Here, finally. He set Hachi down and turned on the floodlight, illuminating the space. His body ached, exhaustion tugging at his limbs, but he was safe—for now. After a quick look around to confirm he hadn’t been raided, Hiro considered cooking up the noodles and beans he had picked up in the First Interim, something that would last, something practical.
But then he heard the soft stirrings of Mishka from his bag, indicating that the Teddy was awake.
“Tenders it is,” he said as he got one out of its package, Hiro getting more accustomed to doing things with his bear claw hand. The teeth were retracted, and while it looked wild, it functioned normally now.
[Your Survivor Tenders have been poisoned. Pay 500 Soul Cash to remove the poison? Y/N?]
“Yes,” Hiro said, which brought his remaining Soul Cash down to just over a hundred. He swallowed the realization that the Doom System intended to turn everything into a transaction, every action into a means of survival. “Last hundo,” he said, a thought that forced a smirk to tug at his lips, dry and ironic.
This wasn’t the first time he’d been down to a dangerously low bank account. At least this time, there was food. And at least this time, there were no insufficient funds fee. Not yet, anyway, he thought grimly as he set his backpack down, letting Bianca pull the crying teddy free.
“Just in time,” she said as Hiro pressed a tender into Mishka’s waiting mouth. The bear ate it quickly, and yawned once Bianca started rocking the teddy in her tentacled-arms.
Hachi let out a low whine.
“Don’t worry, you’re next,” Hiro reassured the dog as he opened another Tender. He smeared it with peanut butter and held it out, the demonic Shiba Inu snatching it carefully from his fingers. Finally, after downing some water, Hiro ate his own. I still wish it tasted better, he thought as drank a bit more water.
“You’re such a good papa,” Bianca teased once Hiro had leaned back.
“Please don’t say that.”
The system spoke in its creepy voice just as he was getting conformable, Hiro mere seconds away from popping open the Knock-Out Punch:
[Pay 1,000 Soul Cash to sleep peacefully? Y/N?]
Hiro exhaled sharply through his nose, a dry, humorless laugh escaping him. Of course. Of fucking course. Even rest had a price. The Doom System didn’t just control the world, it looked to be monetizing existence itself, turning something as natural as sleep into a luxury good.
“Motherfucker wants me to pay one-K to sleep,” he told Bianca, rubbing his temples.
“Bro, you just spent five hundred to keep from poisoning your daughter.”
“And?”
“I don’t know,” Bianca admitted. “I just think its kind of sweet, choosing your baby—our baby?—over sleep. In a way, Big Brother Hiro is becoming Big Daddy Hiro, but without the sexual connotation. Gross.”
“Agreed, and she’s not my daughter, and she’s not our baby I don’t have a thousand anyway,” he said louder, his voice directed at the Doom System. “And if anyone would know that, it would be you. So no.”
“Yep, we won’t pay a G for shit,” Bianca said, echoing Hiro.
His phone buzzed. Not the usual, expected vibration—but something sharper, more insistent, a tremor that crawled up his wrist like a jolt of static. A warning. A threat.
Hiro got out his phone to find a message from the Doom System itself.
“What’s going on?” Bianca asked Hiro as he blinked a few times, his hand trembling upon rereading the message.
Hiro’s breath caught. His fingers tingled, bear claw hand’s teeth morphing, his grip unsteady on his phone as his mind surged forward, gears turning too fast, too forcefully—like a machine forced past its limits, gears grinding toward failure. He blinked, rereading the message, feeling its weight settle deep into his chest. It was happening. That familiar surge, that unbearable rush. His body braced for it even before his mind fully understood
A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.
His heart thudded once, twice, then too many times to count.
Hiro cleared his throat and spoke directly to his phone, directly to the Doom System’s warped logic: “Poverty created by a system or state is not a crime. It is a tragedy meant to be avoided but often inevitable.”
“What the heck? Is it talking to you?” Bianca rushed over to him, but by this point, Hiro was solely focused on his phone, aware that he was in a life and death conversation.
The words appeared slowly.
Hiro’s head pounded, a sharp, stabbing sensation driving from the base of his skull to his forehead like an icepick piercing straight through his brain. The pressure increased at an impossible rate—pulsing, fracturing, splitting thought and agony into colliding waves.
“I don’t… believe.”
His vision blurred into shifting fractals and streaks of color. His pupils contracted, awareness sharpened to a needlepoint. Thoughts expanded and crashed, folding outward in an overwhelming cascade of brilliance and pain.
