Oh, splendid,
I muttered, sarcasm dry enough to scrape metal from bone. Exactly what I needed: an express elevator directly into someone's half-baked idea of immersive storytelling.
The cheers from above still echoed, a cacophony of frothing crowd noise compressed into raw, glitchy reverb. "Bounty! Easy prey!" They were truly milking the irony, weren't they? Because nothing screams peak entertainment like dangling your favorite washed-up legend like bait.
"Mid Gamer," they'd branded me. A walking contradiction wrapped in lag spikes and chronic sleep debt. The myth. The joke. The girl behind the guy behind the avatar—prize of the hour and designated main course in tonight's psychological buffet.
The air grew heavy. Not fear, not precisely. More like that sterile, server-room chill, the kind that permeates a refrigerator full of forgotten dreams. Mixed with metal. Probably blood. Possibly someone's last corrupted save file. Light shrank behind me, reduced to a stage-light pinhole that snapped shut like a blinking cursor. No escape. Just depth. And drama. And whatever twisted, meticulously scripted "twist" they were cooking next.
A clone of Velvet, they'd casually announced. Because originality's dead, and horror's always better when it's recycled through personal trauma. What, no loot drop first? No skip cutscene button for this emotional torment? I swear, if I ever meet the Game Masters face to face, I'm going to mod their brains into pre-rendered tofu.
The platform jerked to a halt, a sudden, jarring jolt. My stomach followed a second later, performing a graceful, if unpleasant, somersault. I exhaled slowly, a practiced, almost automatic gesture, as if this were just another mundane match queue finally loading. Because honestly? It might as well be.
"Still watching?" I whispered, the words barely audible in the sudden, oppressive silence of the chamber. I wasn't speaking to anyone, or perhaps, to everyone. To the unseen puppeteers, to the faceless masses. "Hoping I lose?"
A beat of silence hung, heavy and expectant.
"Cute."
A half-smile tugged at my lips, but it wasn't joy. It was the sardonic grin of someone already halfway through the breakdown, now just trying to make the collapse cinematically engaging.
Right.
Time to meet this Velvet knockoff. Time to play their game. Again. And maybe, just maybe… break something far more important than just a few F-PP points.
The platform hissed, a final, weary sigh of compressed air releasing me into the chamber. It was a circular space, vast and unsettling, bathed in a sickly, green-tinged glow that seemed to soak into the very concrete.
The walls were a rough patchwork of raw material and exposed rock, scored with deep gouges that looked suspiciously recent, like the aftermath of previous, less fortunate participants.
This wasn't just "an underground room"; it was a hastily constructed, brutalist arena, reeking of desperation and the stale sweat of past, unseen battles.
My eyes immediately swept the perimeter, searching for an exit, a flaw in their grand design, anything that wasn't a dead end. Nothing. Just more walls, more gloom, and the omnipresent hum of unseen, heavy machinery vibrating through the floor. They hadn't skimped on the prison aesthetic.
Then, from the deepest shadows opposite me, a figure began to slowly, agonizingly coalesce. It wasn't a sudden pop, like a low-resolution asset loading into frame. Instead, it was a deliberate materialization, as if the very air was stitching together threads of light and shadow, forming a human shape.
My breath hitched.
It was Velvet.
Or rather, a terrifyingly accurate replica.
Every subtle curve of her silhouette, the way her hair fell, even the familiar, almost imperceptible tilt of her head – it was all there. My gut twisted with a fresh wave of nausea, sharper this time. Of course.
They wouldn't just make a generic enemy; they had to twist the knife, didn't they? They had to make it excruciatingly personal.
My mind, despite the cold sweat tracing frigid lines down my back, immediately snapped into hyper-analytical overdrive. I scanned for the tells, the glitches, the minute imperfections that would betray its artificiality.
Was there a subtle flicker in its eyes? A stiffness in its posture? A fractional delay in its perceived breathing?
Nothing. It stood there, utterly still, a perfect, silent mirror reflecting my own dread back at me, the only sound the low, almost imperceptible hum of its artificial existence.
This wasn't just a combat drone; it was a psychological weapon, crafted with a perverse, unsettling precision. The sheer effort they put into this level of torment was, frankly, insulting.
All for me, the "Mid Gamer."
A sardonic laugh bubbled up, quickly stifled before it could escape. They wanted a show? Fine. I'd give them one. Just not the one they expected. This wasn't just about winning for F-PP or earning some idiotic bounty.
This was about survival, about preserving whatever fragments of self I had left.
And if that meant dismantling a perfectly rendered, agonizingly familiar ghost, then so be it. The grin returned to my face, sharper this time, less about performance and more about the bitter taste of cold, hard defiance.
Time to see what kind of damage this "legacy" could truly inflict.
And yes, it's the perfect time to lock-in.