Zen. I’m sorry. I wanted this to be gradual, at least you get a decent weapon to work with and the screaming doesn’t sound too human. Lucky you.
I watched Zen shout my name as he proceeded to miss swing after swing, using a machete after all was far harder than most would imagine.
He switched to holding it with two hands and in spite of me sitting on the body of the infected NPC he continued to miss. I sat on the body and stuck one of my military style boots on the head of the woman pushing it forward. The other was planted firmly on the ground.
A message popped up from one of my [Guest Viewers]. They and most standard [Viewers] could see Zen in the bubble view that surrounded me. The difference was that the message they sent to visible to literally everyone.
Exclusivity and direct contact with me came with a price tag and while I was one the lower side of the [Player Killers] in comparison to someone like [Heart Eating Beauty]. The female serial killer who charmed hundreds if not thousands of [Viewers] with her style and fixed setting was far beyond me.
Unlike other [Viewers] I didn’t have to pay much attention to the guests or invisible ones, they were able to see me in action for shorter periods of time or they could only access cut clips of me.
There was a definite limit, nothing here was free I knew that. Even when they sent me messages, I could choose to fully ignore them but at my low level there was little point doing so.
I sat harder on the body of the woman as I avoided Zen accidentally slashing me with my own blade. The [Blooded Machete] was bonded to me and while an NPC could use it on a rare situation to fight back a little I doubted that he could use it to hurt me.
I’d threatened the life of his older sister, Beauty Vee. In theory she was already a meat puppet performing to the standards of others. Or she could have been called a stable and fresh young actress to the horror scene. I was a long away off from being a [Scream Queen] though or a [Final Girl].
‘The head. You need to aim for the neck...Zen. Your sister? Yeah. I know her really, really well. Or I want to...get to know her better. Bet she tastes good as well.’ I said as I leaned back on the body a little.
My weight and [Player Killer] strength was more than enough to stop her shaking me off and causing further issue. If I had wanted I could even have ripped the head straight off her shoulders which was surprisingly harder than it looked.
There was a good reason that the killers in the standard suburban used blades on victims. I guess they could have crushed skulls or used their fists and feet to beat someone to death but there was less tension when you did that.
Someone curled up on the floor while they died wasn’t the act of a monster, it was a human who had gone insane and had a massive violent outbreak.
In response to my words Zen only shouted my name and marginally followed my instructions. I wished I had some music or a music player by Jaja Swag to listen to sitting on the writhing infected body.
I gave a few punches to the back to relieve some of my frustration and watched a black liquid drip from my knuckles when I managed to break through the torn clothing to direct skin.
The screaming from the NPC was getting boring at this point. She wasn’t doing it out of fear but rather frustration. The black veins on her skin were the same as before but her eyes had completely turned back as she threw her head back at a near impossible angle causing bones in her neck to crack.
‘I’m waiting Zen...this is getting boring. I could break her arms and legs but you need to learn to kill on your own. Your sister, remember her? I’m going to find her and do really terrible things to her face if you don’t cut her head off. She isn’t human. Think of her as a zombie.’ I said as I sat there with one boot forcing the head of the infected NPC back down to the asphalt road.
Eventually Zen succeeded in cutting off the head of the infected older female NPC, it didn’t gnash at him with teeth though. There was a thick black liquid with slow drops from the base of the severed head.
He held it up in the air with one hand still holding onto my [Blooded Machete] as he stared at it as his eyes began to widen and his mouth began to heave.
For a moment I was proud of him for following through. Not for the PTSD that was going to follow but he’d done something without being forced.Then he dropped both and threw up over the corpse. Lovely. Oh and all over my boot as well, and then it began to drip into my colourful socks underneath.
The temporary anti-viral drop by my [Verified Fan] GutzGutzLiver_23 deserved a mention at least. They’d shown me kindness and support for my plan. Unlike the new [SuperViewer] who clearly knew more than they were letting on. I didn’t like mind games.
