El Sexorcisto Z!

by Yuli Ban

  ‘Of course. I spawned in the game next to the town of Victory.’ I shook my head and laughed, realizing that I had just watched a recording of myself. In a way, I was a ghost watching my own body before it had died taking the precise steps that would later damn me to my current fate. But I was damned from the moment I first appeared in the void.

  I looked up, feeling the worst sense that I was being watched. Yet the apogee of the darkness bore no faces or eyes. The shadowy figures had all disappeared. There I was. I, alone.

  “So this is the spawning lobby, I presume,” I called to the void. My voice echoed for infinity, growing louder until the sound waves in the infinite distance exploded into light.

  “Of course, you idiot.”

  I about-faced. I saw a man I felt I knew but whose name and face I could not remember. He had dirty, shaggy black hair that reached to his brow and wore pure black leather. And something about those dark eyes seemed so similar to my own. This one was not me, but I could not help but wonder if I was staring upon another version of myself from another time.

  “Who are you.”

  He sneered. “Wrong question.” Then he started this spooky monkey talk straight from a bad dream— mine: “Watch yourself closely, Sistar. You may be watching your own death loop infinitely for what little time you have left to live. And as you rot in time, I’ll be there to watch the Wytches Crue betray you. You delude yourself into a belief that they live for you and love you— like an insect trapped in a web watching the spider approach thinking it is a friend. You are a fool among fools, Sistar.”

  “Might you pipe down, young man!”

  He threw up his hands and shook his head. “Are you really so angry as to not understand the threat, then?”

  “I don’t know who you are!”

  He smirked. “Is that right? How sad, then. Tragic to an almost Shakespearean level, in fact.” He turned away and seemed to fade into the blackness. “Mya longs to see you one last time, Sistar.”

  I started towards him. “What did you say?”

  He turned to me and stood firm at my charge. “As we speak, she is being…” He rolled his heard and sneered. “Processed.”

  My nostrils flared and my fingers dug into my palm so hard that I could have drawn blood if I squeezed any more tightly. “You son of a bitch…”

  “And it is as painful, sick, and sadistic as you think it is, my boy.” He pat my shoulder and passed me up. “This past week, as you enjoyed the fleeting pleasures of the flesh with the Wytches Cunts, know that your own blood relation has taken quite the time to die.”

  I swung. But my fist passed through the void. I fell to my knees and beat at nothing. The void itself seemed to will a floor for me, understanding my emotions as well as I ever have.

  From nowhere, he spoke once more, “But through all this, know one thing: we both seek the same thing. Mya and Myles are not my responsibility. Don’t wait for the day that never comes.”

  I closed my eyes and waited for the nightmare to end.

  Prelude to Madness

  “Yo, Boss.”

  I looked up. There she was, smiling as usual. Johnic was sitting in a rocking chair staring at a section of the wall as if it were a window.

  “You’ve been rotting on my floor for half an hour,” he said. “Dammit man, I’ve been waiting for you to tell us what you’ve seen in the dark sides of your mind so I can finally piece together this whole mystery.”

  Ana sipped from another bottle of Coca-Cola— this one looking much more conventional.

  I wiped my forehead and lifted myself out of a puddle of my own puke. “Oh lord.” Ana quickly ran to the bathroom and fetched me a towel, and I thanked her after wiping off. “That was unpleasant. And I have no idea if the events that have transpired were real or a hallucination.”

  “Oh, the malarkey that has scared you to let the floodwater loose?” Johnic pointed at my crotched and chuckled.

  “For god’s sake! I thought that didn’t happen!”

  Again, Ana fetched another towel, though it was not quite as useful this time around. At once, I was reminded of the horrors of sand— how it seemed specifically designed to find the most uncomfortable places on the human body once it has found wet clothes. But while most would imagine this occurring at the beach, I suffered the same plight from the worst injury a man could ever receive. Oh, that terrible thought was too much.

  The walls shook as the roar of thunder tore through our ears.

  “You weren’t kidding, Annie,” Johnic said. “Goodness, that sounded nasty.”

