Danny chugged his fourth Nerve Damage, a custom energy drink he had ordered after his favorite show. Savoring the overwhelming artificial grape, "Graveyard Grape," he simultaneously played an idler in the background, a roguelike and even a clicker on his phone. He had become a "Zen gamer," achieving "Pro-player enlightenment."
"Haha! See that, chat? That's the tenth run is the lucky charm, there goes the fourth boss." Chuckling merrily at his own achievement, Danny looked to the side of the screen to read the answers, but instead...
30 Viewers
"Tsk, still just the bots I set up. Maybe I should go for a multiplayer..." he contemplated as he fetched another Nerve from the minifridge next to his PC, tossing the empty can to the pile in the back.
The reason why Danny hadn't played any multiplayers games yet, despite being a self-proclaimed Zen Gamer, was simple: he didn't like to lose. As he reached the boss room, his character's HP, which had taken a huge hit, suddenly shot up. But the game didn't feature healing systems. Danny whistled while covering the roguelike he was cheating on with the idler, before quickly putting it down, realizing he hadn't disabled the "extra-speed" hack.
"Well, no one saw that, heh." In the game, within a gothic cathedral, through the red and black stained glass, the light of a dead sun reached Xaladion, the king of the damned and final boss of the videogame. With a smug smirk, Danny turned off most of his cheats, leaving only those he deemed "should've been included in the development of the game," like infinite magic pool and super speed.
"I got this," he told the non-existent viewers. But he didn't get it. A few moments into the battle, the boss began to pummel him to dust, and with a final attack, it shot icecles in a widespread fan, the boss put Danny on the verge of calamity. If he hadn't activated the god mode cheat towards the end, he would've lost for the eleventh time.
"Hah! Easy game, they just don't make them hard anymore, with all those noobs out there," he proudly told himself. Then, as he reached out for the cursed chest containing the world-ending relic, just as the character's hands reached for the lid— Flash! Everything went dark.
Danny blinked repeatedly as his overly-strained eyes passed from the 100% brightness monitor to the dim light of the phone on his lap.
"What... What's going on?" he stammered, thinking that someone had purposefully pulled the plug off his computer. Turning off his phone (not before pressing the "smart buy" button), he walked tentatively like a blind man. He could've used the flashlight, but he would rather save the battery for the clicker until the situation was resolved.
Like a modern Pandora, Danny reached out for his doorknob with the hope that behind it all lights were on and this was some kind of localized problem that could wait until he finished his gaming session, somewhere between tomorrow and the next week. The door wouldn't budge. 'Ah, damn it. Must have closed it, force of habit.' Unpleasant memories of his mother barging into his room back when he still lived with his parents came to mind as he rummaged through the dirty dishes, instant noodle cups, and energy drink trash pile or "compost" as Danny liked to call it. He frowned at the stench while swatting flies with his left hand. As he dove, he found that one of the drinks still had some liquid inside the can.
"Murder Berries, ah, this one was really good..." Like an alcoholic in abstinence, Danny looked to the sides before drinking the last bit of content in the can, but then he spit it all out, screaming "Ugh, what's this? Ah, no! Why!?" Whatever he had drunk was not Murder Berries at all. He tried to wash his tongue with his hands, like he had seen in cartoons, but he forgot where his hands had been just a few seconds before. With the taste of rot, the youngster continued screaming a string of curses before moving on.
As he searched through the pockets of his "Not dirty enough to wash" pile on the chair, a loud series of steps shook the ceiling of his room. A giggling noise curdled his blood. Danny wished he had his noise-cancelling headphones, but he had traded them for a limited edition body pillow now lying on the bare mattress in the room's corner.
"Creepy children, I don't know why people even have them. Didn't the neighbors from upstairs move out?"
Danny wondered aloud. He found the sound of his own voice comforting, subtracting him from the nightmare he was immersed in.
Finally, he found the keys lying next to his "I still can use them" stiff socks. A tiny key, no wonder he had misplaced it.
As soon as he placed it in the keyhole, a growling noise echoed through the entire room, startling him. "Who's there!?" He shouted in a quivering voice before realizing it had been his own stomach.
"Ah, haha, my Nerve rush must've run out. Haha..."
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The door's creaking noise resounded over the otherwise silent apartment, sinister without any light. Danny couldn't even recognize his own home in the dark, that's how much it had changed. He kept moving, the dragging feet making a grating noise due to the week's accumulated dust on the floor, slowly making his way to the kitchen.
Moving past the small counter and helping himself with his hand, he motioned towards the fridge, his stomach growling again. Behind him, he heard more steps, a door opening and closing in the distance, and the muffled voices of people.
His hand passed through the sink, accidentally collapsing the to-wash Jenga, and the glass exploded and the ceramics sparked all over the floor, adding to the mess. Danny jumped, scared by the sudden noise, but laughed nervously at his own clumsiness. Opening the fridge, the stale smell of Chinese, Thai and Japanese leftovers made him turn over his head.
