And for what?

He pressed F11. The chat log vanished. The player names above heads dissolved. The floating green blips on the minimap flickered out. All that remained was the raw, unfiltered render.

They were roleplayers. That’s what they called themselves. But on nights like this, the mask slipped. They weren’t cops and criminals, mechanics and medics. They were architects of a broken cathedral, praying at the altar of modded draw distances. Marcus had spent four hundred hours tuning his visualsettings.dat file. He knew the exact value for shadow cascade splits. He had sacrificed car reflections for ambient occlusion. He had chased the dragon of “cinematic realism” until his game crashed more times than it ran.

His radio crackled. It wasn’t in-game. It was Discord.