  She popped gum in her mouth and said, “It actually looks much worse. The sky was all green when we last checked.”

  “Green? So it’s become tornadic, then.” Johnic sounded terrified.

  I looked into the bathroom mirror and pulled at my face. At once, I wondered, ‘Who am I? Who was that? Am I going insane?’ But nothing seemed to pacify my mind and I wasted too much time lost in the look of my own face.

  “That’s not thunder!” I heard Ana scream. I heard her say it several times, but it did not register to me until it reached that panicked peak of emotion. She ran into the bathroom with me and pushed me into the tub.

  All of a sudden, the light flickered and went out. Then the ceiling began to peel away.

  Johnic grabbed onto a lamp, but he could not maintain his grip.

  “Ana! Alex! I won’t make it. But listen— beware Batzor!”

  “What?!”

  And then he shrieked at the peak of human emotion, the point past which any voice maintained integrity and all became one roar of analog static: “BEWARE BATZOOOOOR—”

  He vanished into the clouds, his health bar dropping from a full green to a red sliver in a second before disappearing altogether. Then his body rag dolled about before being torn apart limb from limb by debris and the winds. As his head disappeared, only his torso remained and that too began to strip apart. Johnic was dead. I should have cared more from the way Ana screamed out his name and wept for him, but considering I was sure I could press charges against him for battery and assault and that he was the one who forced me to experience that little horror, I wasn’t exactly mournful.

  Indeed, I wasn’t feeling much of anything other than mortal terror, panic, and raw abandon. All animal instincts within me activated. My eyes pulsed. The world bounced. I beat my fist into the floor and grabbed a firm grip of the hole I made. Then I pulled myself forward and repeated the action.

  Ana’s claws had dug into my back while her tail wrapped around my waist, and all of it was terribly uncomfortable, but I was glad for this— she gave me the adrenaline I needed. My attack at the floor increased in frequency until I had brought us towards and out the door.

  “Don’t worry, Anastasia!” I shouted. “We’re going to make it! We’re going to make it!!”

  Punch, grab, pull. Punch, grab, pull. Punch, grab, pull. The tornado sucked, sucked, sucked us towards it and I felt my pants leave me. The vortex landed directly in the room and I could see where the whirlwind swirled so violently.

  It approached.

  My pulse hit a machine-gun pace.

  The veins and arteries in my wrists burned.

  My vision blurred.

  I called out, “Ana! Ana!” and she called out, “Alex! Alex!!”

  And then it all went black.

  Madness

  I awoke. Was I dead? Had I respawned in the void? It couldn’t be, for Ana was wrapped within my arms. But was she? Or was I just hallucinating something as a result of the sludge forced down my throat? I felt her fur, her locks of hair, and the clingy feel of the leather as my fingers ran across some part of her body. As for if I still had fingers or instead eviscerated strips of flesh, I could not say.

  And it all hurt far too much to be death. Oh no. Death had not yet come for me— it was too busy trolling the rest of the city with its veil. Once I oriented myself well enough, I felt confident enough to surmise that I had been pinned beneath twisted steel, heav
y bricks, and broken pipes. Water trickled somewhere to my northwest and I prayed that it was indeed water— in this sort of city, it was always possible that sadists saw the devastation and would tickle their inner pyromaniac.

  I attempted to move my leg, but I could not feel it. My head beat once against fallen plaster as I assumed the worst. What’s more, I could not feel or hear Ana breathing. At once, I summoned strength from within and attempted to push the debris from off the top of me— this proving to me that we were indeed crushed. But it was no use. My muscles had no strength left to give. What’s more, my attempt settled the debris in such a way that I brought more pressure and knew immediately that my ribs would not be able to hold indefinitely. I would die there, drowned in my own blood.

  And why? Why did that buffoon not have a window in his apartment? Why did Ana have to bring me to him specifically? Why was I in the game at all?

  “It keeps happening,” I said. My voice broken and quivering, there was a rush of red emotions through my face. “All this nonsensical shit keeps happening.”

