The room hummed with the low glow of ambient LEDs, throwing fractured light across posters of worlds more alive than the one outside. In the center, a boy sat, deep black hair tousled around a pale face, eyes dark as mahogany locked on the screen. Fingers, sleeves pushed to elbows, moved with a precision born of obsession.
Eleven hours had passed in this chair. Eleven hours navigating a digital hellscape that had crushed every other player. Ten demons of fear. One mistake meant death.
The final boss flickered with a sliver of health. The live chat froze, a tide of emojis and prayers suspended in panic. He leaned forward, knuckles whitening, pressing the final combination.
The screen erupted in a silent explosion of colors.
Victory music blared. GOLD LETTERS: WORLD FIRST. The chat erupted in chaos—cheers, disbelief, flooding praise too fast to read. A laugh ripped from his throat, loud, sharp, hollow. The words he answered with were performative, polished—"Thanks for the raid, love you all." The triumph tasted almost too bright, almost too real.
Then the stream ended.
Silence fell like concrete. The crooked smile vanished, leaving only slackness. Posters became faded paper. The PC's hum flattened to a monotonous drone. The screen blinked: STREAM ENDED. Nothing moved. Nothing mattered.
His gaze drifted to a framed photo, younger, between two adults whose faces had long been erased by time. A single notification blinked on his phone—a monthly data alert. That was it.
The joy was a memory, a phantom limb. He had worn it, danced in it, believed it, but it had never touched him. A cold band tightened across his chest. Breath hitched. Fingers clutched at the hoodie over his heart. Eyes widened, reflecting the last glow of the screen.
Darkness crept in. The chair groaned under him. The stale air thickened. Shadows from the posters stretched toward him, elongating unnaturally, and the walls felt closer than before, pressing inward. The hum of the PC flattened into a dull, mocking heartbeat. Only the steady red of the webcam remained, silent, unseeing, and utterly indifferent.
He tried to reach for something, anything, to anchor himself—but there was nothing. Even his own breath seemed foreign. The room was alive in its emptiness, aware of him in the way a predator might sense a lone prey: present, and entirely alone.
The glow of the monitor faded entirely. The boy slumped, the edges of his vision darkening, and the red eye of the webcam watched, unblinking, as if the room itself had swallowed him whole