He was disappointed that the fridge didn't have a light of its own, as if he had expected that the fridge had a grid of its own, or that the tiny magic penguins continued their labor during outage.
As he rummaged through the leftovers, he heard the children giggle much closer. He turned around, but there was nothing there. Then, something touched him on the shoulder. Danny screamed and kicked, hitting his shoulder while running around stumbling with things.
When he finally calmed down, he turned on his phone and saw that in his palm he had a tiny dead spider. He sighed in relief, putting the hated task of cleaning up somewhere in the back of his mind.
His stomach growled again.
"I'm famished. What time is it, anyways? Maybe I can order some takeout..." He saw the mark on his phone. "Two in the afternoon? Impossible!" He walked to the closed curtains and flipped them open, the night outside barely less obscure than his own apartment. He hit his head as he remembered having changed the hours in the phone to work around a queue time in the clicker game.
"It must be that. Well, nevermind. Let's see, what we have... What? No wi-fi?" He remembered then that routers were powered by electricity. But an even harsher challenge came his way. There was no signal either. Grasping his head, Danny muttered:
"Ok, it's fine. It's ok, how long can they cut off the power? I just have to survive until day, then the power will surely be back." Danny eyed the fridge. 'There's some mayo...' he thought.
The hours passed and the power didn't return. To add to his already hellish plight, the running water had stopped coming too. Apparently, the pumps were electrical too. The steps and the voices, growing louder along with his anxiety had him on edge. The power on his phone rapidly drained after barely ten minutes of playing the videogame, as if something supernatural had drained the power.
Danny's rational mind thought that it may be consequences of having it constantly plugged in for years, but his heart, his soul knew that something was wrong.
This was a nice neighborhood. How was he expected to live like this? More concerns kept showing in his mind as the minutes went by, each stretched into what seemed an eternity. If the power didn't return, that meant that he'd have to take the stairs. Living on the twelfth floor, this was unthinkable. Maybe he'd somehow make it to the ground floor, but back again? No way. Trapped here, with no takeout and no water, he'd starve to death if boredom didn't get to him first. All his needs, put into stasis by the grade of videogame immersion he was constantly in, came rushing at the same time.
His throat, parched, longed for even a drop of Nerve Damage. But the minifridge was empty, he thought he'd have time to order new drinks. He was simultaneously exhausted, yawning every other minute, but too on edge to sleep. Without the A/C, the cold had him shivering, and even as he covered himself in layers and layers of stinky clothes it was still not enough. And with the crazy climate they'd been having lately in the city? In the day he'd roast, a literal medieval torture.
Someone banged on the door. He remembered all those people he had insulted online, all those troll posts. What if his IP got leaked?
"Who is it?" The heavy hand hit the door three more times, each louder than the other. It made perfect sense that someone would come after him; he was too good for this world. People were envious, like a noob in wooden armor glaring at the pro with the sparkling and shiny golden full plate with mythical modifiers. His mind tried to wander to his rainbow-hued equipment, but the person, or the thing, wouldn't leave.
Danny stood up trying to hold the clothes in place. The giggling, closer to him than ever before, had him jump in his place. The night was locked outside, and the thought that it should've been day already crossed his mind incisively, like a knife cutting through butter. Excalibur wasn't here to protect him, he didn't have dragon bone armor nor quad-crossbows. No cheat table to activate as safety net, just pure danger.
The slams on the door were akin to those of Xaladion on his coffin, and beneath the door, a red glow, like the rays of the dead sun through the stained glass, filtered.
Danny approached trembling to the door, and just as he reached for the knob, it was kicked open, and he fell to his back, hitting his nape against the counter.
The figure of the apartment's handyman loomed over the ashen young man, who gasped for air with something stuck to his neck. The handyman dropped his tools and rushed to his aid, barely making out the broken piece of glass with the red emergency lights.
The power suddenly returned, and the shadows receded like a wolf in the face of fire. But it was too late, the glass was lodged in Danny's aorta, and the pool of blood didn't flow back into his body by the works of electricity.
The handiman tried stopping the bleeding with his bare hands, his guilty eyes darting through the room searching for an excuse to have let himself in so aggressively. 'There was no one inside,' 'He was already dead when I found him,' and a dozen other lies came to his mind. The truth was that he, too, hated the young Danny. Just not enough to want him dead.
Danny looked towards his high-spec computer, that reliably booted in a few seconds, resuming all the tasks it was running. The hand of the character was perpetually frozen with its hands on the lid of the chest, too far for him to reach.
With a very last thought, Danny wondered if he had erased his browsing history, but death got to him before he could recall. On the side of the screen, the streaming read "31 viewers."
