Drip. Drip. Drip. Cold droplets splatter against Remy’s forehead as her eyes flutter open and see a rocky ceiling. She comes to her senses quickly, her chest tightens, she jolts upright with a gasp then a whisper disturbs the silence.
“You alright?” A young man, of similar age to her, leans into her view.
His crystal blue eyes shine like a beacon of hope in their dark surroundings – a crude prison cell. Black iron bars, dug into the rock, surround them on three sides and a rusty iron gate bars any notion of escape. The last time she awoke in a place she didn’t recognise she was twelve Cuba Libres down, but her head wasn’t throbbing half as much as now.
“Where am I?” she asks.
“Hell if I know, I’m still not convinced I’m actually awake,” the young man replies. “Last thing I remember, I was playing—”
“Ultimate Adventure VII?”
“Yeah!” He looks at her as though she had read his mind.
The image of Jessica’s discarded phone and her bloodcurdling scream come rushing back to Remy. She notices a girl in the corner of their cell and recognises the red bomber jacket immediately – a staple of her sister’s wardrobe.
“Jessica?” She crawls over to her sister and shakes her limp body. She’s so flustered that she doesn’t even notice the chain fastened around her ankle.
“It’s alright, she’ll come around soon,” the young man assures her. “We rolled her onto her side, that’s what you’re supposed to do, right?”
Remy checks she’s still breathing and sighs with relief. “Yeah, I think so. Thanks.”
The young man smiles. “I didn’t get your name.”
“Remy.”
“I’m Matt,” he nods to the opposite corner of the cell, where another young man is curled up away from them with his head slumped between his legs, “… and that’s Ed. He’s not coping so well.”
Remy glances at Ed but doesn’t recognise him from the back. She’s more transfixed by her surroundings. It feels so familiar.
“Are we…? Is this… the game?” A fleeting smile graces her lips. She wanted immersion, and for fifty quid, this is pretty damn immersive. She runs her hand across the floor, and stares at the cave walls through the bars of her cell. Everything looks and feels as real as she is. “… Amazing.”
“Amazing? This is a nightmare.” Ed turns around and faces Remy mad-eyed, his hair a wild mess. “Those things, you know what they do? They eat people!”
“You!” she gasps.
“Pyjama girl?” His severe expression softens, and he looks vaguely happy to see her.
Realising that she’s still in her pyjamas she sighs. Awkward. “Of course it had to be you.”
“You know him too?” Matt asks.
Ed nods. “Yeah.”
“No,” Remy says at the same time.
Matt looks a little confused but shrugs it off. “Well, he’s got a point, we shouldn’t hang around in case those monsters come back.”
“Agreed, you with us?” she asks Ed, who mulls it over for a second.
“I guess whatever is out there can’t be worse than waiting in here to die,” he sighs.
“We’re not going to die,” Remy laughs. “This is a game.”
A chilling scream resounds through the dungeon hallways, and their eyes fixate on the dark tunnel beyond their cage, but thankfully nothing emerges from it.
Then Matt stands up, a bastion of bravery. “If this is a game, then let’s play.”
The other two rise with him and they all try to take a step towards the cage door but tumble over; each one of them is shackled to the other and to the wall.
“Oh yeah,” Matt groans.
*
A tall woman with hourglass hips traverses the ruins atop the tunnels, once human, now something much more twisted. Her slinky figure cloaks a wicked bloodlust. Ice-white hair flows behind her as she stalks through the long passageway beneath the crumbling stone arches. A black-scaled body suit covers her torso and arms, with patches of the fabric removed to expose her ample cleavage and various parts of her toned abdomen – well, it is a video game after all.
The end of the corridor widens to the remnants of a coliseum long laid to waste, and standing in the centre of the circular platform is a figure encased in pitch-black plate mail and draped in a ragged cloak, gazing out at the blood-red moon looming in the night sky, bathing the vast wasteland before him in crimson.
“More have arrived.” The woman’s voice is softer than her striking features would lead one to expect; with cheekbones that sharp she hardly needs the decorated short sword hanging on her hip.
“Are they capable?” The Dread Knight’s low voice reverberates from beneath his demonic helmet, framed by two horns like a ram’s skull.
“Some of them have potential,” she smirks, relishing the grim fate that will likely befall the poor ‘players’.
His gaze turns from the moon. He pauses. It’s impossible to tell what he’s thinking beneath that cold metal, but that doesn’t stop her from wondering.
After a moment he looks back at her over his shoulder. “Show me.”
*
“This is useless!” Ed moans as he, Matt and Remy pull harshly at the iron chain binding them to their cell.
