Systems and methods are disclosed for directly responding to distributed network traffic received from a plurality of client devices. One method includes receiving, at a source device, client requests including a packet having a reserved portion, a source portion, and a destination portion; determining, for each client request, a target device from a plurality of target devices to respond to the client request; modifying, for each client request by the source device, the destination portion of the packet to an address of target device; modifying, for each client request by a switching layer prior to the target device receiving the modified client request, the destination portion; and responding directly to each client request by the target device without traversing the source device.