by Yuli Ban
I couldn't keep thinking about her without getting emotional, so I apologized and forced her out of my head to focus on the graphics.
Jesus Christ! I waved my hand in front of my face and had to marvel at how crisp the framerate was. I had heard the meme of how 30 FPS was 'more cinematic' but what good was that when you had whatever this was? It looked like friggin' 3000 FPS! And the fidelity had to be something like 16k, if not double that. It looked like I was looking at reality, not at a screen. This wasn't a game! I was in some sort of alternate reality, surely.
But when I brought the menu back up, I saw the rest of my HUD— heads-up display. This was definitely a video game... I was just somehow experiencing it as my actual reality, and that blew my mind so hard that I almost had to turn around and check to make sure my brains weren't splattered on the wall. To drive it into my skull, I pinched the bridge of my nose. Already angsted about it.
"Hey," some roughneck yelled at me in a scratchy voice. "You gonna order somethin' or keep wastin' space? I charge by the nanometer."
I said, "Oh, sorry, sir. Just looking around is all."
"That'll be $50 for everything you look at. Every atom. Right now, your bill is so high you could bankrupt the Hurricane Corp." He chuckled at his own pseudo-highbrow joke as he slapped the bar table.
I laughed nervously just to ease the tension, but ultimately, I decided to go ahead and step up to see what the man was selling.
"You dropped yours? Alright, alright, take a look. Here's the menu." He shifted over a laminated pamphlet and I unfolded it to check everything out.
The prices looked unreal. $500 for a mug of beer? Even a glass of water was $40!
I looked up and said, "Don't you have anything cheaper?"
He gawked at me like I shagged his dog. "The hell are you talkin', boy? This is the cheapest stuff in the state!" I shook my head and felt my pockets for my wallet. No wallet. No cash. Oh shit.
I threw the menu down and said, "Never mind. I'm going somewhere else."
He spat at me, "Only broads change their mind, ya little soy!"
Little soy? What kind of insult was that even? Did he mean soy boy? That made sense, except he was so thick that I wondered how he hadn’t been reabsorbed by his mother’s folds. In the old days, being that heavy in the head got you an icepick up the nose.
I turned back and said, "Look, man, I just need to figure stuff out. I don't know what's happening right now. I'm lost, I need money..."
He scoffed and said, "You need to figure your shit out alright," with a grimace. “Where do you think you’re goin’, soy?” He rushed to the end of the bar, tapping his knuckles against the wood. “You ain’t goin’ nowhere.”
Some mohawked greaser stood up from the bar and walked towards me. Didn’t even see him until that point, as if he spawned in abruptly. And he exploded, "You some sort of fairy?" The funny thing was, he was the fairy. Those wings didn't lie. He was straight-up Tinkerbell with a tool. Even had the sparkly leggings, which just made me wonder how in the holy mother of ass he was had gotten through the door without being lynched.
I backed up and said, "Look man, I don't want any trouble," like I was in some '80s movie.
And because I might've been, he gave me a Billy Idol sneer and said, "Trouble found you, punk." Then he put his gloved hands on my shoulders and headbutted me to the ground. There was no one else in the bar, but I still felt like a crowd laughed at me. I grabbed my forehead and smeared some blood on the wood panel floor trying to get up. He literally kicked my ass as I scampered to the door. Both of them were cackling like the devil. I wanted to bust their asses wide. Someone's ass had to be busted. I didn't care whose. I was already feeling bad when I got there and those jokers just had to keep pushing me.
I guess I snapped. I didn't listen to mommy and daddy enough when I was a kid. I grabbed an empty bottle sat out on a round table near the door and threw it right at the punk's head. It exploded into thousands of shards. That fairy went down instantly and didn't move. Instead, blood flowed off his face and pooled around his head.
I stared. My jaw didn't leave the ground until I saw the barman rushing at me with a lead pipe.
I just killed a man. I killed him in cold blood. I couldn't control myself. Not that I hadn’t been an emotional wreck before then, but that sent me over the edge.