“Shut up and keep pulling!” Matt replies through gritted teeth.
At his behest, they pull again, but the chain doesn’t so much as budge. Remy and Ed collapse huffing and wheezing while Matt wastes little time conjuring a new plan. He frowns at the shackle linking the chain to the wall then focuses on the wall itself. After a moment he lights up.
“Maybe I can punch the brick to loosen the shackles!” He pulls off his T-shirt, revealing a muscular physique.
Ed rolls his eyes. That’s got to be the dumbest thing he’s ever heard, but Remy finds herself a little impressed by Matt’s display of sheer undiluted masculinity. He slams his fists into the wall around the shackles, and after the first few blows, his shrill screams and bloody knuckles quickly banish whatever fleeting attraction she felt. She winces and exchanges a disturbed look with Ed while Matt pummels the brick with desperate, sweaty ferocity.
Unable to endure this horror show any longer, Ed searches for a more practical means of escape and stares at the iron gate.
“A game… If this is a game then there has to be a way out,” he whispers to himself.
His eyes widen with the promise of an idea and the bobby pins in Jessica’s hair provide a method to his madness. He shakes her gently; first impressions aren’t exactly his forte, but he reasons that her coming around while he’s stealing her hair pins might set off red flags. Thankfully, however, she’s still out cold. He carefully slides one of the pins from her hair and tries to pick the lock on the shackle binding his ankle. Matt’s screams and the crunch of his knuckles beating the stone make it difficult to concentrate, but after a bit of finagling, Ed cracks it. He can’t believe his eyes. Back home he’d tried this once after he’d locked himself out – failed miserably, busted the lock. Dad was furious – who’s laughing now?
He stands, free from his bondage. “Hey!”
Matt pays him no heed. His punches are fewer now, sluggish, but he refuses to give up. Better to break every bone in his hand than look foolish.
“Hey!” Ed shouts again.
“Not now!” Matt snaps. “I need to focus. If I can just channel all my strength—” He clenches his fist. Blood seeps from his raw swollen knuckles.
“Seriously, just gimme one second.”
“What?!” Matt turns to him, red-eyed, nostrils flared.
Ed motions to his ankle, and Matt and Remy realise he’s no longer chained to them.
“But how did you—?” Remy asks.
“I picked the lock,” he says with a shit-eating grin.
“Nice.” She punches him affectionately. “Now do us.”
Matt quietly concedes defeat and nurses his split knuckles and his pride while Ed unshackles them, and then Jessica who’s still unconscious. After they’re all free he turns his attention to the cell door and starts to jimmy the lock while Remy and Matt watch closely over his shoulder.
“Could I get a little room?” He motions for them to back off, and they oblige but lean in again as soon as he turns back to the gate.
He twists and turns the pin slowly until the lock clicks. They watch with wide-eyed trepidation as Ed pushes the creaky gate open.
“What are you, a locksmith?” Remy asks.
Ed shakes his head, still barely believing it himself. “I just thought, what would I do in the game?”
“It doesn’t matter how he did it, we need to move, and we need to stay quiet,” Matt says, like a general commanding his troops.
Jessica’s eyes flutter open, but her head throbs so she doesn’t sit up right away. As her vision clears, she stares fearfully at a centipede scuttling from the eye socket of a human skull buried in the dirt beside her and lets out a piping scream as it crawls towards her face. She jolts upright flailing her arms.
“Jess! You need to be quiet! Be quiet!” Remy grabs her from behind, which only worsens her panic. They wrestle while she tries in vain to subdue her sister’s hysteria.
“I’m surprised those creatures aren’t here already!” Matt frantically scans the tunnels for danger. If they’re really in the game, it’ll never be far away.
Remy mounts Jessica and pins her arms to her sides. She presses her palm against Jessica’s mouth, but Jessica bites down on her hand. Remy sharply retracts it with a yowl, then Matt pushes her aside and strikes Jessica with his hand, silencing her instantly.
She stares at him with wide, fragile eyes as a bright pink handprint materialises across her stinging cheek. Ed and Remy look amazed and appalled that he’d smack a scared teenage girl half his size.
Oblivious to the controversy, Matt looks up to the stretching tunnel and squints his eyes. He feels like a goddamn action hero.
“We need to move,” he growls as the tremor of metal footsteps draws near.
*
The Dread Knight Grimoirh and his wicked accomplice approach the cell. Her face turns woeful at the sight of the door ajar and the ‘players’ gone.
“Domina,” the Dread Knight says.
She turns towards him, looking shameful, and can’t bring herself to look him in the eye.
