Bang. Bang.
The sound tore through the street like a hammer smashing against bone. It wasn't a sound meant to echo. It was sharp, sudden, violent, and final, leaving behind a ringing silence that clawed at the mind. A man's voice cracked, soaked in terror, trembling as if his throat could no longer bear the words he forced out.
"Please! Please don't kill me! I'm begging you!" His voice rose to a shriek, then faltered into a gurgle as the metallic impact of a gun's butt collided with flesh. Once. Twice. The wet, sticky sound of impact echoed across the pavement. Blood sprayed in dark arcs, pooling at angles too unnatural, too vivid to be real.
"Shut the fuck up!" another man snarled, voice rough, eyes wild. "A worthless pig like you doesn't deserve to live!" He struck again. The sounds of bones breaking were muted, as if reality itself were muffling the horror, forcing it to arrive slowly, unbearably, at the edges of perception.
The man turned sharply.
"Whatchu staring at, kid?! Beat it!"
Misaki didn't answer.
She simply turned and continued walking. Her bare feet pressed into warm, sticky pools of blood. It clung to her skin, thick and heavy, squelching softly with each step. The sensation should have repulsed her, but she didn't flinch. She didn't slow down. Her movements were deliberate, almost ceremonial, as if she were performing a ritual that mattered only to herself.
A few seconds later...
Bang. Bang. Bang.
The pleading stopped.
Misaki didn't look back.
The city stretched endlessly before her, a grotesque mural of collapse and decay. Bodies lay twisted across the streets, some missing limbs, others hollowed out as if reality itself had carved pieces of them away. Walls were painted in reds too vivid to be natural, windows spider-webbed with cracks frozen mid-shatter.
The air smelled of iron and burnt plastic. A fine mist of smoke drifted lazily through streets littered with scattered debris, twisted metal, and broken dreams. Everything felt wrong. Everything felt thin, like a badly rendered dream someone had refused to finish.
A blur slammed into her from the side.
Pain exploded in her stomach, tearing the breath from her lungs and forcing her to collapse to the cracked pavement. She coughed violently, hacking through the taste of bile and iron, while a voice hissed low and cruel beside her.
"Give me your money, brat."
She didn't respond.
Hands yanked her hair, jerking her head back so violently that her teeth collided with her tongue, sending white-hot pain shooting through her jaw. "I said give me everything, bitch! Oh? You don't want to?"
The man's fist connected with her face, detonating a blinding flash behind her eyes. Her head hit the ground, her vision spinning, ears ringing. Weight crushed her chest. Fingers wrapped around her throat, squeezing, cutting off air and hope in equal measure.
"Why do you just stay quiet like a fucking statue?!" he screamed. Spit flew across her face, warm and wet, mingling with blood dripping from her split lip. Her vision tunneled. Darkness crept over the edges of her awareness. Then...
Slash.
A hot spray of blood splashed across her cheek. Pressure vanished. The heavy weight collapsed beside her, producing a dull thud that shook the ground under her.
Misaki blinked.
The man's head lay a short distance away, eyes wide, mouth frozen in a scream that would never finish. Blood poured from the severed neck like a fountain, thick and dark, soaking the cracked asphalt, glistening under the fractured sunlight. His body twitched beside her, lifeless yet alive in its grotesque finality.
Misaki slowly sat up. She brushed dust from her dress, calm, mechanical, as if nothing had happened. Her steps resumed, methodical, unhurried, through the horror around her.
The city wavered. Buildings bent at impossible angles, tilting toward each other like they were conspiring. The sky fractured into jagged polygons that blinked and shifted as if the world itself were unsure of its own form.
> [WORLD INTEGRITY: 41%]
[STABILIZATION FAILED]
Reality snapped back into something resembling normal, yet the seams were visible. Sounds arrived late. Shadows twisted unnaturally. Colors bled in places they shouldn't. The world was hollow, fake.
Everything was fake.
This world hadn't always been like this.
Once, it had been peaceful. Civilized. Real. And then the Main Characters were declared dead. Nobody knew who they were, nobody remembered their faces, yet they had been pillars, the anchors that kept this world intact. When they vanished, the world began to rot.
Creatures poured from cracks in existence, abominations that shouldn't have been rendered, beings stitched together from nightmares. Whoever had created this world abandoned it. Left it unfinished. Left it to collapse.
Misaki kept walking. She wondered where the new heroes were, where the saviors were meant to come from. Was this the end? Did NPCs like her deserve deletion simply because no one had intended for them to survive?
"Take cover! The Nullitesc are here!" a voice screamed somewhere, weak, terrified.
The sky blackened. Massive, black silhouettes crawled over buildings like living shadows, silent yet alive, their presence erasing everything they touched. Walls, streets, even people blinked out of existence without sound. They didn't destroy. They nulled.
Misaki laughed softly, the sound broken but unrelenting.
What was the point of her existence? To stand as a background character? To scream once, die quietly, and be forgotten?
Her chest burned. She coughed, black blood spilling from her mouth, breaking apart midair into tiny fragments that shimmered and glitched before dissolving entirely. She sank to her knees.
"Everything is fake!" she screamed. "We're fake! This world is fake! It's just a simulation!" Her laughter cracked into hysterical sobs.
She covered her face. One side was gone—burned, melted, barely recognizable. Exposed nerves and muscle twitched grotesquely, yet she felt no fear, only clarity.
"What's the point of surviving," she whispered, voice trembling yet calm, "if we aren't even real?"
Her gaze fell to a blood-soaked knife. She picked it up.
Slash.
Pain flared. Hot, sharp, undeniable. Blood poured out in thick, living streams. She laughed harder. "I can feel it! I can feel pain! I am alive!" She kept cutting, over and over, watching the blood flow, watching the world glitch and fracture around her.
Screams filled the air. Explosions ripped through the city as the Nullitesc destabilized power cores, gas lines, and structural anchors. Buildings phasing in and out of existence collapsed. Debris spun and twisted, half-solid, half-phantom.
A massive building near her groaned, half-erased, lower floors flickering like a dying flame. The Nullite field destabilized its gas-powered energy core. Pressure built until physics itself threatened to unravel. Then...
BOOM.
The building exploded from within. Fire ripped through reality, colorless and consuming. Concrete, steel, and glass tore away, spinning violently, phasing in and out of existence. A massive section of concrete tore free, hurtling toward her.
Misaki didn't flinch. She didn't scream. She stared, calm, black blood still dripping from her mouth, her mangled face twisted into a smile.
So this was the end. No story. No meaning. No existence. just pure, unrecorded deletion.
The slab hit her, and her body was reduced to a splattered ruin of flesh and blood.