Hiro’s skin crawled as searing concepts slammed into his consciousness, forcing him to process at speeds his mind wasn’t built to endure. Bianca said something, but it barely registered. It was as if he had been launched into the stratosphere of intellectual clarity while simultaneously being fed through a neurological meat grinder.
{Terminal Lucidity}, he thought, recognizing the sensation, aware of what the Doom System had just done to him. And then the words spilled out, too fast to stop, his voice slipping into a trance-like cadence:
“I don’t believe the poor should be punished. Nature and nurture intertwine so frequently that the debate between which holds more power is nullified by the scope of one’s wealth and access to advantages not afforded by others. Your misinterpretation of human nature is a surface-level misunderstanding of what has shaped humanity at best.”
“Relax,” Bianca said as she placed a fuzzy tentacle on him. “Please, Hiro—”
Breathless and manic, each syllable carried an edge of revelation and a thunderclap of pain as he continued: “You have discounted the very thing that makes us unique in this world. First, you tried to fuck with everything in a futile attempt to make us appreciate you. Then, you reduced us to competition. Now, you distill us into pure economic equations, a system that credits only the forces that drive us to resist oppression, even as you wield them against us—”
Hiro’s hands trembled, muscles seizing as if his own body was rejecting the sheer weight of thought. Every connection his mind made felt seismic, too vast to hold onto, too sharp to ignore. Beneath it all, a terrifying realization crept in—he was losing control. His mouth, his mind, his body—all of it shackled by the Doom System’s punishment in force-triggering {Terminal Lucidity}.
“F-fuck… you…” He rasped, his breath shuddering, veins bulging against his temples as he glared at his screen through a haze of distortion, his vision fracturing at the edges.
The Doom System finally responded, the text appearing, disappearing, then solidifying:
Hiro hunched forward, a string of drool slipping from his lips as he fought against the onslaught. His muscles coiled and clenched, arm morphed into the face of a bear and retreated, a grotesque origami folding him inward as his mind stretched beyond breaking.
Yet something within him burned, something the Doom System couldn't touch.
Hiro wanted to tell it that it would never break him, that it could kill him right here and it still wouldn’t matter, that its control was an illusion, a failing attempt to define the human condition.
But what came out instead was more—an unstoppable, unfiltered monologue, a furious argument against the System’s misinterpretation of humanity as if the words were wrenched from his very soul by the Roulette Skill he couldn’t silence or control:
“You are wrong,” he seethed. “Dead wrong. A person’s worth isn’t measured in bank accounts, debt, or possessions. The lie that traps people into thinking survival is just a numbers game is an illusion. We are more than transactions, more than statistics in your broken equation. Love, loss, fear, anger, joy, serendipity, trauma—these are the forces that shape us alongside wealth, not just the hollow pursuit of capital. You twist the rules, warp reality, stack the deck—but you don’t understand the game. You don’t understand the game! You think power is control, that fear will break us, that if you strip everything away, we’ll bow. But you’re wrong. So long as even one of us fights back, your system will never be absolute,” he said hoarsely. “Because humanity is more than its hunger. We endure. We resist. We adapt. And unless you wipe us all out, we will always find a way.”
“Hiro!” Bianca shouted, but all he could do now is focus on his phone screen, sweat dripping from his forehead as he read the Doom System’s quick reply:
“I’m not—” Hiro’s vision frayed, the world around him melting into overlapping layers of red. His skull felt like it was expanding, like his brain was swelling past the confines of his flesh, pressing against his skull, demanding release. Then it felt like it was being crushed, pinched, squeezed until all of the brain matter was gone.
Each heartbeat that followed sent shockwaves through his nervous system, an electric current that made his fingers twitch uncontrollably. Words, ideas, entire philosophies thrashed through his mind with relentless force—cohesive but unbidden, like a dam finally bursting.
Too much. Too fast. Too loud. The Doom System wasn’t just punishing him—it was rewiring him, plucking at Hiro’s neurons, tying his thoughts into endless knots.
Bianca shouted and shook him with her fuzzy pink tentacles, her distant pleas distant swallowed by the storm raging inside his skull.
Hiro’s mouth opened, and before he could even process what he was saying, a final flood of raw, unfiltered cognition pouring out: “We are bound to the illusions we create—governments, economies, moralities—all constructs designed to wrangle the chaos of existence into something digestible. You don’t realize this. You…” He gritted his teeth, fighting against the nausea, the dissonance of knowing too much too quickly. “...you… you’ve taken humanity’s worst habits, believing competition and capital are the bedrock of existence when in reality they’re just the weapons we forged to survive the cages we were never meant to be in.”
A massive surge of power rushed to his gut, which exited the only way it could as Hiro soiled himself and passed out.