Chapter 2 – Post-Mortem Observer Mode
Black.
Then not black.
A color that has no name. The kind of absence you only get when every photon is gone and even the memory of light has been patched out.
I am… here.
No body. No heartbeat. No input lag.
Just perception, pure and clean, like running at uncapped FPS on a monitor that never existed.
I can see the room.
I'm floating two meters above the desk, looking down at the thing that used to be me.
Gray T-shirt.
Short brown hair sticking up at the exact 11° angle it always did after 19-hour sessions.
Face pressed against the keyboard.
One cheek squashed, mouth slightly open, drool pooling on the spacebar.
The webcam light is still red.
Chat is a white waterfall of panic and memes.
NULL DIED ON STREAM LMAO
CALL 911
BRO IS ACTUALLY GONE
this is the greatest clip of all time
someone archive this
he went for WR and got IRL speedrun instead
F
The body doesn't move.
Rigor mortis hasn't set in yet; the fingers are still curled exactly the way they were when I pressed the final deathblow on Isshin.
I try to move a hand that isn't there.
No controller.
No keyboard.
No latency at all.
It should feel freeing.
It doesn't.
It feels like being kicked out of the only server I was ever good at.
I drift closer to the corpse.
The eyes are open.
Pupils blown wide, reflecting the victory screen frozen on the monitor.
Sekiro's kanji glows gold.
Timer: 19:14:11.
Permanent.
I wait for something.
A tunnel of light.
A loading bar.
A "Continue? Y/N" prompt.
Nothing.
Instead, the temperature drops 6.7 degrees in 0.8 seconds.
The air thickens, like someone just turned gravity up to 1.3×.
The RGB strips on the PC case flicker once, then die.
Darkness gathers in the corners of the room.
Not regular darkness.
This is the kind that has weight.
It pools on the carpet like spilled ink, then rises in slow-motion tendrils.
No face.
No scythe.
Just absence wearing the shape of inevitability.
I know what it is.
Every gamer knows, even if we never say it out loud.
Death.
Not the respawn kind.
It moves toward the body.
Toward me.
I should feel fear.
I don't.
Fear is a resource I optimized out of the build years ago.
What I feel is… irritation.
Like when a randomizer gives you the worst possible seed.
The darkness reaches the chair.
It brushes the corpse's ankle.
The skin there turns gray instantly, like someone dragged the saturation slider to zero.
I watch my own corpse start to deflate.
Not dramatically.
Just a slow leak, the way a character model glitches when the game can't find the texture file anymore.
I try to speak.
No mouth.
No voice.
But the thought forms anyway, clear and flat:
Not yet.
Run not over.
The darkness pauses.
For the first time since it arrived, it hesitates.
Then the room tilts.
Not metaphorically.
The entire physical space folds like a bad map transition.
The walls peel away in 8-bit chunks.
The monitor fractures into pixels that hang in the air like dust.
The darkness surges forward to fill the gap.
I feel it touch whatever I am now.
Cold doesn't describe it.
Cold still has temperature.
This is the absence of temperature, of reference, of meaning.
It starts pulling.
I resist.
Not with muscle.
With pattern recognition.
With frame data.
With the same stubborn refusal that let me beat Genichiro blindfolded on my 4,317th attempt.
The darkness tightens.
I feel the edges of me starting to unravel, threads of consciousness coming loose like corrupted save data.
And then, something else arrives.
A single line of white monospace text appears in the void, floating in front of the darkness like a system message:
7 UNFINISHED GAMES DETECTED
SOUL RE-ROUTED
PERMADEATH OVERRIDE ENGAGED
LOADING…
The darkness recoils, just slightly.
Like it wasn't expecting the patch.
I feel myself yanked sideways, hard, like someone just executed a perfect clip through the geometry of reality.
The last thing I see before everything collapses:
My own corpse on the desk, mouth still open.
The victory screen still glowing.
Chat still scrolling.
And in the reflection of the dead monitor, for one single frame, something stands behind the chair that definitely wasn't there before.
Tall.
Featureless.
Holding a clipboard made of static.
Then the world rips open and I fall.
No loading screen.
No music.
Just the sensation of raw, unfiltered speed.
I am a soul with no controller, no body, no HUD.
Falling through corrupted code toward whatever comes after the credits nobody ever watches.
The darkness chases.
It's fast.
But I have beaten worse RNG.
Run continues.