TW (because of setting): abuse of game mechanics such as respawn and potions
95Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡ1cyYCukFdq
Wyatt's POV:
"You'd look good in red." He smiled at me as I mockingly twirled, showing off the purple three-piece suit. The lavender undershirt was ill-fitting, a little too loose on the torso, royal purple tie a little too tight. Red was Eli's color, I had my doubts about it.
"You really think so?" I tugged it loose, breathing in a happy little gasp of air, grinning at him. Eli nodded, head tilting to the side as studied me.
"I know so. Let me make a crimson one." He waved and a screen popped up in front of him, glowing softly. The back was blurry to me, words a black smear across a light blue screen. I pulled up my own, sorting through my items idly as he began to pull out materials. I let mine fade away, small icon hovering in the corner of my vision as I stared at the objects he was pulling out with confusion.
"Eli, those aren't red?..." I said, watching as he tugged out a brutal-looking pair of fabric shears and an empty plastic tub, dropping it all onto a pile of white fabric. He grinned, teeth flashing with sudden animalistic sharpness. I paused, taking a step back, hands flattening against the smooth concrete wall behind me.
"Why don't you set your spawn, hm? Make it a little easier on both of us." He set down a spawn point in the middle of the spacious room, the runes glittering with an orange light that was normally innocent, but now had a threatening cast to it.
"Ha, I'm good. It took me fucking forever to get my old one set-up, y'know-" I edged towards the door, palms sticky with sweat. His smile grew inhumanly wide, teeth sharp in the glow of the orange runelight. I smiled back, nervously, the corners wobbling and hands shaking.
"Set your spawn, please. Don't make me ask again, it won't be pretty." Eli took a confident step forward, sending me skidding backwards to remain out of his range and losing any progress I had made. He continues forward, shoulders relaxed and body languid, uncaring. He pressed me closer to the spawn point and eventually I hit it. He snatched my hand, swift as a cobra's bite, pressing it against the top of the spawn point. The runes flare green, then white, signalling the successful spawn set.
I stare at him. He stares at me, lips curved into an infuriatingly smug smirk, shears spinning languidly in his hands, metal blade winking in the dim light. The suit suddenly felt suffocating; collar a noose around my neck. Glass glinted in his hand, iridescent blue with hints of gray, glittering and shining against the rich tan of his skin. A potion, one I wasn't familiar with. Then again, I wasn't an Alchemist or Brewer like Eli was. He splashed it at my feet and I was instantly coated in sticky blue liquid, soaking my clothes and seeping into my skin. Everywhere it made contact instantly felt like lead, pulling me downwards with its weight and dimly numbing the area with pricks and tingles.
I crumpled like a piece of paper, gasps for air tearing through my throat and sending jagged bolts of pain through my lungs. Eli loomed over me now, rolling me flat onto my back and gently tracing a shape on my exposed neck with the tip of the shears. Goosebumps erupted wherever the cold metal touched fevered skin, a trail of thin cuts and droplets of blood dotting each line.
Eli's POV
I watched as the skin broke apart under the sharp blade of the shears, dark amusement curling itself around my heart and squeezing lightly in approval. I dragged the shear tip down further, digging into Wyatt's skin, his hands clenching uselessly at his side, nails digging crescent moons into his palms. He couldn't move, not with the Weakness-Slowness hybrid potion I'd managed to create a few days prior. The shears disappeared into my inventory with a white flash and soft ding.
I touched the blood gently before smearing it onto his cheek, abruptly digging my fingers into the wound and pulling the edges apart, flesh tearing raggedly and fluttering with each desperate breath of air. I smiled, pushing fingers further in until I could wrap them around his trachea, careful not to break any delicate arteries with my prodding. The bone was ridged beneath my skin, slick with sticky blood and I began to apply slight amounts of pressure, delighting in the way it crumpled easily under force. It finally broke, crushed together. I splashed a little Regeneration potion on it, then Health, watching as the bone stretched out and healed itself into the grooves of my grip, muscles contracting and relaxing as his body struggled to repair itself properly with the intrusion.
I tugged my hand out of his throat, watching as his glowing health bar ticked lower and lower with each passing second. He barely moved, body seizing and shaking uncontrollably as blood streamed from the wound, staining his torso crimson. Head tilting to the side to study him, sighing in disappointment as the green faded into red, and then his body convulsed once more, disappearing in a flash of white light. Wyatt respawned with a choked-off sob, hands shaking as he stumbled away from me, movements slow and clumsy, still under the effects of the potion. He fell, curling into a ball in the corner of the room and shrinking away as I approached, scalpel in hand and grinning smugly.
I kicked his side to get him to uncurl, grabbing his ankles and dragging him back into the open and pulling him onto a table, rearranging his limbs so that they were tucked into his side and not limply flailing in the air. I carefully strapped each arm and leg down so he couldn't move in the slightest, making sure they were tight. He watched me with wide, frightened hazel eyes and I couldn't help but think he looked a little like a deer in headlights. I frowned, if only I had thought to bring a better sedative than Weakness potions. Oh well, it was going to be fun either way.
