The simulation dropped him into the interiors of some grand Victorian hall. Its ceiling arched ridiculously high overhead, swallowed by shadows long before his sight could register its peak. With heavy drapes covering any external illumination source, every scrap of light came from candelabras scattered around. Red wax bled down from them in slow columns, pooling down to a floor so polished it reflected back their flames. It was enough to confirm the general existence of shapes, but most of them were kept at the edge of ambiguity.
Dark stone walls enclosed the space, beveled with age and ornaments that —since Neon knew by now that it was all premade for atmosphere— had been designed to look like they’d lost the war against grime ages ago. Tapestries hung here and there, but Neon didn’t care to detail whatever narrative they were trying to sell. He already had enough context.
Self-importance. The whole place reeked of it. Of someone wanting to feel eternal so badly that the architecture itself had to accommodate the delusion. Far more important were the six people occupying the place.
Four were arranged in a loose semi-circle near the far end, positioned with the approximate attitude of an audience. Their collective attention coalesced on the two standing at the center carrying themselves with a higher type of presence. Whatever had gathered them all here, the question of who held weight wasn’t really worth asking.
Neon’s interface shimmered, resolving around the leading duo.
[Contestant 10, Nihil.]
[He/Him. Team Vampyr. Rookie. Sponsor.]
[Contestant 11, Iscariot.]
[He/Him. Team Vampyr. Rookie. Sponsor.]
Sponsors. The word alone left a poor taste. Or at least it did now, since these two were surrounded by a group that behaved like obedient followers. He didn’t want to judge anyone based on a label, but… Ugh. No matter. Better to take a proper look at them, at least.
Even before he lumped both into one single unit rather than individuals, Nihil and Iscariot already felt like a shared thesis on a specific kind of longing. They had built themselves into something, or paid enough credits for someone else to do it for them.
From the greyish pallor of their skin, to the black and red hair mirrored across their heads like a call and response. They looked close to his own age, but who knew how real that was. Crimson eyes on both, each carrying their own depth and sharpness. Their tall, lean frames were dressed in adjacent variants of goth —velvet against leather, expensive jewelry versus spiked collars. Funnily, Nihil wore platform boots to perfectly match Iscariot’s height.
“It is simply not enough, my flower. You’ll have to drink, and let us drink, more and more and more, for you to become a proper member of this bouquet of darkness.”
Neon rolled his eyes. Right. He understood what was happening here. This wasn’t about competing, or hunting, or winning. This was set dressing. Fantasy fulfillment.
These guys were roleplaying.
Whatever it was that Vampyr and their… Bouquet of darkness continued talking about —in yearning whispers, in sultry murmurs— Neon just filtered it out. There was barely any math to it. For all their grand théâtre des vampires… Nihil and Iscariot were the prey in this room.
So far, decoded feedbacks always kept him close to the actions of their respective teams. Which, if the pattern held, meant Atrax was already in here somewhere, watching this performance from the inside. Neon ran a quick pass over the assembled four, but…
Three Respawned, one Convict, all Rookies. None of them part of Team Atrax.
Assuming a mistake had been made at some point, he reviewed the hall a second time. The six people, the walls, the corners, and… Nothing. Not even a stray spider in the periphery to serve as foreshadowing.
Why was he watching, then? Had Atrax found some other way to monitor this place, masking their presence in a way he just couldn’t see?
The system freaking out wasn’t entirely impossible. It happened with Team //ERROR, after all. Neon considered he was witnessing some fetish party by accident, at least until the hall’s main doors loudly swung open. The candle flames trembled under the cold draft rushing in, dying sunlight and mist outlining a silhouette now standing at the threshold.
Ah. There’s the vampire hunter. We were only missing the crossbow.
[Contestant 106, Carnarium.]
[She/Her. Team Atrax. Veteran. Respawned. Transgressor.]
She plucked a cigarette from her lips and exhaled before she spoke.
"I’m very sorry but I’ll interrupt the sex tape." Dry delivery, cold, warm and mocking at the same time. An orange ember lit her sharp features, smoke curling upwards lazily around it.
Carnarium was tall, long-limbed and lithe. She could be mistaken as frail at a glance, but once she moved, the meticulous stiffness of her steps evoked anything but that. She was the real thing —and genuinely menacing to look at.