Badmotorfister…
The barman should have called the police, but instead he was trying to kill me. I ran out, slipping against the door and tripping over a parked bike, sending it toppling over. Then I kept running onwards, still hearing the man's footsteps behind me. When I looked back, I saw him getting closer. He was out for blood. Those wild eyes and drool flying off the side of his mouth complemented his shrieks.
That meant that one of us was going to jail no matter what. If I was already going in for murder, why not at least defend myself?
I saw a trash can, classic silver metal tub. I picked it up and threw it at him. He caught it, but staggered. Then I rushed into him, pushing my head into his gut and beating him to the ground. In the maelstrom of blows, I managed to grab his pipe and I beat his skull open. Wait, did I? There wasn’t an overload of gore. Rather, blood spewed across the air and he fell prone. When I caught a glance of his face, the bones still held and his eyes were still in their sockets. Considering the force of the blow, he shouldn’t have had a face. Pulp, maybe, but not a face. Against my better judgment, I brought the pipe down on his head again. No more damage than what I already had cause. Like I was Michael Myers, I chose to brutalize him just a tiny bit more with about two or twenty more strikes. Not even a crack. His skull wasn’t programmed to break.
Sad as Hell, that’s how my brain knew once and for all that one reality was true. The disgusting, ugly truth really calmed me to be honest. At least there was an answer I could trust. But that wasn’t the scariest thing. When I finished my onslaught, the whole thing was capped off with the most nonsensical bit of the entire day thus far:
+250 EXP! floating up above him like I was in some sort of PlayStation 2 JPRG. What sense did that make? How did I earn experience from killing a man besides for future angsty literary novels? Even more horrifying, I saw my experience points go up to 500, meaning that the man I killed in the bar was worth the same. All of it made me back up. Why was I seeing an experience bar in the first place? Who logged it? Why were they worth 250 points? If this was a video game, surely I didn’t need to see experience points floating in mid-air. Unless, of course, this really was an MMO. Video games had long evolved past that point where you needed to see these notifications. Except if that one was expanded upon. You know, that one. The one that wasn’t a game but instead congealed failure.
And I killed two people. Innocence for me was over. My innocence was all over those two men— and not that way. There was no going back after this, no matter what it was supposed to be. The ultra-reality of it and the fact I used my own two hands made it far too real. If I went to sleep at that moment, there'd be nothing but nightmares from start to finish. My entire future would be an endless series of hauntings of these lives I had taken.
But I didn't have any time to angst about it because I heard yet another 'Hey!' shouted at me. Did I say ‘shouted?’ I meant ‘called in the queerest accent imaginable’. This time, a real Bubba of a man sprinted my way from across the street. He had been inside that cheap old whorehouse but he was clearly pumped for action. And he looked like a biker— handlebar mustache, bald, thick face, square body, massive muscles, and stressed blue leather from head to toe. In other words, his queer accent suited him perfectly.
I actually pointed to myself as if I hadn't learned my lesson.
He screamed profanities at me, accusing me of messing with his bike— but he didn't say 'messing.' He didn’t say much of anything besides one word. Actually, he had somehow managed to stick the word 'fuck' about fifteen times in one sentence as he charged at me like a bull.
I didn't know what to do and I had tossed away the
pipe. Thing is, the pipe was right by my feet, so in any reasonable story I’d have stooped down to pick it up. Not this one, for I had been struck upside the head with the Idiot Stick. And you know, I was able to knock down the bartender because he was a manlet. This was no man. There was one detail I forgot to mention about that freak: he was an orc. Yep, big tusks protruding from his teeth and a literal eight-foot height. I could have been Arnold Schwarzenegger or Andre the Giant and he would have run me down like I was a cream puff. And he’d do it while remarking about how wrinkled my mauve T-shirt was or how my jeans didn’t match my old loafers.
And to make matters worse, he brought friends. Burly men wearing denim and leather streamed out of brothel like a climax and followed the orc. They also accused me of messing with their bikes— at that point, I didn't think the bike I knocked over belonged to any of them to begin with and they were just high and intended to turn me into some sort of rentboy.