I took off my suit jacket, draping it over the back of a chair and did the same to his, tossing it unceremoniously on the ground. I undid the buttons on his shirt, exposing ivory skin dappled across with freckles to the dim light. I admired the lines of his torso for a few seconds, practically salivating at the thoughts of how he would look covered in red. The scalpel spun languidly between dexterous fingers as I began to make the first cut of the Y-incision, blood welling up wherever the skin was cut.
I pulled the two edges apart, holding them in place with a rubber clamp. Muscles spasmed beneath my touch, blood smearing across the planes of Wyatt's stomach and oozing onto the metal table. It stained the scalpel red, dying my hands as I plunged them into the open cavity of his chest. I wrapped my fingers gleefully around the rough bones of his ribcage, pulling them further apart. They groaned in protest before cracking under my insistent tugging, snapping apart in order to be pushed away. The opening was bigger now, I could see organs pulsing to the beat of his heartbeat, frantic and panicked.
I fished around in his chest, flesh slick and warm against my hands as I began to extract his liver, ignoring his little hiccuping gasps of pain, voice hoarse from screaming. Tears streamed down his face, silvery in the reflection of the respawn tower and glistening. The liver throbbed, cupped in my hands. It was smooth and slicked with blood and my fingers brushed over small bumps and ridges, admiring the sight of the organ as it fluttered desperately in my hands.
I raised it to my lips, biting down quickly into the dark reddish-purple flesh, bitterness exploding in my mouth. Blood dripped from the corners of my lips, leaving streaks of vermillion on my chin and sliding down towards my neck. The organ was pleasantly bitter in taste, filling my mouth with a viscous, jelly-like substance, sliding down my throat with ease. I finished it in rapid, tiny bites, chewing thoughtfully and making sure that Wyatt could see each and every bite, his gaze full of disgust and revulsion, Adam's apple bobbing as he swallowed back a sob.
"Seems like you've been drinking a little more alcohol than you're supposed to." I said, placing my hand back into the interior cavity of his chest, poking each individual rib harshly. He stifled gasps of pain, hands shaking.
"P- ple- please, why are you doing t- this to m- me?" Wyatt stammered out, words dissolving into choked-out sobs. I smile.
"I don't forget, nor do I forgive. You killed me, took all my stuff and left me vulnerable. I'm just returning the favour." I stab the scalpel into his arm, pulling it back out and watching with a delighted laugh as blood gushed out, spilling across his arm and pooling underneath him.
I was only a simple artist, given a blank canvas to cover in my favorite colour. He may just turn out to be my greatest masterpiece.
I pulled out one of his kidneys, carefully dislodging it from the web of tendons and arteries. It felt tiny cradled in my palm, a brown-red in color and roughly the size of a clenched fist, bean-shaped and contorting to my grip as I squeezed it lightly. Wyatt's health bar ticked down and I splashed a Health potion, a Regeneration potion, and another Weakness-Slowness hybrid potion, watching as his features went slack and he faded into unconsciousness. I pressed the kidney to my lips, biting about half of it in one bite. It was more mild than the liver, a wild, gamey, taste not reminiscent of a deer. It tasted metallic, like blood but sweeter, oozing in my mouth. Delicious.
I began to hollow out his chest cavity after finishing the kidney, blood leaking into jars and bottles, each chunk of coral-colored flesh dipped into a liquid to preserve it and wrapped carefully with paper. Each bloodied organ went into a jar of its own, swirling. I left the heart, the lungs, and the brains inside of his body, so that the potions would have something to keep him alive, even if it was just barely. Classical music played softly in the background, from speakers embedded in the wall. The inside of my mouth was coated in metallic-y copper blood, face and hands stained with dried flakes that constantly got dipped into fresh crimson. The scalpel was so red at this point it was barely recognizable as a scalpel.
I turned away from the living corpse on the surgery table, washing my hands under a stream of water and beginning to organize all the jars and packages into my inventory. There was a shuffling behind me, then a soft thud, followed by a muffled scream of pain. I spun around and spotted Wyatt on the ground, pulling himself towards the respawn point, leaving a smear of blood on the ground in a gory trail. The table was on its side, a leg speared through Wyatt's back and exiting outside of the gaping wound in his chest, intestines wrapped around it like a bloody scarf, viscera falling out of his body and leaving chunks of pink flesh across the floor. He smiled at me, a bloody, broken thing of bleeding lips and teeth more a grimace than a smile. He smiled and broke the respawn anchor, collapsing onto the ground as he did so, pole jerking in his chest and sliding further up with a sickening slurp. His body spasmed as he faltered with his inventory, pulling out a tiny bottle that I instantly recognized as anti-potion, swallowing it.
As soon as the liquid went down his crushed throat, he squirmed with a scream. The scream was pure agony, tearing through his throat as every cut, every missing piece finally caught up to him. He convulsed, pole tearing through his flesh like a hot knife through butter and he vanished in a flash of white light, screams lingering behind and echoing, a hollow sound. I stared at where his body had been, leaving behind on a smear of blood and a chunk of lung from where the table leg and punctured his body.
"Hm, how disappointing." I made my way over, wiping my hands on my clothes and scooping up the lung piece. I studied it, sponge-y under my hand and pale pink in color. I popped it in my mouth and straightened up, spine cracking.
"I did say you'd look good in red."
ns 15.158.61.48da2
