The false Emptiness and the false Hero

I felt like a grain of sand on that beach of light and sound. Here, far from the epicenter, the air should have smelled of fresh digital grass and tranquility. But something stank. Something metallic, sour, like rust mixed with the static of an old television. A smell that didn't belong in the world of Lover Online.

We had reached the center of the map, and for a moment I was relieved, I thought they would get us out of this place, Ikel and a few others were close by, so I let my guard down for a moment.

Serious error.

An elf archer standing near me was turned into a glitchy, viscous liquid in front of my eyes. I watched as his silhouette twisted, as if a giant, invisible hand had grabbed his code and squeezed it until it broke.

His face stretched and contracted in a ghastly loop, a pixelated mask of pain alternating with utter emptiness. From the cracks opening in his virtual skin gushed a black liquid, thick as tar, bubbling with a sickly sheen. It had a nauseating, digital odor that intensified, sticking in my nostrils, leaving a bitter aftertaste in my throat. This was not part of the event. This couldn't be happening.

I stepped back. My feet felt like lead, but horror propelled me backward. The ground vibrated beneath my boots, not like an earthquake, but like a computer screen about to collapse. The grass at my feet buckled, not from the wind, but as if sucked into the slimy, black puddle the elf had left. Reality itself was sinking there. And then I heard it: a deep, guttural hum, as if a thousand voices were whispering cursed machine languages in unison, a static that tangled in my ears and climbed up my spine.

From that puddle that seemed to devour the light, leaving a halo of pixelated gloom emerged that. A black tentacle, not of flesh, but of pure corrupt darkness, with edges frayed by a constant glitch, emerged with a digital crackle that made me shudder. Like a giant file being damaged. Then another... and another, writhing with an unnatural, sickening sinuosity. Until a formless mass, a cancer of visual errors and vibrating shadows that defied any geometric logic I knew, began to rise. It was an infection. A virus taking monstrous shape in the world I thought was safe.

— Run, Asimil!  — Ikel's scream sounded strangled by a terror I recognized instantly. It was primal. Instinctive.

But I couldn't. My legs were concrete blocks anchored to the ground. It wasn't just the fear of the moment. It was the ghost of a thousand past paralyses, the high school hallway as laughter pounded or the front door as screams burst like glass. My chest burned, an unbearable pressure threatening to burst me from within. My throat was a desert. Not even a moan could escape.

The creature roared. A burst of distorted bytes and impossible frequencies that made the air vibrate like thin glass. And in an unnatural flicker it disappeared from the scene and reappeared three meters closer.

Ikel stepped in. I saw the glint of panic and determination in his eyes an instant before he shoved me with a shadow.

It all happened too fast. The black mass of tentacles rushed in like a nightmarish wave. Ikel shouted something that was lost in the din of my own heart pounding in my ear. I was the target. I knew with an icy certainty. Fear welded me from my boots to the ground.

I watched as one of those appendages, loaded with distortion and digital crackles, lunged toward my chest like a dagger. Time slowed down. I could see every wandering pixel on its surface, every glitch that flickered like a dying star. It was beautiful and horrifying. And I knew, deep inside me, that it was going to erase me.

Move... Move, damn you... The thought was a muffled scream in my skull, an echo of all the times I had stood still. But my body was a betrayal. A statue of flesh and code about to be erased.

It was not a thought. It was a physical sensation. The heat of corruption inches from my skin. The buzz of death. I closed my eyes, a stupid, primal reaction, waiting for the impact that would end it all.

But the impact did not come.

Instead, the cold arrived.

A burst of bluish frost materialized between me and the tentacle with a deafening sound. It was not a solid shield, but a dense, icy cloud, a vortex of ice crystals spinning at frantic speed. The tentacle sank into it and... slowed until it seemed to move underwater, its deadly advance reduced to a pitiful crawl. The cold it emanated was so intense that I felt my own virtual joints creaking.

A whip of pure crimson fire, as thin and concentrated as a laser beam, struck the tip of the tentacle just where it emerged from the ice cloud. It was Noelia. I saw her out of the corner of my eye, her arms outstretched, one controlling the vortex of frost, the other directing the incandescent beam. Her face was contorted in monumental effort.