I wasn't going to have any of that and ran into an alley, hoping that there was a way out to a different street. But remember, this was an '80s movie based on a video game so due to the laws of TV Tropes, I ran into the one alley that led to a brick-wall dead end.
They all approached at the other end like droogs, with one beating a bloody wooden bat in his fist. Another man was a wolfman, complete with the fur and snout, and he was looking rabid— I didn't know if that was foam or cum on his lips, but I didn't want to find out.
The big muscly orc walked my way and said, "I'm gonna drown you in a puddle of your own shit and blood, fuckboy. Get on your knees." Was it truly time to make me a weepy little rentboy? He took aim at my head, thrust his fat fist, and I dodged.
I dodged! Everything seemed to move in slow motion, as if I activated Chaos Control or some shit. And I then drove my fist into his jaw, sending him straight into the air. He hit his friends like a wrecking ball, knocking them all down. The wolfman looked on at the damage in amazement and then came at me with a knife.
"You some sort of hacker, you little—"
I grabbed his snout to shut him up and threw him right back into the orc who had only just gotten to his feet. Then I made my escape out of the alley. I looked back, heart pumping and thinking I was instead in some sort of anime. Something, anything but a video game. Something, anything but that video game. But before I could run off into the sunset, I saw that one of the bikers dragged a girl out of the brothel. She clearly didn't want to go with him, as she kicked her feet and squirmed and had to literally be dragged. What's more, some other of the men were starting to fondle her, rubbing against all parts of her body, even places that weren't erotic like her shin because they all wanted a piece of her.
I was no hero. I didn't have to do anything, as reprehensible as it was to let an innocent girl suffer such a fate. I guess what really prompted me to act was that she screamed for help.
Before, I thought, 'Maybe she's just roleplaying.' It was simple enough to consider while on adrenaline and my mind accepted it until I heard her scream.
Maybe it wasn't even the scream. Maybe it was the fact... Goddamn, just put a disgruntled sigh right here because this is just plain lazy— maybe it was the fact they were Nazis.
Yep. They were wearing the swastika wristbands and Stalhelms and military caps, the whole shebang. It was so disgustingly cliché that I actually sighed right then and there and said to the world:
"Really? Come on!"
Nazi rapist outlaw bikers, because I needed an excuse to enter a harem story and what better one than gay Nazi rapist outlaw bikers?
Now look, I’ve got nothing against bikers. Blame the goddamn designer of the world for pulling this shit. And if I had to be honest, ‘gay Nazi rapist outlaw bikers’ wasn’t the most over the top thing that they could’ve been.
I ran back, plowing through the orc and his friends and dropkicked the first fascist carrying the girl, this pretty boy elf who made Legolas look like a NEET. The assault victim was able to put her legs on the ground while the elven ladyboy gasped for air and checked to see if his waist was still on right.
A completely normal human with long hair and a scar giving him one eye took out a submachine gun— an MP40. He laughed like a sadist as he sprayed and prayed and accidentally gunned down five of his own men. I ducked behind a newspaper stand and waited for him to run out of ammo. By accident, I pushed the stand off its hinges and gawked at my raw strength. How? How did I just pull a friggin’…? So I got over that nonsense, realized I had a useful weapon, and hurled the entire thing right at the madman. It deep-impacted the submachine gunner, reducing him to a red mist. What happened to his gun? Where did it go? Did it glitch out?
Well, has anyone figured it out? It’s still missing. The sheer insanity of seeing his gun disappear messed with my mind more than anything that had happened before or since because things don’t just flicker out of reality like that. All I did was eviscerate the man— there’s no reason for a gun like that to vanish too. I even started towards the mist to see if I wasn’t just losing my mind, but there wasn’t anything around that sprinkly puddle. No gun, no ammo, nothing.
The prettyboy said, "Oy, who the bloody 'ell is this unit?" My mind still on the AWOL gun, I threw myself at him, grabbed him through the eye sockets and brought him down, skull first, into the pavement. He didn't have much of a skull after that. Thank god that the gore finally kicked in for that one. And you know what warranted such a brutal bitchdown?