  My palms struck the debris, again and again. When I felt the rush grow, my vision took on a burning red frame. My blood seared my veins.

  And I knew exactly what I needed to do. How I knew, I know not.

  I sucked in as much air as I could from our pocket and bellowed, “HELP!”

  That trickling water devolved into a ghastly gurgle. I felt the terrible wetness lap against my back. Then it increased in volume until it began to sound like a malfunctioning toilet.

  Once more, I screamed, “HELP!” to any who cared to listen. I knew it was a gamble— in my state, someone could loot my corpse and leave me for dead. They probably wouldn’t even wait, as long as they had a spare bullet or weren’t afraid to get their shoes dirty. That was the damn thing about these virtual worlds: our most horrible traits were allowed to run amok. Our sole attachment to humanity no longer mattered and we were free to be as animals. The most brutal acts could be wrought with impunity.

  A light shined upon me as I heard a voice from above. “Alex! I’m sorry, Alex!”

  I did not recognize the voice. But I was glad to hear it. I understood exactly what the Wytches Crue lived for in that moment. Oh, I thought I understood before. But what did I understand? And did I really?

  At least, that time around, I finally understood— deeply understood— the mindset of the ladies. I squeezed Ana, however so that I could, and stretched my arm over my head. This shifted the weight of the slab above me onto my ribs more totally, and I knew that I could not withstand the pressure for long. If I were in my right mind, I’d have stopped moving and waited longer for help. But the light began to fade. Again, I screamed out, “Help! Come back!” But when it faded completely, I saw that it had come from nowhere. I was staring straight at the collapsed slab of brick wall.

  I felt myself grow more irrational. But that's what I wanted to happen. I needed to grow irrational. That was the only way I could possibly survive the game. And if I didn't manage to do this, I would fail to survive for much longer. If I kept to my rigid sense of logic and reason, a desire for the game world to resemble real life in any way, I would die quickly. I almost perished so many times during my introductory week alone. And what did that do for me? Where was I now? At the bottom of rubble, crushed by heavy debris, with a potentially dead catgirl waifu in my arms, being talked to by either a ghost or God while sewage bubbled against my back. I should never have tried to tempt fate so totally as to expect to get around the same way as I had in life.

  That's what I understood. I kept saying my epiphany out loud so many times before, but I was a robot saying preprogrammed words. For the first time, I actually knew what I was talking about and knew that I had to change my ways to reflect this understanding. I was not being crushed just by a fallen building, but also my own clouded, angry mind.

  This was a video game. It was an open-world MMO battle-royale action-RPG called Violence Online, one designed to mimic Grand Theft Auto with even fewer rules. And the only way to make your way in Violence Online is to kill, be savage, be selfish, and do whatever you want. All inhibitions of civilization were to be suppressed. You were no longer shackled to the standards of society. No matter what you wanted to do, you could do it here. What’s more, you were encouraged to do so.

  That's why the Wytches were the way they were. That's why Ana was so passive about death. That's why they stole from truckers and killed others so easily. That's why emotions did not register to them the same way it did with me. That's why Maria would so easily find herself in a fistfight with a random man on the street.

  When had I ever been expected to live in a video game? I was always able to suspend my disbelief for the moments I picked up a controller.

  But now, I was the controller.

  I was El Sexorcisto. And that made all the difference.

  I shifted myself again and pushed upwards more fiercely. When the rubble did not move, I doubled my efforts. When that also failed, I kept at it. My new mindset was that I did not need to worry so much about my own safety. If I died, I died. If Ana died, she died.

  What matters was making sure I did not lose everything that I had. Mya wanted me here for a reason. And that's why I couldn't die. There was some role I had to play, even if I didn't know what it was yet.

  Once more, I pushed my muscles beyond what they should have been able to accomplish. This did not work. But I was not dissuaded. Instead, I rolled from side to side as a means of shifting my center of gravity.