The ice was not there to stop it, but to slow it down and make it fragile, and the fire, to strike with surgical precision. The effect was devastating. The tentacle, suddenly brittle from the extreme cold, pulverized on contact with the fire laser. It did not retract. It exploded. It disintegrated in a shower of black, glowing fragments that evaporated in a smoke of dense, acrid static. The creature emitted a shriek of discordant frequencies, a sound that was pure pain and digital fury.

The monster recoiled, the remaining mass of tentacles writhing in agony. But the damage was done. The pain seemed to have broken something in its form, forcing it to reveal itself fully.The black pool from which it emerged began to boil. The distortion of the air around her intensified, bending like a concave mirror. And then, it rose.

It was worse than I could have ever imagined.

From the pool of corruption emerged a tall, grotesquely humanoid but twisted silhouette, like an elongated and corrupt shadow. It must have been ten feet tall, perhaps more. Its body was not solid; it was a fluid, smoky form of pure darkness, as if made of night itself, with thick, writhing tentacles sprouting from its back and sides like necrotic appendages, rippling with blind rage.

But it was the head that froze my blood. An amorphous, dark mass from which two eyes sprouted. They were not eyes. They were slits in the darkness, sharp white slits that glowed with a cold, evil light, like dead stars. And beneath them, a mouth. A slit that opened in terrifying silence, revealing not teeth, but endless rows of jagged, sharp spikes, like shards of broken, crystallized code, slowly spinning in an internal whirlpool. It was not a mouth to eat; it was a mouth to devour, to erase.

The atmosphere itself changed. The air became heavy, charged with a malevolence that was almost tangible, a smell of burnt ozone and emptiness. She was an entity of pure horror and corrupt power, and her very presence was a blasphemy against the world. The eclipse in the sky seemed to beat in unison with it.

It was at that moment of freezing horror, as I and everyone else stood transfixed by the revelation of its true form, that the second tentacle, the one that had emerged from my blind spot, took advantage of the distraction to launch itself at me again. This time, silent as death itself.

There was no time for cold or fire. Noelia was exhausted, panting, her magic wavering after the combined effort. This time she was really going to die.

And then, the world tilted.

It wasn't me, it was everything. The ground beneath my feet suddenly curved. An invisible, massive force pushed me to the right with the brutal smoothness of a tsunami. I did not fall; I was displaced, thrown out of my paralysis and out of the path of death. I looked back to where I had been and saw the air distorted, like the heat emanating from the asphalt in summer, but concentrated in one spot. The tentacle that was about to impale me swerved sharply, as if a giant, invisible hand had pushed it aside, thrusting itself furiously into the ground where my heart had been beating moments ago.

It was the hooded man, it had been saitras, Noelia's best friend, he had not brandished his sword or any other weapon. He had one hand outstretched toward me, fingers twitching in a gesture of brutal struggle. The other hand held his temple, as if the effort of bending local gravity caused him excruciating pain. I saw droplets of a digital sweat, dark and shiny, fall from under his hood. It wasn't teleportation magic. It was mass manipulation. He had pulled me with gravity.

I fell to the ground, rolled several times, gasping, my mind a whirlwind of confusion, belated relief and renewed terror at the monstrosity that now loomed in its fullness. It hadn't gone through me. The combination of slowing ice, precise fire and a gravitational push had saved me. By the skin of my teeth.

I staggered to my feet, the image of those sharp white eyes and nightmarish mouth burned into my retina. I watched as Noelia and saitras shared an intense, fleeting look, a flash of perfect coordination, but also of deep exhaustion and shared fear at what they had helped unleash before turning to face the now fully revealed creature, which regenerated its lost tentacle with furious black glitches even faster. They were not well. Noelia was breathing heavily and the hooded man was leaning on his sword, his arm visibly shaking.

They had saved me. Not by chance. Not with infinite power, but with technique, with coordination, and at an obvious cost to them. Relief mingled with burning shame and newfound terror. I was still here, without a new scratch, for their effort. And they were paying the price, having awakened to a greater horror.

The creature that was now a nightmarish silhouette against the sky roared. A sound that was not sound, but the void itself screaming, that shook the very foundations of the map. Its gaze those two sharp white slashes rested on us again. The danger was not over. It had just begun in earnest.