A hooded bodysuit covered her in black, layered asymmetrically in web-mesh fabric that gave glimpses of the skin beneath. Faint speckled markings spread over an exposed shoulder blade and collarbone in a pattern resembling moth wings, textured like they had been branded there. Her deep violet hair fell long on one side, while the other gathered forward in a loose braid that didn’t quite match the rest of her.
“We have a new guest!” Nihil recovered his composure first, which Neon supposed was its own kind of skill. His arms opened wide at his side, probably aiming between solemn and welcoming. It landed uncanny instead, forced just like his voice was. “And a most beautiful one at that.”
>> “You were drawn here by our call, yes? The desire of kindred souls reaching through the dark to find another across the vast, indifferent void of this…”
Blah blah blah. While Nihil continued masturbating to the sound of his own voice, Iscariot had taken a step forward, watching Carnarium advance like a concealed blade. Neon noticed belatedly how her shadow seemed to stretch rather than follow, expanding under every step.
“Sure. Why not?” Carnarium stopped at roughly the midpoint of the hall, letting the coven of red gazes settle on her. “That’s exactly why I’m here.” Her eyes conveyed a frightening amusement, with both holding inky black scleras. Only the left one had something akin to a pupil, threaded by a silver spiderweb. “But the only desire I have is to tear you apart.”
She said it the way one would ask for salt and pepper, free of cruelty or viciousness.
Now that she had closed the distance it was difficult not to notice the extra limbs —thin, articulated and arachnid, sprouting from her back and folded around her torso like a living corset. Following the insectoid motif, faint chitin seams traced her jaw and ran down her neck, catching light at certain angles. Her loose clothes likely concealed more of them.
And speaking of, a utility belt crossed her hip loaded with small vials whose contents Neon was fairly certain he’d rather not know. Curiously, a few of those knick-knacks had been tagged with small stickers. Little cartoon bugs? One had a ribbon tied around it, too. Kind of uncharacteristic, but it didn’t stop there.
Small concessions to softness had been made here and there. A small cluster of pastel-colored charms as a wrist bracelet. A single press-on pink nail applied to her middle finger, chipped at the corners. They read like someone else’s love language, worn with tenderness. Carnarium surely didn’t look like she’d put them there. More like she allowed them to stay.
“You’d be making a mistake, my dear.” It took some time and effort, but Nihil’s smile survived the threat. “We’re not here to reap lives carelessly. What we offer isn’t submission. Only strength in numbers and… Plenty of rewards. A veteran joining our—”
“Nilcas.” Iscariot spoke for the first time, flatly cutting the air. “This woman targets sponsors. She’s here to kill us, not negotiate.”
Their dynamic was transparent. Nihil’s theatrics were the scaffolding, built prettily but void in structure, while Iscariot was the actual load-bearing support. Secondary in presence, primary by function. Case in point, it was to his voice that the other four rookies reacted, dropping their postures into pre-strike tension.
Carnarium took one last exhale of her cigarette, examined the dying ember at its end, then dropped it to the polished floor and ground it under her heel without looking down.
“Looks like I’ve been figured out.” She said, undisturbed, entertained. “Can we start now?”
“Such tragedy.” Nihil’s lament dissolved fast, replaced by a curl of his lip as he shed the faux-aristrocratic cadence. “You have no chance against all of us.”
Responding to some unspoken signals, the four rookies launched themselves at Carnarium in a quick-moving pincer that she didn’t even acknowledge with so much as a step back. Only her spider limbs moved, unfurling into a defensive shell of spindly tips. Still, it was the darkness itself that acted first.
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Shadows crept up from every unlit corner of the hall —from around Carnarium, from Vampyr’s backs, and every dim spot in between. They rose like oozing, tangible appendages, bending and twisting as if alive before lashing out like whips at everything daring to approach their master, all of them at once.
[Skill: Fen of Shadows Lvl 7]
Writhing black circus of death.
Their attack was telegraphed enough for most to scatter outside Fen of Shadow’s path, except for the sap closest to Carnarium. The moment those black tendrils made contact, they exploded into hundreds of small spiders, crawling and biting as the rookie succumbed in an agonizing scream. It was a prolonged kind of suffering, thrashing against the colonizing darkness that suffocated all movement until no more were left.
[Skill: Gift of Life Lvl 4]
Soulless bodies flooding forth from the gutter
“Not that one, then…” Carnarium murmured, calmly and without remorse.