  But the debris was beginning to push down with ever more extreme weight. And then I felt the first horrible CRACK. Something in my chest gave way. Pain ripped across my breast. I worried that I may be crippled by this, but I did not care. I needed only to escape— that was my goal. Escape.

  But as I wiggled around, I began to feel a great tightness in my back. It was as if I were being pulled. I tried to roll further to the left and right, but then I was tugged.

  I panicked and grabbed at a pipe jutting across my face. However, it was lodged. Then I pulled at Ana and wondered how on Earth I was below her. Was the Earth giving way?

  But she began to come down with me.

  I felt my body squeeze through gaps. Tiny gaps. And it didn't make sense how my form could fit between them. Like an old cartoon, I was being made into ground beef only for my body to reform just fine below the drain.

  I could feel as my face slipped through the cracks.

  And down I went into the dark pipes. Ana followed.

  For old time's sake, I shouted, "FOR FUCK'S SAKE."

  Somehow, I had been sucked through a tiny drain. What pulled me down? Why was Ana following me?

  And where was I going?

  One word flashed across my consciousness: "BATZOR".

  Batzor? What was that supposed to be? I did remember that several had warned me of the creature beforehand— the robots and Johnic himself.

  Where is my mind? Where is my mind? Where is my mind? Where is my mind? Where is my mind? Where is my mind?

  I awoke. Just as last time, I did not know if I was within the void or dead. But I figured out much more quickly as the stench overwhelmed me. There was also a small waterfall of sewage spewing from an open pipe just beyond me. This was the furthest I could see, and how I managed it, I did not know. Right next to me was Ana. She was half-submerged in the murky horrors and my eyes deceived me when I thought I saw her chest moving. However, that was the wake of my own movement splashing against her.

  When I looked around, I saw nothing beyond the edges of blackness. The stench alone was too much.

  I reached down and touched Ana's chest, making sure to keep my hands firmly away from her breasts. Alas, I felt no motion. When I felt her wrist, I felt no pulse.

  She was dead.

  Again.

  I silently uttered a swear and threw down my fists. Then I lifted her body into my arms and carried her, bridal-style, to wherever I could find. This failed immediately as I lo
st my footing and fell into a deeper pool.

  I swallowed something and god damn do I not want to know what it was.

  Once I swam back to the edge of a path on the sides of the canal, I understood exactly what this was all supposed to be.

  "I hate these things." I had Ana's body by the wrist and pulled her up. Even if she would respawn, I did not want to let her body rot down here. She deserved better than that.

  But then, she coughed! Yes! Yes! I started as I heard her sputter and gasp for air. What's more, I could tell that what she coughed out was not entirely liquid. Eww.

  She grabbed at her chest and gargled on sewage, spitting it out and rolling onto her stomach. I saw immediately that her black catsuit had been torn right down her back, and the bloody gash stopped short of the base of her tail.

  I rolled her back over and pressed against her chest.

  “Hey, hey, Ana! Breathe! Can you breathe for me?”

  She spat out something or another and said, “Alex? Alex, you’re still alive? Wow, I can’t believe it!” But it was so weak and devoid of her usual cheeriness that it came off as creepy to my ears to hear it coming out of her.

  When I looked above her, I saw that there was a health bar floating next to her face. And it wasn’t encouraging.

  The bar was blood-red and had barely more than a sliver left.

  “Hold on, I’m gonna getchu outta here.”

  Somehow, a smile came upon her face. “Your accent’s gone… But is your dick still okay?”

  I pat her cheek and tried to say something, but I was too taken aback by her joke and fell on my ass laughing. Of all places for her to bring that one back up!

  She grabbed and squeezed my hand. "What are you talking about?" she asked.

  I stopped and stuttered, "What? You're the one who asked me if my dick's okay!"

  "No, no, I meant about earlier. When you were talking in the rubble before we got sucked down."

  My mouth fell, but the whole thing did for once rather than just my jaw. I looked about the stinky cavern and said, "Oh, oh, oh, you heard that? Uhh... that was... motivational speaking. Self-moi- uh, motivational speaking, I mean."