paid special attention to the last round, where the opponent’s entire board repositioned to dodge Toto’s whirlwind ability.

The replay was played fra by fra.

In the very last second, every one of the player’s pieces on the board began to move. The actions all started on the exact sa fra.

"A script! That’s definitely a script!"

Zog said with absolute certainty.

’Feilin doesn’t have Heart Stealers, so what, is he using tentacles to move all his pieces at once?!’

"What’s a script?" Toto asked, confused.

"Er, it’s a type of cheating thod, basically."

Although Zog respected all kinds of gars, his opinion of people who used cheats in PvP gas had always been that they deserved to sit at the sa table as dogs.

’No, that’s an insult to dogs.’

The next step was simple: find this script-user and figure out where the cheat ca from.

Zog had no intention of letting his own ga’s environnt be ruined by cheats. He’d seen plenty of gas go down that path before.

Cheats drive away normal players, and then the cheaters, having no one left to stomp on, quit as well.

In the end, the only outco for the ga is to be shut down.

However, although the ga consoles had a location-tracking function, the tech team checked and found that this person wasn’t playing on a console, but was using Illusion Mimicry.

While that could also be tracked, it was more troubleso. It couldn’t pinpoint an exact location, only a general area, which would take a lot of ti.

Just then, Zog noticed a sowhat familiar account na—the account of the cheater’s duo partner.

"Little Girl Who Dreams of Getting into Repin," Zog read the account na word by word. "How is it you again?"