The Ultimate Epic Fail Influencer

Chapter 6

Ella Rogers pulled out her phone, thumb already swiping through the department's internal database. The screen flickered, then locked onto a grainy mugshot, the face crooked into a sneer that matched, almost too perfectly, the unconscious man sprawled face down on the cracked pavement. She crouched, tilted her head, compared the two for half a second, and her professional composure slipped just enough for everyone nearby to notice.

"Hold on," she said, cutting through the murmurs of the popcorn crowd. "This isn't just some pickpocket."

The crowd leaned in.

"This man," she continued, lifting the phone so the closest onlookers could see, "is Class-A Most Wanted. John Baxton."

The street went dead silent. For a heartbeat, even the traffic two blocks over seemed to hush. Then the silence cracked open all at once.

"What the hell? That's not a thief?"

"A wanted criminal? Class-A?"

"John Baxton, I know that name! He pulled big jobs all over the country."

"No wonder he was carrying a knife. He was ready to go down swinging."

The whispers spread like a brushfire. An older woman near the curb pressed a hand to her mouth, eyes going wide.

"I heard about him," she said, voice trembling. "There was a girl, came in from the countryside to study in the city. He stole her tuition money. It wasn't even much, just a few hundred dollars."

"A few hundred?" someone repeated, frowning.

"Her family had scraped that together over an entire year," the woman went on. "Eating plain rice, skipping doctor visits, all of it. The girl was too scared to tell her parents. She cried herself sick. Her heart gave out. She died in the ambulance before they ever reached St. Mary Hospital."

A collective intake of breath rippled outward.

"I saw that story. Three hundred dollars. You can't even pay rent with that. And that piece of garbage took a teenage girl's life over it."

"There was a single mom too, sick herself, raising two kids. He took her whole month's paycheck. And an old man recycling bottles for half his life, saving up to travel. Baxton cleaned him out in one afternoon."

"There was a blind beggar on the footbridge, playing the violin for spare change. Same guy. Same rotten deed."

The mood curdled fast. John Baxton had never killed anyone outright, never robbed a bank. What made him unforgettable was the kind of person he hunted. He picked on the weak, kissed up to the strong, every single time. The names of other fugitives blurred together, but his stuck like a splinter under the skin.

A man near the back bent down and picked up a fist-sized rock, knuckles whitening around it.

"Scum of society like this doesn't deserve a courtroom," he growled, taking a step forward.

Ella moved smoothly between him and the unconscious figure, palms raised.

"Sir, please." Her voice stayed even, the trained calm of someone who had defused worse. "He's already been taken down. He isn't going anywhere. I promise you, every single one of you, he will face the full weight of the law. Every victim, every family, will get justice. You have my word as an officer."

Something in her tone settled them. Heads nodded. The rock dropped back to the asphalt with a dull clack.

Then, almost as one, the crowd remembered who had actually put John Baxton on the ground.

Slowly, every pair of eyes turned toward Sam Sparks.

He was still standing beside his battered scooter, helmet tucked under one arm, hair slightly mussed, the picture of a tired delivery guy whose shift had taken a wrong turn. Lean, almost too thin for the oversized jacket. Nothing about him suggested a man capable of running down a Class-A fugitive in broad daylight.

Nobody could quite believe it.

Everyone knew the tier system. Fugitives were sorted into Tiers A, B, and C, with Tier A reserved for the worst, the ones whose crimes posed a serious threat to public safety. The department usually pulled in tactical units for those people. Sometimes specialists. Sometimes a whole task force.

And this skinny kid in a delivery uniform had just taken one out solo. With a scooter.

"Now that," somebody breathed, "is a real stand-up guy."

"Even riding deliveries, the man's got fire in his chest."

"I bet he recognized the face the second he saw him. That's why he hit him so hard."

"Earlier I thought he laid into him a little rough. Now I'm thinking he went easy. Should've broken both his legs."

Applause broke out. Real, full applause. Somebody whistled.

Inside Sam's own livestream, the chat had gone feral.

【Holy crap, John Baxton? I know that name!】

【That guy ran wild across the whole country, the kind of bastard you grind your teeth thinking about.】

【I heard he had insane counter-surveillance tricks. That's why nobody could pin him for years.】

【Obviously. Otherwise he'd have been caught a decade ago.】

【And he gets taken down today, by a delivery guy on a scooter?】

【Insane. I thought our streamer just clipped a random pickpocket. Turns out he reeled in a whale.】

【Bro didn't pull a stunt, he played with his life. That's a knife in the guy's pocket.】

【Baxton only ever stole, but with that rap sheet he's never seeing daylight again.】

【Cornered animals bite. He had nothing left to lose.】

【My scalp is tingling. If the streamer hadn't slammed him that hard, that knife would've been out.】

【Now I get why the first hit was so brutal. That wasn't recklessness, that was a plan.】

【LeftMeRight was the bait. The streamer was three steps ahead the whole time.】

【Baxton was on floor one, we were on floor three, our streamer was in the stratosphere.】

【This isn't a delivery run, this is a one-way ticket to a prison cafeteria.】

Reading the chat, Sam felt his face go numb in a slow, horrified way.

Brutal? On purpose? He had been trying to brake. Desperately. The scooter simply hadn't cared. The thing launched off the line like a rocket strapped to a barstool, throttle pinned somewhere north of a hundred miles an hour from the first twitch of his wrist. A scooter like that wouldn't just flatten a person. It would put a horse on its back.

And the Damn System that had dropped this nightmare into his life was clearly insane. Opening move, slam into a Class-A fugitive? He had been bracing for some loose-change purse snatcher. Instead the universe had handed him a legend in handcuffs. He didn't even know who John Baxton was, not really, but the chat was acting like he had wrestled death itself onto the asphalt. If a man could earn a Class-A label, his skill set was nothing to laugh at. Sam wasn't denying that. But the way the comments kept escalating, you'd think he had walked into a war zone with a lunchbox.

The chat refused to slow down. The viewer counter ticked past five hundred and kept climbing.

【User SnowWhisper sent: Dreamy Hot-Air Balloon!】

【User CloudWanderer sent: Romantic Fireworks!】

【User SweetCookie sent: Crush Rose!】

【User TenderNight sent: Dreamy Bubble Machine!】

These weren't the polite little stickers from earlier. Each gift bloomed across the screen with its own animation, color, and sound, the kind of effects Sam had only ever seen during late-night scrolls through other streamers' rooms. He didn't know exact prices, but he knew expensive when he saw it.

"The internet is something else," he muttered. "Barely five hundred viewers and the gifts are stacking like this. If the room ever cracks a few thousand."

Just imagining it made his stomach do a little flip.

"No wonder everyone's clawing to be a streamer. This blows a regular paycheck out of the water."

Within thirty seconds, the gift effects had rolled across the screen dozens of times, hot-air balloons drifting past roses, fireworks spilling over bubbles. A rough mental tally said he had already pulled in several hundred bucks just standing there.

His like counter was spinning like a slot machine. New followers piled in faster than the UI could refresh. The notification icon had given up entirely and now read 99+, frozen in surrender. Some viewer with deep pockets had spent real money to push his stream onto the platform's trending board, and the boost was instant.

Within minutes, he caught the unmistakable handles of Newsroom Press accounts and regional indie creators trickling into the chat, watching, waiting, fingers no doubt poised over keyboards, hungry for whatever happened next.