In the lone room sat a lone girl surrounded by unfinished cup noodles and packed garbage bags with chicken bones peeking out.
While the chicken bones glared at the girl to beg for a swift dive into the garbage dump, the girl still merely had her eyes on the monitor, her fingers on the keyboard moving at lightning-fast speed.
Left, right, left…step on the guard's head, pass through the glitched ceiling…go right here…
That's right, the girl was currently speedrunning a game, particularly a 'no-kill-sneak' game called
Her focus was so intense that her dead parents could've risen from the grave just to smack her forehead with bony arms and screech, 'Eat dinner already!'—and she still wouldn't have noticed.
But the girl has a mission, and that mission is to: beat the top runner who just surpassed her in one second!
"Throw a coin here, head turns right, go past him...the guard notices, doesn't matter…toss a cupcake, jump up the chandelier, lose aggro…"
Most speedrunners were either silent menaces or stream-chattering menaces, but this girl? She occupied a weird middle ground like 'professional amateurs'—muttering strategies aloud even though no one was watching or listening.
"And…DONE! Fourteen minutes, fifty-eight seconds and…HAHA! NINE MILISECONDS ahead, baby! Suck it, knuckleracker2000!"
Upon reaching the infamous bad ending scene, where the nameless player found everyone in the thieves' guilt was suddenly invaded and killed by demons, the girl raised her arms in celebration!
The infamy of the only ending in the game had the girl once throwing her arms up in rage, for the demons appeared entirely out of nowhere till the very end with ALMOST no hints or implications.
But now? The speedrunner girl dared devils to invade faster, kill faster, ah and silence the talking NPC faster so she wouldn't waste time stuck in a dialogue scene again.
....well, most of the important NPCs in the route are either incompetent fools or egotistical 'you're the first one to XXX me' bastards. So, no. The girl refused to care about any of them.
Weirdly though...she frowned as the screen flickered for a bit, so she clicked her mouse a few times for a bug check.... no issue though, other than how the game screen looks...ominously red? And is it just her or are the demons' pixelated eyes following her cursor?
A raised brow, then she circled the cursor around the ending screen, the pixelated eyes circling and following as well. Pft, cute. Must be the developers forgetting to turn off their April's fool update.
Anyways, whew, her run is saved and recorded! The girl huffed her relief as she uploaded her run on the speedwalker's page. The relief of not having hours of gameplays wasted washed over her momentary doubt.
And like any normal gamer who has to rub it in on someone else's face, she proceeded to her only social connection website in this world: Discorp, for bragging, of course. What else can a gamer neet do other than bragging?
TopSpecMochi: *Upload Screenshot*
TopSpecMochi: And...I broke the Record again! Someone needs to work on their route, and it ain't gonna be me :PepeSmug:
knuckleracker2000: Seriously? It hasn't been even 72 hours.... :Girl_Cry_Blood:
YouSeeMeYes89: Praise the Mochi! Gratz on your run! :RaiseHand:
UiUiLover90: Typical Mochi stan. Oh hang on, my wallet dropped again *donated 500 coins to TopSpecMochi*
knuckleracker2000: Simp
YouSeeMeYes89: Simp :ThumbsUp:
TopSpecMochi: Hehe, thanks!
UnknownIssac22: Will Mochi go for some other modded routes? Vanilla is nice but seems kinda boring to do all the time...
The girl, dubbed 'Mochi', blinked her eyes, then scowled. Indeed, there's only so much money she could earn from the Speedrunning Bounties from vanilla, so she may need to start another route...perferbly a modded run.
The game's niche as an open-sandbox that allowed the players any freedom except killing people has drawn many players, particularly speedrunners who like 'sneak-running' strats and modders who like to tinker the game into other favours.
For a neet who lost her parents, got trapped in the rich relative's home that required her not to work out of pity, the young girl that has less background story than a random mob NPC instantly jumped onto it.