Pointy ears.
He was an elf. How dare he be an elf in my presence.
I scowled. It was a scowl that has never been equaled across time, all at that one word, ‘Killtastic.’ Who programmed that into the game? Have they ever lived it down? Would their children be ashamed? Did they even have children? Probably not.
The girl whimpered but took on a much more composed posture. Right before I was able to chase after one running Nazi, she grabbed my pant leg and said, "Wait, hold on!" Her words were surprisingly well held-together for how violated she must've felt, and she completely sold me when she said, "Leave one for me." She used me to get back to her feet and burst off ahead at lightning speed.
I threw up my hands and shouted, “Come. The fuck. On. Why couldn't you do—" I grunted as I went down, a ringing piercing my ears and a very sharp pain exploding through my body. The top of my head felt like it had been blown open. I thought I was dead for a second. But when I was able to look back up, I saw the orc. He dropped the lead pipe. And man, did that ugly grimace transform into a sadistic grin in record time. He grabbed me by the pantleg for stability and thrust his fingers around my balls. Already, the nails dug into my sack, but then he clamped down and squeezed with industrial amounts of force.
I squealed. I'm not gonna sugarcoat it— I squealed like a baby. The scumlord lifted me up by my ball sack and set me back on my feet. Then he knocked me back with a punch to the face with a fist so big, we would have invaded Iraq if Saddam Hussein had it.
He roared at me, "I'm gonna take you apart, boy. Gonna put your pieces all back together in the wrong places and make you hurt like you ain't never hurt before."
I kicked him in the dick. He grabbed his nuts and yelled, eyes bulging. I mean, he was open. His legs were spread out like he was asking for it, so I answered. I don’t swing that way, but his wide-open legs were what caught my eye so that probably means something.
Then I pushed my self up, twisted around, and gave him a shoryuken that cracked his jaw so hard, I saw the +250 fly up with him. I landed and we both fell at the same time. But while I rolled onto my side to begin my twenty years of recovery, he didn’t get back up.
"I just did that!" I screamed to the heavens. What even was the point of unlocking skills you could do by yourself? Well I found out the answer real quick when the wolfman charged at me. He came on all fours like that was supposed to intimidate me more.
A notification popped up on the side of my vision.
I nodded my head, pursing my lip. That actually made sense.
Right when wolfie was in the air to gnaw at my neck, I thought of the words. My body moved on its own in an upward twirl, knocking the pupperboy away. He hit a lamppost, bending it and sending it crashing right on him. That was another +250. What's more, I even got a +50 EXP bonus for "awesome enviro-damage!"
“Oh no, the pillock is superior,” some other nasty Nazi shouted in complete deadpan as if his brain forgot how to emotion. Why were they using British slang? Honestly?
Actually, that would have sold the game to me if I wasn't already halfway to slitting my wrists, dying my hair black, and crawling in my skin towards a numb end that didn't matter. Not to mention that I fell right back down because you’re not supposed to be moving when you suffer mortal damage to the family jewels. Even if the motions were automated, the pain didn’t care, and every part of my body felt it. Then the pain subsided and came back around again.
And the girl from before, she came back to me with four Nazis skewered on a katana. She looked pleased with herself, though I could tell from her red eyes that she wasn't without some level of damage from the horrors that had been brought unto her. At least, that’s what I thought until I noticed that those red eyes weren’t puffy from tears. Don’t ask me how I know, but those eyes looked agitated more than weepy.
She dropped the Nazis down and said, "Thanks for giving me the chance, Boss."
"Boss?" At that moment, I literally went, 'Oh no no no no, this isn't actually a harem, is it? Well, at least it's only one girl. There’s absolutely no chance of me meeting anymore women beyond this point once I get the hell out of here.' I looked back to see if there were any more Nazi bikers to deal with. But either they had all been killed or ran off. I didn't think that so many had been offed until I saw my EXP bar and noted that it filled to 4,150. What's more, I had apparently leveled up in something else. When I opened the notifications bar, I got: