"Sorry, grandpa, but your real grandson died 4 years ago."
It was 4 years ago when I died back on Earth and woke up in this strange, almost unknown place.
Almost.
It was a cramped, dark, and musty room, with a distinct metallic stench of blood throughout.
I looked to my right, and there were corpses.
I looked to my left, and there were corpses.
Heurgh—
What the hell was that?
I puked my guts out and immediately felt the need to escape that hellish place.
Was this hell?
Was I such a bad person that I ended up in hell?
All I ever did was… waste away my life by playing games, and… allegedly threaten the game developers for getting some terminology wrong.
But I had a job as a teacher, surely that cancelled the bad karma out?
I ran out of the room, and my eyes met with a scenery that was even more horrific than the one inside.
An entire field, with dark fumes rising from the ground, pools made up of crimson liquid, and the field littered with corpses.
It was a scene I had only ever seen in war movies.
My guts twisted, but there was no substance left inside to be thrown up.
The gut-wrenching feeling made my head spin, and my knees go weak.
The pain was a bit too real for this all to be a dream.
My eyes watered as I couldn't comprehend the situation I was in.
What in the seven depths of hell was going on?
But then, I felt a sharp pain in my right earlobe, as if someone was twisting his ear and lifting him with it.
"Who the fuck do you think you are to slack off like this?"
The voice grated on my ears, and the man's spit was flying all over the side of my face.
My body was in no condition to fight, and that man had strength like nothing I had ever felt.
"Where am I?"
Slap—
I was slapped so hard for a simple question that my brain rattled and my pupils shook like the world was ending.
"Does this make you remember where the fuck you are, you pathetic excuse of a meat wall?"
Tears rolled down my cheeks as helplessness overwhelmed my senses.
"Now go ahead and carry the corpses of the fallen inside that bunker."
The man released my ear and started to leave when he suddenly turned around and slapped me again.
I nearly passed out from that slap.
"Do I need to remind you to chant the motto every time?"
"Mo- Motto?"
He raised his hands again, and I flinched like a lamb to be slaughtered.
"Long live, Prince Wilbert."
Prince Wilbert? That name felt awfully familiar to me.
"Prince Wil-"
Suddenly, a hand shut my mouth up and spoke from behind, "Master, let me handle this one."
The man in the front stared at us for a moment before spitting and moving forward.
"Make sure he gets back to work in no more than 5 minutes."
"Long live, Prince Wilbert." The new person bowed and pulled me aside.
"Are you crazy, dude?" He whispered aggressively, "Do you have a death wish? Are you out of your mind?"
"Where am I?" I still couldn't figure out half the words the person was yelling at me.
I really hated people yelling at me.
"..."
A stretched silence followed my words.
"Do you not remember anything? Not even me?"
I shook my head. I couldn't even properly see how he looked.
"We are in the Lysander Kingdom, fighting the civil war against the insurgent forces of Princess Mellissa."
Lysander Kingdom? Princess Mellissa? Civil War? Prince Wilbert?
All these terms were so disgustingly familiar to me.
I wondered if I was on a movie set, but it was a bit too real for that.
Because these terms were all straight from the game I was playing right before I died.
The game whose developers I threatened, because they got the definition of a few terms wrong.
The game I obsessed over for years.
And the game that kept me miserable for the longest.
A game about the exploration of fallen Kingdoms and saving the rest.
But there was one twist that kept me enraged for so long.
A game feature called 'Continuity Debt'.
It was rather simple on paper, but hellish to live through.
Every time the protagonist dies, the world resets.
And it got worse.
The Continuity Debt weakened their plot armor ever so slightly following each reset.
This ramped up the difficulty in each loop until a certain point, where the debt completely outweighed their plot armor, making the game almost impossible to beat.
The protagonist would keep dying in the most random events.
And if the protagonist dies continuously, the world would keep resetting into an endless loop.
At that point, eternal rest would be a luxury to have.
Just thinking about that made me shiver like I was standing naked in the tundra.
"Hey, man," I called out, my voice shaky, "T- This all is staged, right?"
"Stop talking nonsense and get back to work before they skin you alive." The guy who saved me shoved me off.
"Do you know who I am?" My voice sounded dead.
"I dunno." He shrugged, "To me, you are just another slave brought here to serve the Kingdom."
"Do-"
But before I could finish my sentence, the guy started dragging me somewhere and made me stand in front of a corpse.
"No more questions, just work."
Finishing this sentence, he left me alone, expecting me to carry a corpse.
I used to avoid graphic games because of how weak I was to gore, and now I was supposed to carry a corpse?
But feeling the ominous presence of the man who slapped me, and the words uttered by that guy, I was helpless.
I had to do it.
The situation was just too overwhelming for me.
On one hand, I was supposedly in a game world, destined to doom.
On the other hand, I was assigned a task that was making me gag indefinitely.
I could have sworn the corpse was staring back at me with its hollow eyes.
"I can't do this."
And just when I uttered this sentence, a voice crept up from behind, whispering in my ears.
"Looks like someone needs a little discipline out here."
The heavy hand grabbed my shoulder–
…
Caius' eyes snapped open, his breath heavy.
"Fuck this dream."