They were shiny.
Tiny dots of light surrounded Rafael from every direction, scattered throughout the darkness like distant stars.
He slowly raised his hand toward one of them, his fingers trembling as he reached for the faint glow... they were gorgeous... but then everything went black.
"How beautiful the stars are... maybe—"
The sudden ring of the doorbell cut him off that night. And when he opened the door, she was standing there.
"Miss?"
"Can I come in?"
"Uh..." He stared at her for a few seconds. "Sure."
He stepped aside, and she walked straight past him.
"I thought we were done with the therapy..."
Rafael watched her walk over to the couch in a miniskirt, sit down, cross her legs, and look him straight in the eyes.
"Or is this some... intimate session?"
Nothing. Not even a smile.
"I got a notification from the hospital. One of my patients hasn’t collected his medication in over a month."
"Oh... wow. Who would do something like—"
"Why?"
As Rafael looked at her, he knew it wasn’t the time to joke.
She looked angry as fuck.
"Patient? Our therapy stopped, and you said—"
"You signed papers, Rafael. Papers you didn’t even read." She cut him off again. "So answer me, why don’t you take your medicine?"
"I’m gonna die anyway." Rafael didn’t even hesitate. "Why the fuck am I taking medicine?"
"Rafael, you want to die faster, don’t you?"
Whatever reaction she had expected, she didn’t get it. Instead, Rafael genuinely smiled at her.
"You know what’s better than medicine? That."
He pointed toward his computer, then toward the wall beside it.
"You see those holes? Sometimes I can barely fucking move. But then I sit there, play that game for a few hours, and somehow it pumps me up enough to punch through the fucking wall."
Rafael smiled.
"That is help."
He lowered his hand.
"And there’s one motherfucker called Tim. He’s a real therapist with his dumb ass. I tell him my problems, he calls me a retard, then we go kill shit together. He is a—"
"A game can’t replace medicine, Rafael—"
"I don’t need it to!" He raised his voice for the first time. "I already know I’m fucked, miss. I’m not trying to cure myself."
He nodded toward the PC.
"I just found something that makes being fucked a little more fun."
Something snapped. Her eyes grew teary, her hands clenched, and her breathing became heavier.
"Rafael, you’re going to die a cruel death." Her voice trembled with restrained anger. "And I don’t think you understand what that means."
She leaned forward.
"Your muscles will waste away until you can barely move. Eventually, you may not even have the strength to breathe properly. Your lungs can fail, Rafael. You can spend your final days fighting for every breath."
It was cruel. Maybe crueler than anything a therapist should ever say to a dying patient... but Rafael wasn’t angry at her.
He just sighed as a smile grew wider on his face.
"My mother, my father, and my little sister burned alive in a car crash while I was in a fucking desert cooking food."
He gave a small laugh.
"Three years later, I got diagnosed with terminal cancer. So whatever suffering comes next, it better be fucking creative."
[Curse of the Ancient Dungeon Activated]
"Ahhgg—"
Before he could even open his eyes, he was already choking on his own vomit.
"Ghh—aghh..."
He rolled onto his side as the gagging continued, and when there was nothing left to vomit, blood started coming out instead.
"Rafael!" A hurried voice came from somewhere in the darkness. "Let me help you!"
He felt a hand touch his head... a palm cupping his face and slowly lifting it.
"I am here..."
It was her... his little sister, or at least what remained of her.
Her body was burned beyond recognition, half the flesh hanging from her face, with bone showing underneath.
There was almost nothing left for him to recognize.
Only her voice... and that small, fragile body he had seen running around the house.
"R-Rosa..."
He slowly reached toward her face... but as soon as he touched her, a piece of burned flesh came off and stuck to his hand.
"Ahh..."
He fell back, shaking his hand before wiping it against the ground again and again.
"Ahh... ah..."
"Don’t worry, Rafael. I am here."
Her voice came again, but Rafael didn’t look. He turned and started crawling, desperately pulling himself away until he stumbled to his feet and ran into the darkness, following the shiny dots on the ceiling.
He didn’t know how far he had gone or how much time had passed. He just followed those shiny dots... until something changed.
They were no longer forming lines leading him forward. The shiny dots now covered the entire ceiling around him, like a dome full of stars.
Thousands of them surrounded him from every direction... and then he felt a light pressure descending on his body.
[You have entered the domain of an Ancient Boss.]
As the notification came, he kept his eyes on the tiny dots, staring at them for a few seconds before the realization finally came.
Those weren’t dots or stars...
[Azh’Rathul, the All-Seeing.]
[Level: ????]
Eyes... thousands of eyes staring at him.
Then one of the eyes blinked, then another, another, and more and more after that.
And every single time one of them blinked, it was like a strobe light going off in the darkness, a bright white flash hitting Rafael’s eyes.
Every blink was another strobe of light, flashing from every direction until Rafael couldn’t see anything anymore.
Everything was fucking white... up until it wasn’t. The blinding light disappeared, leaving complete darkness behind, and as Rafael slowly opened his eyes on the floor... he saw them.
The eyes began flowing down from the ceiling and walls, gathering in one spot right in front of him.
They came together, forming something... or someone.
A human-shaped body... but there was nothing human about it.
It was just fucking light.
Pure white, glowing in the darkness, with no face, no hair, no clothes, no features at all... just looking down at him.
"Yo." A voice came from all around him, just like the voice of the Forsaken had before. "Don’t worry, I am here to help."
"Huh...?"
The white figure pointed to the side, and Rafael followed its gesture.
Crawling through the darkness were spiders... with his sister’s face.
"Those little fuckers have been chewing on your head since you got here." The figure tapped its featureless head. "Digging around, pulling shit out, showing it back to you."
Suddenly, the figure crouched in front of him.
