They surrounded the little girl on a slab of cement, stabbed her and then drank her blood. The girl was still alive, wriggling and screaming at the top of her lungs as the men chanted around her. The same exact ritual the little boy just went through, still looping on my computer screen. Except in this one, the four men surrounding the little boy have tall, sharp-pointed hoods drawn over their heads, concealing their identities. I can already feel myself slipping back into that black hole it took weeks to crawl out of six months ago. It put me in one of the darkest headspaces I’ve ever been in. I locked myself in a room and didn’t come out for twenty-six hours after watching that first video. I was physically unable to go on living my normal dayto-day with the knowledge that this was being done to children. That helplessness grew as I explored the dark web and found thousands of videos of parents raping their own children. Alongside the millions of other videos of torture, cannibalism, and even necrophilia. A lot of those videos take place in red rooms, where buyers can direct how exactly they want the victim to be tortured, raped, and killed. And those are just the ones involving children. Those videos in particular are what drove me to create Z five years ago. Since I was a kid, I had a knack for computer science, and my skills have surpassed even the top hackers in government organizations. Finding myself on the dark web and stumbling upon those videos was by accident. But it changed my fucking life. I haven’t been able to sleep since then. Knowing sick people pay to view hundreds of thousands of children being subjected to those things. Even worse, knowing that the people committing the acts do it both for their own pleasure and monetary gain. And that just as many women and children continue to go missing every day so they can be subjected to those same things. Since then, I made it my mission to find and kill them all. ’ve killed hundreds of people at this point. Locating predators that I have one hundred percent proof of their involvement in human trafficking. Now I’m going to make my way through the government, starting with the four politicians from the first video, and then making my way through the rest. I know exactly where they live. What they eat, where they sleep, shit, and work. But what they haven’t led me to is where these rituals take place. And every day that goes by without that information, these rituals will be performed more. “Did we get a hit on an IP address from who leaked the video?” I ask Jay, though I already know the answer.