‘Thanks for my [Viewer] and one brilliant [Verified Fan] in particular for enabling me in my purpose to take an innocent NPC from the [Surburbia Zone] and then turn him into a true [Player Killer]. We will get more kills, but I’ll need to establish a beginning [Kill Count]. Ah, that sick. All over my clothes. I can tell killing these infected is going to get messy.’ I said while tilting my neon mask to the side and flaring it up with blue and pink colours.
No surprise there. The colour of his sick had changed at least so it more resembled human flavour, but it had been a long time since I had last eaten or drunk anything. I should be thankful that he managed to throw up bile and sick all over my [Blooded Machete].
My last meal had been a good while ago. Perhaps before I came out from the [Cut Zone]. There were changes when we left [Zones]. A small part of us carved out the audience who watched us and paid for the privilege but didn’t seem to exist in person.
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I had no other words to explain it. We killed and survived or had to flee due to overwhelming opposition. Of course there were those [Player Killers] who played on the human or pet cannibalism card but it didn’t mean that they were hungry.
Some of the nicest people in the [Cut Zone] who had given me free clothing gifted to them or advice when I was desperate took on cannibal roles. Which didn’t make them good people, just helpful to another brutal killer.
Not my place to say. I didn’t want to get involved in that, I’d make slow kills at the most. Not as though I enjoyed it or could even pretend that I did.
You had to be good at acting to survive inside this place. Or you suffered some serious psychological disorders like dissociative identity disorder and partitioned yourself off from reality.
Someone else was holding the baseball bat, someone else used the makeshift flamethrower on the police chasing you. A totally separate personality which did the work until one day it took you over completely.
Not me. I wanted to comfort Zen, if he was awake after screaming out my name then he would become like me pretty fast. My actual name, not my [Player Killer] identity as [The Griefer] then he would eventually recognise me. Immediately if I removed my mask and allowed it to showcase my normal voice.
Zen threw up again, his face was pale and he wiped the contents of his stomach off with his sleeve. There was sweat on his forehead and this time he was looking around. Before he saw me his eyes went blank and rolled back into his head.
He could have murmured curses at me for threatening his sister but that was a situation we could come to later. The [Viewers] would discover the fact but given we were siblings and he wasn’t an ex-boyfriend of mine I would imagine that they’d see this moment fondly.
Brother and sister find each other and then proceed to become serial killers. All for the sake of this stupid insane form of entertainment. This way would be safer though, I still didn’t trust those in the [Cut Zone] and the situation here was going to rapidly deteriorate with the massive viral outbreak.
The messages. He was receiving messages. Either from a new sponsor who thought he was worth it or the same one which I received. TBIA Entertainment was one of the popular ones, the strange thing was that I was certain they were the ones who had….had...something.
Every single time I heard them send a message advertising their content a part of me, a very deep part was aware they owned something and have created...or built...something.
I knew Jaja Swag had a vague connection with them. At the very least I was aware that TBIA Entertainment were into producing content for this place, they were one of the key sponsors. The others were versions of Belphus but different, the food and drink, the electronics, most of it was either different or so out of date in this place.
Security cameras and detection devices for one thing, even the weapons the police were armed with, all of it was old but new at the same time. Modern security systems didn’t operate on clear lines here, otherwise it would have been easy for [Player Killers] to be caught or discovered.
I watched Zen as I sat on the corpse of the woman. He looked up at the sky, at the burning houses in the suburbia area further down the road, then at the pick up truck and rubbed his eyes. Then he sat down on the hard road surface and cried, only a little as he rubbed his eyes more.
His physical reaction at least was much the same as me I’d been when I’d made my first kill. A car crash and someone begging for mercy as I dropped a heavy weight from the trunk of the car on top of their head watching the blood and brains intermingle.
Red blood. Like my blood. Not like these..infected whom Zen had just killed. The dead person had stopped moving then and I’d had to do the same to the two other passengers who had been brought along.
My mentor had found me wandering the side of the highway and eventually I had wandered into a roadside diner to see him placing human heads on plates and hands on hooks inside.
The fact he hadn’t added me to his collection was because he had recognised me. He knew that I wasn’t the same as the NPCs from my immediate reaction to him. I had thrown up and then joked about how I’d rather have something that wasn’t raw to eat.