“Find them. Quickly!” he commands.
She grits her teeth and storms off, leaving him to inspect the empty cell.
*
The four unlikely adventurers wander the winding dungeon in search of an exit. Matt takes the lead, of course, steeling himself for any danger that may lurk around the corner. The rugged tunnels stretch on for miles, lit by flaming torches mounted at various points along the walls.
Remy treads barefoot over the rough cave floor and stumbles with a sharp cry. Matt rushes to her side like a knight in blue jeans.
“What’s wrong?” he asks.
She inspects her blackened sole and carefully prises a jagged fragment from her skin, releasing a trickle of crimson. She can’t be sure but it looks like a piece of bone.
“It actually hurts…” she mutters to herself as her mind races with thoughts of what this could mean. Surely no game would let the player feel actual pain, and so far her experience has been way too linear to be a dream. Her tawny eyes meet Matt’s over the fragment. “It actually hurts.”
Despite not understanding the gravity of her words, he nods empathetically, then he tears off his T-shirt sleeve and tenderly wraps her foot.
“Oh, you don’t have to—” Remy insists.
“Don’t be silly, don’t want it to get infected…” he says with a warm smile that puts her at ease; it’s been a long time since anyone looked after her, “… besides if you’re hurt you’ll just slow us down.”
And there it is. Her sense of ease quickly fades as she remembers the reason why no one has looked after her in a while; because despite how they appear, in her experience people only ever have their own interests at heart.
Ever the pragmatist, Ed searches for a more permanent fix and backtracks a short way to loot a pair of boots from a rotting corpse slumped against the cave wall.
“Here, put these on.” He offers up the putrid shoes and as Remy reaches for them, a decaying foot slips out of the left boot and lands between them with a thump.
“Oh God!” Jessica retches, covers her mouth and shies away.
“No way am I sticking my foot in there,” Remy cries.
“It’s either these or bloody feet.” Ed tosses the dusty boots to her.
“So poetic.”
She holds them up with her forefinger and thumb and peeks inside to ensure there aren’t any more surprises. The smell knocks her back; no doubt who ever died in these met their end sometime ago. The boots squelch as she presses her feet in them and she shivers as her toes sink into the mushy insoles, which are damp and slippery but also somehow gritty. It feels like she’s wearing a dead fish.
Jessica looks back but catches a whiff and immediately regrets doing so. “I think I’m going to be sick.” She backs away from her sister.
Remy stands, and the boots are about ten sizes too big, but in the blink of an eye they shrink to fit her perfectly. She gasps as the cold leather wraps her feet and tightens around her calves.
“Did you see that?” She marvels at the ratty boots as though they were ruby slippers.
“Think about it… In the game you loot enemies for their stuff and it always fits, right?” Ed says.
Matt shakes his head. “You really think we’re in Ultimate Adventure VII?”
“Makes sense to me. How else do you explain this?”
Remy scoffs, “It doesn’t make any sense at all. This doesn’t feel like we’re in a simulation, we’re all wearing our own clothes and my foot actually hurts, that can’t be good, right?”
While the three of them try to rationalise their situation, Jessica stares into the darkness behind them. A faint murmur has caught her ear.
“Do you guys hear that?” Her question lands on deaf ears. The others are too busy bickering to notice.
“… Everything looks so familiar. This place, I’m pretty sure I’ve been here.” Ed presses his palm against the stone wall, recalling the first major dungeon in the game.
Remy lights up. “So you know a way out?”
“Not really, I always just follow the quest marker on the mini-map,” he sighs, quashing any glimmer of hope.
Jessica takes a step closer to the others. “Guys, I think we’ve got company!” Her voice trembles.
The four of them huddle together and fix their eyes on the tunnel behind them, imagining all manner of horror as a rising symphony of hoarse groans echoes towards them. Then comes creaking bone and crunching cartilage. A herd of walking corpses emerge from the dark. As good as the graphics in the remake are, they don’t stand up to the realism of the withered flesh hanging from their yellowed bones, bound in remnants of broken armour, the glint of rusted blades clasped in their skeletal hands and the permeating stench of death. Their groans turn to gnashing, snarling cries as their pale, dull eyes lock on the four ‘players’, and the creatures snap their rotting jaws excited by the prospect of a fresh meal.
“Run?” Ed trembles with the fear of God.
Remy nods. “Running sounds good.”
“I like running,” Jessica whimpers.
“Go!” Matt takes off like a bat out of hell in the opposite direction, leading the others through the winding cave passages that cross and intersect each other, each as identical as the last, making it impossible to tell whether or not they’re retreading the same path.