Where the tendrils had missed their marks, darkness spread horizontally across the floor in a dense lattice of black veins —a living tripwire promising the same grim fate. Only one person was responsible for them, and yet it was sufficient to dominate an entire battleground in seconds.
Iscariot came up with the quickest solution. He seized the nearest candelabra and swept its flames across the floor. He moved quickly, inhumanly so, toppling one after another for the fire to expand and brighten the darkness. Fen of Shadows bubbled and scurried away at their touch, retreating just enough for the rookie’s mangled corpse to peek through the gaps.
“Nilcas, now!”
Nihil aimed his long-nailed fingers like closing jaws towards the fresh corpse, and activated.
[Skill: Scarlet Communion Lvl 4]
Forgive me, father, for I will continue sinning.
Blood erupted from every open wound on the corpse, tearing itself free of the shadow mass in a violent surge. The stream circled back to Nihil before launching outwards like twin lashes aimed directly at Carnarium. A curtain of black emerged to intercept, but one of the rookies immediately committed to the small opening in the spiderweb —flanking the veteran with a dagger in hand.
Though it successfully managed to break Carnarium’s stillness, an extra limb seamlessly deflected the blade. Her human arms moved in the same motion, capturing her prey and landing the execution soon after. Three clean stabs of her spider legs, and any resistance ended in that same instant. She let the body drop without even looking at it.
“Not this one, either…”
“This isn’t going to work. The rookies won’t…” Iscariot’s composure cracked. His eyes swept the hall, with its shrinking number of allies and narrowing angles of light. “We have to—”
“I’ll keep her occupied.” Nihil growled, his hemomancy skill already draining the newly deceased to immediately fight back Carnarium. “Feed. As much as you have to, Gian.”
The permission carried a weight Iscariot appeared to have been craving. The instant it landed, something structural morphed in the sponsor. Gone, whatever it was that separated him from animal. His crimson eyes bled past their irises into full burning red, and his joints, too, locked into positions that had no interest in looking human.
Just hunger, Neon recognized. Hunger with a face.
[Skill: Crimson Baptism Lvl 4]
Flesh of my flesh, blood of my blood.
He moved. Very fast. But maybe because his senses were finally adapting, Neon could tell where Iscariot’s trajectory was leading him —the nearest surviving member of the coven. His hand closed around the rookie’s hair, yanked back the neck, and fangs were bared immediately after.
The trope was easy to follow. A vampire empowered after a fresh meal. Except that instead of the smooth, cinematic pageantry of a fed predator, it was something else that announced itself once those sharp teeth made an incision on skin.
A gurgle. Wrong and obscene. Wet and structural. Of bones finding new configurations, of flesh parting from the inside out. Iscariot’s eyes widened in a way that no vampiric pretense could reframe as dramatic. He shoved the rookie away from him. Hard. As if distance could somehow undo whatever had already started.
Neon’s stomach twisted once he took a look at what had taken shape on that neck instead of a quaint bite mark. It was fingers. Actual fingers, slick with blood.
The rookie’s hand flew towards the wound, bloodshot gaze desperately seeking what those fingers were doing —growing into palms, widening the rupture with them. One last pleading look at the sponsors, and their pupils rolled into nowhere.
It made no sense. How could something this large be hiding inside someone without killing them? But there was no denying the head forcing its way outside the breaking rookie, nor the cheerful smile worn by the parasite.
[Contestant 107, Infi.]
[She/Her. Team Atrax. Veteran. Respawned. Transgressor.]
[Skill: Praetorian Defiler Lvl 1]
I was forced to leave myself behind, and so will you.
Neon had logged a lot of mileage in a single day. Watched Nomine dissect people who could’ve become friends. Taken his own fingers for show. Sat through a war machine reducing an entire city block to rubble. He had thought his threshold for genuine shock had been quietly recalibrated somewhere along the way.
It hadn’t.
“Heeere’s Infi!” Her voice was as sweet as a voice could be, brimming with the joyful confidence of someone who couldn’t read a room for the life of them. “Thank you for bringing me all the way here!” She began extracting herself from the body unhurriedly, leaving behind only a sad, deflated carcass. “Your insides were kinda cute.”
>> “So sorry I had to kill you.” She didn’t sound sorry.
