It was just supposed to be another day for him.
An organised and coordinated day of the week with Coca-Cola, bread, and biscuits prepared for the long and sleepless night just to enjoy a day of a week.
He jumps to his chair and locked in position with 3 monitors in front of him. Though he had to correct the angle of the middle monitor, it was nonetheless a perfect night.
He presses the power button, and not a second later, he is at the main menu. Full of pirated games from big and glamorous companies.
He clenches his right hand in anger, seeing all of them, games made by Lazy Developers, who had no compassion for their work. All of them were unfinished games, which were all released as 16 pixels, and they were still lagging.
Mods were the cure. Modders made them real games. Everyone wanted the mods. Even the companies.
Mods were taken forceful way from the Modders just to make it be owned by the Companies.
He was one of them. A newbie who witnessed the creation of a group of modders and witnessed the downfall of the modders, where they were visited by gangs, cops and then Lawers. He witnessed how individually they had been shunned by the justice system.
He lost contact with them as time went by. They have lost their freedom and paid dearly.
Now, he works for one of those companies as a programmer, and he is striving. He can afford to pay his rent, buy a car, and then a motorcycle. He eats well, and he is respected enough to just be left alone to work.
It was a dream come true. It was where he could do something that I was good and passionate about while also being paid.
He doesn't respect himself anymore. He feels betrayed by the outcomes of all the struggles he was part of and to be the only one who was able to get past it and strive.
It hurts him more to accept that he is glad that it happened to him.
To try and mitigate his feelings on the matter, he helps out in charities and trains for marathon.
It even made him depressed that when the charity he was putting money in was a fraud. At first, he was just putting money in it without looking further into its skin. After he managed to get himself over his grief, he investigated the charity in terms of how well it was going.
He found out that it was run by a family of scammers. He got so mad that he confronted them with a complex video recorder set, a rifle, and a grenade. Found out that they were not doing well and were in debt because of a dangerous organised mob.
He was given a deal, split the money with him getting 25%, and the rest is to the family. He tried to tell himself not to take it, but in the end, he took the cut.
He was suicidal at after that. He tried to jump off a bridge to a dry river, but with the luxuries that he had acquired, he didn't do it.
He decides that he doesn't care anymore. Even if everything will become stale. He will live through it.
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He sighs and looks up. He wanted to play some games and ended up blasting himself, with his own experience blasting on his face for a brief moment. He reminded himself that it was all in the past now, you can't change it, and you don't need to relive it.
Looking back to the screen and to the menu again. He smiles, seeing his friends work.
This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.
He opened the game Cyberpunk 2077 and expected it to go immediately to the game's main menu. He was met with Reddish-Black colour all over the screens.
He is surprised. He only had the game on one monitor, and the other two were for music and short videos if he wanted.
He grabs a sheathed machete and a flashlight before looking behind him and flashes his light to the doorway just to see nothing. He doesn't feel safe anymore. There is something wrong, and it's in his house.
He moves quietly toward his bed to get his shotgun. Step by step, as he nears it, ootsteps from the hallway were breaking the silence.
He jumps to the bed and takes the shotgun bellow his pillow and aims to the doorway, and a man is in mid-air shooting towards him.
He shot him the head. Holes in the face to the brains and pierced neck, showing his bones of his throat. The man died as he landed next to him.
After the shot, he recollects his memories if he remembers the face of his victim, but nothing came. The man was just a nobody.
He prepares for more while a corpse bled right next to him as he gueses that home invasions are not done by one person.
He reaches his phone and calls for 911. There's no signal.
He looks at the doorway again and sees a silhouette of a tall and gerthy man with no shirt. He fires again, dropping the man below his knees and holes in his head.
Luci reloads his gun, adding 3 bullets more bullets to make it fully loaded. He raises up off the bed and uses it for cover, waiting for more while calling the cops.
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Minutes turned hours and still no signal.
There weren't more intruders trying to come from the doorway, but it sure didn't help him. He is stuck in his room with no signal and the stinky smell of blood.
He doesn't want to stay anymore. Consequently, he tries to call the cops for 1 more time. Surprisingly, someone picked up.
He begs for help and despenses his situation to the cops. Unbeknownst to him, a water creeps slowly towards him mixes with the blood of the corpse on the bed.
While he was still giving more crucial information to the responder, the corpse rose and tackled him to the ground. The phone flew out of his hand, and the shotgun was under him, leaving him struggling against the corpse.
The corpse tries its best to grapple him, but he shuts its plans down by kicking it hard on the stomach, creating a 2 meter distance between them.
He arms his shotgun again and fires at the corpse 3 times, scattering the upper torso of the body. He breathes with difficulty from the corpse's strength.
While at the other corpse in the room, he goes to his bedside table and takes a box of ammo before approaching the next corpse and unloading his two last bullets.
He reloads his bullets before going to his phone.
His guts were pulled with all of his fears. In his peripheral vision. He saw a silhouette, and it didn’t look human.
He hastened himself to look at his other enemy and sees raised blood.
He unloads all of his 5 bullets to the monster. It did nothing but pass through his walls and got stuck in the special concrete. The monster gains its shape as quickly as he has finished.
He reloads his shotgun and maintains a slow backing pace to the window, planning to escape using the slanting roofs from bellow, while the monster goes to the other corpse.
Mortified by the implication. He fastens his pace. He tried opening the window, but something hit it. It looked like a grey sludge.
It smeared the window with its form, and as he began to realise its resemblance to the monster. Many rained down from the sky and into the ground. He is surrounded.
He looks back at the monster and sees it at the doorway. It was bigger than before, covering light outside the doorway illustrating its perfect transparency with a shade of red.
He looks at it as it gets closer to him. He turns behind him, and the Grey covers the ground. Somehow, a neighbour who is trying to scream with them on her mouth.
He laughs at the sightbut as she covered by them, but she slowly gets close to the ground and disappeared it made him silent. He got a clear view of what was going to happen to him outside.
He looks at his gun and aims it at the monster. He plans to go out on a blaze and struggle.
He fires the gun and empties it. Like before, holes appear, but it just reconstructs. He tries one more time to get out of the room, but it just isn't happening. The monster was blocking off the door like a sheet of barrier, and just last time, it just would just reconstruct.
As a last attempt, he reloads until it is full and switches to automatic before he charges while firing at the gun. He manages to get past the monster with some of it sticking to him.
He goes down the stairs as fast as he can, but he is pulled hard from behind.
He notices that he is floating back to his room. All of his senses are telling him that he is going to die soon and there is nothing he can do about it.
He screams for help crying with his snot out while thinking of redemption. All he thought about all of his tragedies that he had witnessed, and the fantasies of the things that he could have done together with their outcomes.
He held his breath just as his head was swallowed first by the monster. He keeps his eyes open as his last stand of might. But as the monster swallowed him whole, the promised pain was not there.
