006

[GAME LOADED]

…

“So that’s it, huh?”

…

“Two people out of four. A nice, simple fraction if you will.”

“And now, all that’s left…”

“Is me.”

…

“I hope you’re ready.”

“This is the final chapter, after all.”

…

…

…

“…Right?”

You wake up again to find that nothing has changed. You’re still in the lobby of ‘Harmony Labs,’ and the corpse of Lord Tirek is just a few feet away. As you slowly come awake, you stumble away, and you remember what he said.

By committing murder, you locked off your only escape option.

…Or did you?

If you can make it back up to the pit you fell into, you’re sure you can get out that way. After all, it didn’t have any transparent Barrier blocking it off – you could feel wind, and sun, and life out there. All you have to do is find some sort of thing you can climb with. With renewed determination, you press on.

Searching the room, you spy the sword you’d attempted to use on Tirek, hidden in a corner underneath a rock. You stumble over and pick it up, holding a hand to your head in pain. All that slamming around took a hefty toll on your physical health, and if you don’t find some food or drink soon, you’re going to be in for a whole new world of hurt.

You try to open the front door to Harmony Labs, to see if it's possible to go back to the surface that way. To your surprise, the front door isn't just locked, it's no longer there. Just a blank patch of wall... No going back up to the hole you fell into, it seems. You'll have to find another way out.

You attempt to open the door on the left of the lobby desk, but it’s still locked. Frustrated, you punch it, and to your surprise it slides open. Elated, you step through, away from the festering corpse of the centaur you just murdered.

This area of ‘Harmony Labs’ is just as moldy and decrepit as the rest, and you barely stop to look around in each room, searching solely for sustenance. You find your answer in a room whose sign states “Lounge,” in the form of a refrigerator. Opening it, you find a surprising amount of spinach, which you hurriedly scarf down, and a few cold bottles of water, which you guzzle just as greedily.

Half an hour later, you’re feeling much better. You venture out into the Labs again, feeling refreshed and full of determination.

Curious, you decide to poke around some more. You figure out from some of the posters on the wall that this place has apparently been around for quite a long time – almost a thousand years. Whatever a ‘year’ is in this place. You get the odd feeling you’re not on your home planet anymore.

Irritated by the lack of information on how to escape, you poke around some more labs, finding a single lit computer. To your surprise, there is no login, and the desktop is already depicted. You find some vaguely interesting files – an incomplete, pixelated map of ‘Tartarus’, some test logs for familiar-sounding inmates, and a few journal entries from whoever used this computer last. You read through disinterestedly, only to become intrigued as you read about some other human who visited this place. Maybe you are on your home planet, then? You don’t know. You just get the feeling you don’t belong here. Reading further, you’re ecstatic to discover that there is, in fact, a secret escape elevator. Apparently it’s in the same room as the ‘System Defenses’, whatever those are. Honestly, you’re not even sure you care at this point. If you could kill a magic centaur with nothing more than a golden triangular necklace, you’re pretty sure you can take on anything. Besides, they’re probably broken anyway. Or maybe that other human took care of them. The text log says that there are some useful things hidden in the storage cabinets, but you can’t seem to open any. Oh well. You can finally get out of here! Jubilantly, you close the journal file and make your way back into the Lobby, searching along the way for any room marked ‘System Defenses’ or some such.

To your surprise, there’s a new scrap of paper laying on the Lobby floor. You pick it up, and read it.

“Ready?

Go ahead, walk into Lab 00.

I DARE YOU.”

You raise your eyebrow. You never saw a ‘Lab 00’ anywhere. Maybe it was in the corridor you were about to enter? You re-enter the Lobby, only to find that Tirek’s corpse has disappeared. Strange. There’s no trail of blood, so it appears as if he vanished on the spot. But how? Maybe it’s some more weird magic of his, or something.

You decide to check the door to the right of the desk, the corridor you were going to check earlier but were interrupted by Tirek. Checking the doors as you walk along the hall, they all seem ordinary. You come to the end of the hall, and find that the door at the end’s label has been scratched off, a crude ‘00’ written in its place. You attempt to read the writing underneath the scratch marks. “SYS     D    E   S  S” is all you can make out. Smirking, you venture forward, curious as to who could possibly want an audience with you now.

You enter an incredibly large room, halogen lamps diffusing their harsh white glow such that there’s nary a shadow to be found. Unlike the rest of the Lab, this place is still quite clean, and you wonder how that works. To either side of you are rows of cylindrical glass tanks, as large as your entire body. You wonder what they could possibly contain. Looking forward, a massive machine greets your eyes.

The main chassis is roughly egg-shaped, a single tinted-glass circular window occasionally shifting and glinting as though something was moving inside. Several different types of tubes suspend it from the ceiling, hung at disjointed and physically inaccurate angles. The final insult to the standard laws of physics are the thirteen screens floating in front of the strange machine – four on either side, and five arranged in an ominous ‘smiley face’ around the tinted window. Strangely, the screens are dark and cracked.