It was difficult to parse the details between his nausea and the fact that she was showered in blood and viscera, but what registered through all of it was aggressively, defiantly pastel. Pink hair, cut in uneven bangs. Pink eyes, large and cotton-candy soft. Even her skin carried a rosy warmth to it, full of life even after blooming from decay.
“There you are.” Carnarium exhaled softly. It wasn’t relief, much less reproach. Just fondness, undisguised and unguarded.
"Ahahaha! Whooops!" The gore around Infi moved on its own to accommodate her still-forming body, coating her skin like a second layer. “Here I am! Did you wait too long?”
"Not at all." Carnarium was already moving towards her partner. Her gaze didn’t find the final rookie standing in her path, swallowed by the darkness like an afterthought. It stayed on Infi. “I only had to kill a little time.”
It took a moment for Neon’s mind to catch up. Then it did, and he wished it hadn’t. Here was the reason why he hadn’t been tracking Carnarium outside this hall. His perspective had been anchored to Infi the whole time, who had always been there, hiding. Hiding inside their bodies.
He wasn’t the only one arriving at that conclusion. Vampyr’s hands rose in unison, covering mouths and pressing against stomachs —replacing all pretense of predatorial control for crude, unfiltered horror. Easy to understand why.
Because they had bitten. Passed those crimson eyes through whatever augment chain had made it possible. Because somewhere across that shared blood… Had been her.
Infi giggled, rapping her knuckles against her temple.
"Still pretty empty up here. Well. No wonder.”
>> “You know, Chancia? These guys sure can drink!"
Yeah. She was inside them.
“That won’t do.” Carnarium’s shadows had never ceased moving. By now they owned the entire hall. Swallowed walls and all their weathered antiquity until only an island of light remained. "Guess we’ll have to crack these two open to get all of you back."
Infi swung her legs and hopped upright, weightless. Fen of shadows curled gently around her small and slight frame. She remained the most bubbly and energetic thing in the room, pointing an accusing finger at the vampires.
“Right! One of you was bold enough to flirt with Carnarium while I was in there! How dare!!”
>> “Who was it? Fess up right now and I’ll try to make it painless!”
Nobody spoke. Nihil’s fists were clenched at his side, but any composure he recovered held only as long as it took for the shadows to inch another half-meter closer. Iscariot had gone very still beside him, the sanguine fervor in his eyes fading into something flat and far away.
“This isn’t over.” It was Nihil who said it, voice stripped of performance. So quiet in their disheveled states that it was nearly lost. “Kill us all you want. We’ll come back.”
>> “And we will find you.”
“And kill you all over again? How fun.” Carnarium laughed softly. “Go on, then. Take as many tries as you need to get the message. That you scum are not welcome here. And that we’ll get you for real once we escape your playground.”
Her words were punctuated by shadows puncturing their bodies, but Neon looked away to spare himself the sight. No much choice about the sounds. He wished he could press pause. His hands would’ve gone to his ears if he had a body here, if that was a thing he could do —but he didn’t and it wasn’t.
So he waited for it to end, while the terrible noises continued at their own pace anyway.
It was too much. He knew his reason to be here was learning, but…
By the time he emerged back into his room, he was a complete and utter mess. He felt sweaty. Dizzy and nauseous and sickened, unable to do anything with Atrax while the HUD just gleamed faintly across his vision.
//ERROR were scary in how cryptic they were. Harmgivers oppressive. WhoCares flashy and efficient. Even Nomine’s frigidness. All of them were things he could promise himself to try and emulate, someday. Bring himself to the same standard of performance.
But there was a limit.
No matter how many times he told himself that ceilings were just floors he had yet to reach, the thought kept doing that thing where it sounded brave out loud and collapsed privately the moment he stopped saying it.
What these people were doing —or what the VileSports had beaten into them through however many respawns and deaths— was something he didn’t have a word for yet. It lived below skill, below strategy. In the part of a person that stops asking if they can and just does, because hesitation got lost so long ago they’ve stopped noticing its absence.
Well, Neon still had that. Lots of it. And it made him feel hopelessly outmatched since he wasn’t sure if he wanted it gone.
The system timed out, and the room went dark.
He didn’t correct it. Dark was fine. Easier.
Just closed his eyes. Didn’t intend to sleep. Didn’t decide anything, really. Just let the room be quiet. Let exhaustion do whatever it wanted to do. Stopped asking his brain to stay useful for a little while.