There’s gotta be another way. There’s always another way. I don’t lose people; that’s the rule, that’s the whole deal, so if the board doesn’t have a good move on it, I flip the board.
[System: ...mate, I can see you thinking about flipping the board. Just so you know, that’s an option too. Ugly one, but it’s there.]
Ugly? Fine. Ugly is how I beat that minotaur with the hydraulic hammer. It’s how I ended up owning a casino. Ugly is my entire brand at this point, and it works every damn time.
00:06.
Talk to me. What’s the ugly option?
Lyra’s palm presses harder against my coils like she can push the death back out through sheer stubbornness, and her voice cracks clean in half on my name, and I realise I am about to lose something no matter what I choose, that there is no version of the next six seconds where I slither away with everyone I love still breathing.
Old Mate’s voice drops the fake theatricality, stripping away the bogan cackle until all that’s left is something old, heavy, and completely devoid of mercy.
[System: Look at you. Look at the bloody trail you’ve been leaving behind since the day you woke up in a gutter as a red piece of string. You think this is a video game, Matt? You think you can just slither around, tongue-fucking succubi on balconies, giving hit-women corner offices and event planning budgets, laughing like a dickhead while mobsters throw money at your coils?]
I’m handling it! I scream into the dark. My girls are safe, the casino is running, my father’s goons are leaving me alone. I’ve been handling every single thing thrown at me!
[System: YOU ARE NOT HANDLING IT! YOU ARE JUST GETTING AWAY WITH IT!]
The noise cuts out, not fades, not softens, just gone, like someone yanked the plug on the entire world and left me coiled in silence so total I can hear my own heartbeat, except I don’t have a heartbeat.
The floor under me goes white. Not hospital-white, but missing-texture-white, like a glitched-out loading screen. My coils look washed out against it, not even casting a shadow, like I’m a poorly rendered asset hovering over an unfinished level.
Then the ledger drops in front of me, and it is enormous, as big as the space I’m in. Red text, scrolling top to bottom faster than I can read, except somehow I read all of it anyway, every line landing in my skull at once like someone’s slapping receipts onto my face one after another.
[System: Orc, Roach, Capybara, first month, you had no business surviving that, none, you got lucky and you call it instinct.]
I open my mouth to say something, and nothing comes out because there’s no air here to push words through.
[System: Golems. Two of em. Ripped your tail clean off like you were a party favour, and you’re sitting there afterwards looking like a glass bong someone dropped down a stairwell, and somehow you crawled out of that too.]
Okay, but the tail grew back. It was the size of a finger back then; who cares? My tail now could knock a wall down. That’s not a real injury in the grand scheme of things.
[System: The Sump. You didn’t find that pit, mate, that pit found you, and you went and turned yourself into a circus act for a crowd of punters betting on how many pieces you’d come out in. Killed things in there. Things that didn’t need killing, just needed a laugh out of a beastkin with a full wallet.]
I didn’t just survive, though. That’s what he’s skipping. I won. Ugly, maybe, but I won every single time. That’s not a fluke, that’s a pattern. That’s a goddamn business model.
[System: Kebab stall. You gassed out an entire block of paying customers with your own family recipe and somehow didn’t get lynched, arrested, or sued into a smear on the pavement. That orc enforcer, not once, but many separate times, should’ve turned you into paste, and something always got in the way at the last second.]
The ledger doesn’t stop scrolling. It keeps piling weight onto the air, pressing down on my coils, making it harder to even think about rearing up. It feels like gravity itself is taking sides.
[System: Elephant mercs. Professional killers, contracts signed, and you’re still slithering. Cops. How many cops, Matt? How many blokes with badges did you put in the ground and just kept moving like it was another day? Tongue-fucking a succubus on a balcony. Hiring a harpy who kills people for a living and giving her a corner office and a PR budget like she’s running your marketing department instead of your body count, letting said harpy into your house, into somewhere you and your girls find safety?]
I try to argue. I try to say something about handling it, about being fine, about the fact that I’m still here, still breathing, still me, and that has to count for something, that has to be skill and not just...
[System: You haven’t been winning, mate. You’ve been borrowing. Every single one of those moments, you should’ve died, and every time you didn’t, that’s not a win, that’s a marker. That’s a debt, and debts come due.]
The ledger keeps scrolling red, and somewhere far away Lyra’s voice is still cracking on my name, and I realise the floor under my ghost coils isn’t white because it’s clean. It’s white because it hasn’t decided yet whose blood is going on it.
No, I’ve got stats. I’ve got a HUD. I’ve seen the numbers, I’ve spent the points, I’ve picked evolution paths off a menu like I’m building a character; that’s nothing, that’s not just made up.
[System: You think a menu makes it a game? Mate. That interface is a translator, not a control pad. Your monkey brain can’t process raw cosmic ledger-work, so I wrap it in numbers and bars and little pop-ups so you don’t go catatonic every time reality touches you. That’s it, that’s the whole trick. You’ve been reading a phone bill and thinking it’s a scoreboard.]
That’s not, that can’t be, I’ve dodged things I shouldn’t dodge, I’ve found loopholes. I’ve broken the damn game in my favour. There are always exploits. Every system has a cheese strat if you just look hard enough.
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