I’d been half out of my mind then with [Management] trying to direct me to a suitable location to become a [Player Killer] but I’d ignored it on account of being entirely lost and confused.
I too had thought the NPCs were human but I’d seen the reactions of them, watched them be killed and then return again like mechanical puppets designed to perform.
They were limited, they grew and changed but only in specific ways. The reaction was usually the same though. Hostility, hate or fear. There was no wider range of emotions except when they interacted with each other.
I wasn’t killing people. Maybe there had been once, or they had been trapped inside this place much the same as me but I didn’t know or care by this point. They were meat, blood and threats.
The only ones I could talk to really were the other [Player Killers] on the [Cut Zone] or those in the audience. Even then the conversation was either limited or similar, having the same talk on how many kills they made or the best places to hunt and establish got boring.
Some of them had been stuck here for longer than my grandparents were alive because their perception of Belphus was completely different to mine. It was though they had come from variant versions of the same world or they were just super old and their memories had been damaged in this place.
The truck behind us continued to rock, less this time but there was someone or something inside banging on the door frame. The motions would stop and this time I was able to hear a muffled scream or an attempt at one before the front windscreen was slammed into.
Yeah. I’d need to let Zen take on that kill. With a viral contamination in place we were both in one of the few if safest places inside the [Suburbia Zone]. Being stuck on the road leaving the picket fenced houses area which led out of the town was a whole lot safer than being at one of the police stations, shopping malls, fast food places or worst, the hospital.
And now I had to deal with someone who had just been an NPC and had taken a short cut to being a [Player Killer]. They had skipped the assistant part and was taking a dangerous path instead, I’d need to deal with someone who was my younger brother but immediately exposed to violence.
As long as the [Viewers] accepted the situation, and I’d made myself clear on many occasion by addressing them directly
The one [Verified Fan] who had promised me a gift had done this, there was no way that the process from newly created NPC to [Player Killer] should have been this fast.
There was a process and an order to it, I didn’t know which one was worse. I had found my brother and turned him into a killer through my own actions or everything I was doing had been pre-planned and organised by some freak who got a boost out of watching me cry.
Didn’t matter. I needed to make sure that Zen didn’t target me without letting him break down. I had threatened to hurt his older sister and he likely remembered me as the slim young woman in her early twenties with short cut hair and an office suit being stressed out, like, all the time.
He wouldn’t imagine that this bulked up, muscular figure wearing thick jeans, a wool coat and long sleeve shirt and a white face mask which didn’t change expressions but remained pure and clean no matter how much blood splattered on it, was his older sister.
I heard a motion then as my [Blooded Machete] was picked up off the ground where it had been dropped and thrown up on. Zen was standing there directly in front of me.
His face had changed, hardened but it was in his eyes where it counted. There was a maturity there that hadn’t been there before. He had a grim look on his face and it was set in a scowl.
He talked to me then. The first words which I had heard when I had lost him when we had first arrived at the Belphus Horror Marathon Festival in the desert near one of the Parks of Gaia.
Pointing my own [Blooded Machete] he swung it in the direction of the pick up truck where it was rocking more violently. The infected young man inside had been slamming against the door for some time without success.
In this place, when the [Viewers] were engaged time could flow differently. There had been a massive viral outbreak which could have gone on for ours but for me and Zen this had been twenty or so minutes. When the bubble broke we would be hit hard, either with [Infected], [Armed Survivors] or [Military Quarantine Staff].
Zen had spoken to me and I had shut out his words, either on purpose or unconsciously. He had been shouting and I had blanked out.
Then he had rushed at me with the [Blooded Machete] in one hand and with the other gripped his fingers into my [Fright Night Mask]. This time I heard his words.
‘I don’t know who you are, but anyone. Anyone who threatens my older sister gets hurt. I’m going to rip that mask off you freak and shove your own piece of metal straight into that mouth of yours so you never say her name again.’ he said as he shoved me off the body of the headless female infected NPC and backwards onto the road.
The back of my head slammed into the hard road surface.
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