"But don’t worry, twin. I’m friendly."
"T-twin...?"
Rafael stared at the glowing figure for another second, then his eyes rolled back and his legs gave out.
He passed the fuck out.
His mind simply couldn’t handle all the fuckery anymore.
After the torture, the hallucinations, his dead sister, and some glowing motherfucker calling him his twin, his mind had finally given up.
But when he slowly opened his eyes again, something was different.
He was lying on something soft.
"Aghh."
He raised his head, looking around.
His desk. His computer. His clothes scattered across the floor. Even those fucking holes in the wall.
His apartment back on Earth.
Everything was exactly as he remembered it.
Even the smell was the same. The trash still sat beside his desk, and through the window, he could see the starry night sky above the city.
For a good minute, he just stared.
"Was it... all a dream...?"
He didn’t fucking know. But another thought began forming in his mind.
"...the medicine."
He stumbled into the kitchen, and there it was.
All the medicine he hadn’t taken. The medication, the sedatives he needed to cope with the pain that was coming...
"All of it... was a fucking dream. No way I—"
He noticed the faint white glow coming from behind him... from the living room.
And as he turned around, sitting on the couch was that same glowing, featureless motherfucker.
"Wassup, brother? You slept for days."
"Eh...?"
"Yeah, so I thought I’d make this for you." He gestured around with his glowing hand. "I pulled the safest place from your memories, and this was it."
"What?"
"This." He pointed around again. "This is your safe place."
"No... ah, what do you mean... you pulled it out?"
"Oh, that." He stood up. "This isn’t real."
He snapped his fingers, and suddenly they were back in that same dark place, with Azh sitting on a rock instead of a couch.
"You see?"
Rafael said nothing.
For those few minutes, he had genuinely believed that everything, the torture, the dungeon, all of it had been some horrible hallucination caused by his medication.
But now, standing in front of him was something that made even that seem insignificant.
This glowing motherfucker.
"You look a bit pale. On blood, you slept for days, so maybe you need to eat and—"
"I apologize for his manner of speech."
[An Ancient Boss has appeared.]
A different voice came from everywhere at once... feminine, soft yet commanding, carrying an authority impossible to ignore.
"He has witnessed countless civilizations rise and fall over millions of years, watched entire worlds come into existence and disappear... yet he insists on speaking in such an undignified manner."
Rafael couldn’t move at all. He wanted to move his eyes, but couldn’t. He wanted to blink, but even that was impossible.
The pressure coming from whatever had appeared beside him was so immense that it felt as though she was commanding not just his body, but his very soul.
[Vaelithra, the Voice of Eternity]
[Level: ????]
The moment her name appeared, the pressure disappeared as well, allowing him to finally look... and what he saw was the same thing.
Another figure, just like Azh, but instead of bright white light, her entire body was made of darkness.
Pure black, darker than anything surrounding them, even swallowing the light emitted by Azh’s body. Yet this darkness had the unmistakable shape of a woman.
A slender waist, long legs, and distinctly feminine curves.
Yet she had no face, no hair, no clothes, no skin... nothing.
Just featureless darkness.
But what she said was far more important than her appearance.
Millions of years... Rafael thought, before realizing what she meant. Their backstories... became real too...
In the game, backstories meant nothing. Only the bosses mattered. Kill them, get the loot, and move on.
But the Ancient Bosses had detailed histories describing them as omnipotent beings, destroyers of worlds, gods, and every fucking thing imaginable.
And if those backstories were now real... they were on a completely different level.
A level that made them impossible to defeat in Eldoria.
But Rafael had another question on his mind that made no sense at all.
If they’re conscious, then why...
"This is the Ancient Dungeon, right? Why aren’t you two escaping?"
Rafael’s voice came out loud and clear because he knew there was nothing to really worry about anymore.
They were fucking gods.
"We have no reason to escape, mortal. This realm is our home. It existed long before it was given a name, and it shall remain long after that name is forgotten."
Of course it existed... they made the dungeon first, then added you all later... but then it means they are trapped here.
Rafael thought, but there was something else that had caught his attention.
A word that she had now used twice.
"You called this a realm? This is a dungeon," Rafael said.
"Is there a difference?"
"Uh... yeah."
"And is that what you believe this place to be? A dungeon?"
Rafael nodded.
"Then perhaps you know more about our home than we do."
Rafael fell silent.
Sarcasm... an Ancient Boss... using fucking sarcasm.
And the other motherfucker talks like some gangster straight from the streets.
His head slowly dropped as he stared down at his own hands.
There’s just no fucking way... this is actually happening.
He had been so busy questioning them, trying to understand every word, that he had overlooked the most important part.
The fucking absurdity of it all.
"This is a hallucination," he said, looking up at both of them. "That’s why I didn’t die when you two appeared. There’s no way I would survive being in your presence at all."
He smiled.
"The very existence of this conversation is a fucking absurdity. None of this should even be possible... You two should be speaking some ancient language, not fucking English."
"We are real, brudda." Azh’s voice came as he walked up to Rafael. "You feel it, right?"
He reached out and touched Rafael’s hand.
"Has eternity taught you nothing?" Vaelithra’s disappointed voice came from behind him.
"I’m tryna show him we’re real," Azh said, finally turning back to Rafael. "You feel it—"
Well, Rafael was certainly feeling something... he was standing perfectly straight, his mouth foaming, his eyes rolled back into his head as blood streamed down his face from them.
Then Rafael’s skin began sliding off his arms.
Literally, his flesh started peeling away from his bones and dropping to the ground. His face followed... all of it slipped down in one go, his skin, eyes, flesh, hair, everything, leaving nothing but his bare skull behind.
Within seconds, even his skeleton collapsed into a pile of meat, skin, blood, and organs.
For a moment Azh stared down.
"Oh..."