“Does anyone know where we’re going?!” Jessica struggles to keep up. Her short legs aren’t doing her any favours. She knows if she looks back, it’ll make everything worse, but she does it anyway. The corpses’ lack of eyelids make their white, decaying eyes pop at her and their half-rotted lips give way to crooked, bloodstained teeth and demented, bloodcurdling shrieks. Yep, definitely made it worse.
“This way!” Matt darts left through a slim passage in the crumbling wall. They wrestle their way through and stumble into a bricked corridor, and at its end, a worn stone staircase.
Something about the spiral staircase fills Ed with overwhelming dread. He opens his mouth to warn the others but trips over a living corpse crawling out of the wall on its arms. This one looks fresher than the others and is wearing modern clothes – a T-shirt and a pair of bloodstained Levi’s. Ed lands on top of it and lets out a yelping scream. The mangled corpse hisses back at him, but before it can taste his milky flesh, Remy pulls him onto his feet and leads him away by the arm up the staircase.
More undead writhe from every nook and crevice, clawing at the ‘players’ as they tear through the ruins atop the caverns in a breakneck sprint. These creatures aren’t the shuffling, empty, dull undead like you see in zombie movies; they move with purpose. Their hunger may be what drives them, but there’s more than a remnant of consciousness behind their skeletal faces – almost a flicker of emotion, of hatred.
“Piss off!” Remy scowls as she hurls herself at a rotter blocking her path. She shoves it to the floor and leaps over it, but Ed trips behind her and plants his foot through its rib cage as he passes.
“Sorry!” he cries, wrestling his leg free as he hops away.
The corridor ends at a towering wooden door, which Matt hurls himself against.
“We can lose them in here!” He pushes, but it doesn’t budge until the others throw themselves against it too.
Their combined strength forces it open, and the door creaks as it drags across the stone, setting Matt’s teeth on edge. He presses his palms through the grime, against the coarse grain of the oak, and pushes with all his might until there’s enough room to squeeze through. Once clear, they force it shut quickly behind them and press themselves against it as the dead pile up on the other side.
“Find something to bar it with!” Matt cries.
Jessica scans around for something, anything, but it’s too dark to see much. Her eyes lock on a long, thick branch planted in the dirt, which she grabs without a second thought. She shoves it through the iron handles, barring the door shut. Only after she steps back does she realise that it isn’t a branch at all but a bone, probably a femur or maybe an arm, hard to tell.
The others collapse huffing and wheezing and look around them. Save for a couple of lit torches mounted on the wall either side of the door, they are faced with seemingly infinite darkness. It doesn’t feel like they’re outside, more like a large chamber or hall of some kind.
“Turn back. Nothing but death awaits you.” Grimoirh’s foreboding warning bounces around the darkened space, disturbing the silence of the void before them. From a balcony above, he watches the poor souls huddle fearfully by the door.
“Who’s there?” Remy shouts into the shadows.
“This is so messed up,” Jessica frets.
“Show yourself!” Matt takes another bone from the floor, lifts it high and hurls it.
They watch the bone be swallowed by the abyss and listen on tenterhooks, but it makes no sound. Then the deafening silence is broken by a bellowing roar that shakes the room.
Out of the black, hundreds of pale green tentacles slither over one another towards them. They stumble backwards against the door in a heart attack-inducing fright and watch as the mass of slithering appendages part, revealing a ball-like head from which the ungodly creature gazes through a single malevolent eye. It brandishes a wide maw filled with rows of jagged teeth and roars again.
“What the fuck is that?!” Jessica screams. “I’ve seen Hentai, I don’t like where this is going!”
“I knew I recognised that door,” Ed cries. “It’s the dungeon boss, a giganeye!”
“Why didn’t you warn us?” Remy scolds him.
“I… I tried!”
Matt defiantly steps forward as the tentacles swoop overhead. “We can beat this!” He puffs his chest ready for a fight. “We just have to work toge—” BOOM!
A tentacle lands on him with a bone-crunching thud. Remy shields herself with her arms and peeks over them as the dust clears. The appendage retreats, and nothing of Matt remains but a red mist and fragments of bone and sinew stewing in a pair of blood-soaked Yeezys. She wants to scream, but all she can do is stare, mouth agape, thinking she was so very, very wrong. This is anything but a game.
Jessica lets out a shattering scream, while Ed stands frozen in breathless silence. The giganeye roars thunderously and, as if by magic, torches along the walls burst aflame, illuminating the chamber and the mutilated remains of dozens of players who came before them.