“So you’ve finally arrived!” a voice gleefully spoke, sounding… wrong. It sounded as though someone had layered pitches of their own voice over themselves, producing a high, childish-sounding… terrifying sound. Sort of like that bug thing, but much worse. The doors slammed closed behind you, and you frantically banged on them in your attempts to open them.

“Not gonna work, buddy! You of all people should know that,” the voice spoke up, as maniacally cheerful as ever.

“Wha – what do you want?!” you demand.

“Hehehe. Don’t you know?” it asked. “I want you to die!” Without further warning, two cannon-shaped objects slide out of panels in the floor, and blast beams of magic twice the thickness of your body at you. You spring forward, and the beams collide in an ‘X’ pattern, the area of intersection glowing white-hot.

More defenses sprang from the walls, the room having gone from a sterilized lab to a deathtrap in a matter of seconds. You’re too stunned to react as spheres of magic begin to weave wild and erratic patterns through the room, and simply stand there in horror. A single sphere grazes your arm, ‘popping’ with a startlingly loud noise, and the portion of your arm that it touched is gone, a spatter of blood following its former trajectory. You scream out in pain, and clutch the portion of your arm it hit, only to be sucker-punched in the chest by another magic ball. More and more begin to home towards your position, and you sink to the floor as the darkness closes in. You haven’t SAVED in a while… maybe you’ll be able to avoid this fight. Go around it, or some…thing…

[GAME OVER]

[JOKER SAVE: resononce]

[GAME LOADED]

You wake up in the middle of the floor, confused. Weren’t you supposed to be in some rocks? “You can thank one of your so-called friends for that one,” the voice snarked. “Oh, I’m sorry, were you not expecting this?” the voice queries, noting your dismay and giggling. “You didn’t think I was only going to kill you once, did you? Ahahahahaha!” it laughed, the sound shrieking through your ears. “No, you’re going to stay here with me until you kill me… or I beat you!”

And with that, the attack began again. This time, though, you’re more wary. You dodge around the magic balls, weaving and ducking with an insane fervor. The cannons reappear, and you dodge the blasts frantically, still keeping an eye out for the errant spheres of death. Some of the spheres bounce off of your sword, and you take a moment out of ducking and weaving to note that it’s unaffected. A plan comes to your head, faint memories of strangely cartoonic people with giant swords blocking impossibly fast shots. Rather like your situation now, in fact.

Was it real?

[is anime real?]

[Y/N]

Regardless of the answer, you take out your sword and begin slashing spheres around you. Out of pure desperation, your aim is perfected, and you are relatively untouched so far. You leap forward, and slash off one of the cables connecting the egg-shaped apparatus to the floor. A large fan quickly unveils itself just in front of you, and a massive blast of air pushes you off the apparatus before you can do any more damage.

“You think I’d make it that easy?!” the unknown figure rants. “You IDIOT. You have no idea what you’re doing, do you?!”

You twist around and land sprawled on your back, thankfully not hitting any of the magical spheres that are still raging above you. With no time to lose, you scramble to your feet and start deflecting shots again.

This goes on for what seems like forever. Sometimes, you die just as you’re about to win. Sometimes, you die in the most laughable of ways. On and on. Over, and over, you just keep throwing yourself at me your unseen foe, so desperate to win that you’d give your life countless times to do so.

Eventually, however, you must succeed.

With a war cry worthy of a thousand mighty assailants, you sever the last cable, and are immediately blown backwards again by the strange fan contraption. The machine topples to the floor, steel groaning and screaming as it is torn asunder by gravity’s now-unopposed force. The bullet hell stops, the magic spheres vanishing into the walls, and all is quiet. You topple to the floor as well, tuckered out by your insane ordeal. And, for just a moment, all is quiet.

You have won.

“….

….

….

….”

[GAME SAVED]

You wake up, dazed and disoriented. You’re still in the massive room, the halogen lights overhead searing into your eyelids. You’re bruised, torn, heavily injured, and exhausted.

But you’re alive.

It seems like hours before you can get up. Even then, each movement is a struggle, every breath a gasp of pain. But you’re determined to finally bring this adventure to a close. After all, you’ve won, right? There’s nothing else to defeat.

You slowly crawl past the broken machine, still wary of it. Despite everything, you can still see movement inside. You take a moment to wonder what could be trapped inside there.

It’s probably nothing important.

Finally, you make it to a door behind the machine. This is it, you think to yourself. You push open the door, and slowly make to crawl through…

Only to be stopped by an invisible barrier.

Looking closer, you notice it’s the same barrier that you’ve seen before. The one that, according to Tirek, keeps all the criminals down here.

And you can’t seem to get through it. Why not?

Wait.

Wait.

aRE YOU FREAKING KIDDING ME YOU KILLED SOMEONE YOU WEREN’T SUPPOSED TO DO THAT YOU WERE SUPPOSED TO WIN

HOWCOUDLYOUDOTHISTOMEIHATEYOUIHATEYOUSOMUCHIHATE**

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[eRroR]

[SYSTEM SHUTDOWN]