The lonely girl sighed as she glanced at the
...nah, must be not enough Monsders speaking to her. She tilted her head at her vulnerability as she peeked at the parent's photo beside her desk, the only photo she kept for the last 13 years, then shrugged.
Let the dead be dead. Only so many times she can cry about it before she copes with another game after all.
Ah right. She glanced down at her chipped skins with veins popping up. She should cook something actually filling other than instant noodles. Her fingers won't click as fast in a speed-run if she's exhausted.
...maybe a ramen bowl her mother used to reward her would make some difference.
And with that prideful gamer mindset that ignored real-life problem, she sunk in casual 10, 032 hours of her life into a game.
She even became a known top-runner of the vanilla route, once titled 'MochiSeer' for how many glitches and exploits she dug up.
But for the first time? Mochi suddenly felt a pang of boredom. Maybe it's time for a change? Like switching cup noodle flavours when you feel like it.
Pft, there were only so many new strategies she could dig up in such an old game, a game that had already run for 3 years since she last played it.
And so with a scroll through the speedwalking.com's list of failed run, some clips-watching and discorp's quibbles and...her brows raised at the bloodshed on a supposedly pacifist game.
TopSpecMochi: Just found this on a recent modlist. Seems interesting with a system and all. Anyone tried it yet? *Upload Screenshot*
YouSeeMeYes89: :ShockedCat: The Haunted Mod!
knuckleracker2000: :ShockedCat: The Glitchiest Mod to ever exist!
UiUiLover90: Hehe, now Knuckle has to eat his words about
knuckleracker2000: ...please...that bloodlust meter is PIEN....stop moving just to decrease that debuff? Do I need to count how many times I paused mid-escape just so my character won't run back to the guards like a madman? Come on! :Pouting_Doggo:
NaysayerForYou: Ah? So anyone set a record with it yet?
UnknownIssac22: Nah coz I think that mod messes with the code too much? An overhaul mod with skill trees crashed the game too often :Cat_Girl_Sunglasses:
YouSeeMeYes89: It's really detailed though! Shame it got hacked or some malwares corrupted the files or something, coz the game froze when I tried and played it! :Pepe_raise_hand:
knuckleracker2000: Malware? Nothing happened when I played through it! Though the game forced me quit when I tried a route that grinded mob NPCs for money though :PepeMad:
Failed runs, huh? The pride in the top one runner flared as she smirked. If no one ever succeed, it would only be fair if she tried it at least once.
What could go wrong? Spending the rest of her life in a mod? Nah, as soon as she didn't enjoy the couple of runs, she'd just uninstall it. Mochi is smart, hmph.
So she clicked onto the linked mod page from the Failed-run clip, scrolled down to read the mod descriptions and features, then blinked as her cursor was...dragging slower than usual?
Wow, guess the game really is haunted, huh? Mochi snickered as she clicked download, before the bars were being loaded up in her mod manager page.
Hm? Did I just get malware or something? Mochi frowned at the messages that appeared instead of a download bar.
Right as she was trying to click to Discorp to ask, that frown turned into a furrow as her screen froze except the bars popping out.
...
"...pft." Mochi chortled. "I must be losing my mi-"
But her words were cut off, as her throat burned and soured..like she ate a whole boiled ramen in one scoop. Not good...her head felt stuffed and her neck got stiffer all of a sudden.
She glared at the screen, her vision dampening and her eyelids slipping down, before she burped out something...gelly, warm...uh, that red stuff on the keyboard, is that her blood? Seriously, blood?
...haha, must be too much Monsders at work...
Yet, her thoughts drifted as her eyes rolled, her forehead banging onto the desk, the monitor flickering like giggles of demons from the bad ending she reached for countless times.
...her parent's photo, now tilting as their eyes burrowed into her mushy mind, as a mocking sneeze escaped her dying breath, like she is now the demon who sneezed at her own death.
Yes, I know. Guess I got my just dessert for not living a proper life after your passing...
As she sunk deeper into a bottomless abyss that felt oddly more like home than her relative's, her trembling eyes fluttered close as she witnessed one, final message from the monitor.