Chương 51: Chapter 50: WILL - Depression Simulator

The blue door closed behind Z-69 with a soft click. Clean. Polite. Completely wrong. He turned. The path from Floor Six had vanished. In its place stood a plain bedroom door painted white, fitted into a wall that looked too ordinary to belong inside the Tower.

The bedroom around him was normal in the same way a dollhouse was normal: every object occupied the proper position, every surface appeared recently arranged, and nothing suggested a living person had ever disturbed the composition for reasons unrelated to display. The blanket lay perfectly flat across the bed. Wardrobe doors met along a seam too straight to have been used that morning. A desk waited beneath the window without dust, fingerprints, bent paper, or any abandoned thought left behind by human hands.

The air smelled of temperature and nothing else. No detergent. No skin. No stale breath trapped overnight. A computer sat awake on the desk. Its monitor cast a cold white rectangle across the wall while the fan produced a steady hum that should have felt harmless. Instead, the rhythm resembled machinery attempting to imitate calm. Z-69 crossed the room. Black text covered the white screen.

FLOOR SEVEN — WILL ENVIRONMENT: COGNITIVE SIMULATION FORMAT: DATING SIMULATION GAME FAILURE CONDITIONS: — MENTAL COLLAPSE — SUICIDE — KILLING A KEY CHARACTER He read the rules twice. His gaze remained on the final condition.

"Killing a key character." Not emotionally. Tactically. A boundary placed in advance because the Tower understood exactly what kind of contestant it had admitted. One word blinked at the bottom of the screen. CONFIRM Z-69 reached for the mouse. Cheap plastic. Smooth from long use. Light enough to disappear inside his palm. His fingers settled around it without adjustment. That was the first real problem.

This room did not feel like new Tower technology; it felt familiar in a way memory refused to explain, older and more personal than the machinery outside, as though the Tower had reconstructed not merely a location but the residue of habits buried beneath whatever had been removed from him. He clicked. The rules vanished. A title screen exploded into existence with weaponized sweetness. Paper hearts scattered across a pink-and-white background.

Sparkles drifted over sharp line art while cheerful music forced itself through the speakers at a volume just low enough to avoid becoming an alarm. At the center, a schoolgirl smiled with a paintbrush in one hand. DOKI DOKI MONOCHROME DARLING YOU ARE MY COLOR Z-69 stared at her. His chest reacted before his mind did. A small sting. Not Hunger. Not fear. Not rage. Something softer—and therefore more suspicious. He selected START. There was no loading screen. No transition. Only pain.

The mouse cable became a live wire inside his perception. A jolt tore through his arm, struck the base of his skull, and drove through his nervous system with enough force to seize every muscle at once. White swallowed the room. His hearing collapsed into a single flat tone. Then the world shut off. Z-69 woke upright in bed, dragging air into his lungs. Cold air. Wet air. Living air. It burned his throat. He stopped halfway through the next breath. The lungs continued automatically, greedy and impatient.

A biological heart hammered behind his sternum, warm blood moving beneath skin instead of violet crystal regulating a dead body. His palm pressed against his chest. Warm. Pulse. Real. The bedroom was almost identical to the one he had entered. The relationship to it was not. Not I entered this place but I belong here. Information opened inside his skull like a sealed file detonating. Name. Age. Town. School. Parents.

These were not memories in the ordinary sense because he saw no complete scenes and heard no old conversations, he received conclusions already worn smooth by repetition, facts without origins and emotional habits without the events that had trained them. Raito. Seventeen years old. Evergreen Town. Wealthy parents. Distant parents. A boy who possessed more than he needed and felt no reason to touch any of it.

The name did not feel separate from Z-69 but fitted around him like a role whose measurements had been taken from somewhere inside his missing past, a human identity the simulation expected him to inhabit until the distinction between actor, body, and character became inconvenient. Then the world supplied its final condition. Raito saw no color. Not damaged eyes. Not physical color blindness. A psychological filter so complete that reality had been reduced to ash before reaching conscious thought.

Z-69 left the bed. The body rose with him. Different balance. Different weight. Less strength in the shoulders. No crystal beneath the sternum, no electric tension under the skin, no storm threaded through bone. He crossed to the mirror. A human teenager stared back. Dark hair. Dark eyes. Ordinary skin without scars, cracks, black nails, or any feature that demanded attention. A face built to disappear. Z-69 leaned closer and searched the eyes for violet. Nothing. He blinked.

The reflection blinked a fraction too late. A tiny lag. A rendering error. The world had not finished deciding which version of him occupied the glass. That almost made him smile. Almost. The wall clock read 8: 00 AM. Beneath it, a calendar displayed: 12/09/2018 The date carried no emotional recognition. The identity package translated it into a practical problem instead. Raito was late for school. Z-69 dressed quickly. Hoodie. Backpack. Shoes.

At the bedroom door, the body hesitated before his mind approved the delay. Not danger. Not caution. Reluctance learned through repetition. This life had practiced remaining indoors until avoidance no longer required a conscious decision. Z-69 opened the door anyway. Evergreen waited beyond. A neat suburban road stretched beneath an autumn sky. Low houses stood behind trimmed yards. A diner sign flickered at the corner. A school bus moved between rows of trees.

Everything resembled a postcard left in the rain too long. There was no color. Not muted. Not faded. Gone. The sky was gray paper. Leaves displayed different shades of decay. Even sunlight looked like a brighter species of ash. People were worse. Their faces existed but refused stability, with static crawling over features, smearing eyes, softening mouths, and interrupting recognition at the exact point where another person might have become emotionally specific. The harder Z-69 looked, the more the world resisted.

A woman passed while walking a dog. The dog rendered clearly. The woman did not. So the failure was not biological. It was judgment. This world was not incapable of showing him people. It had decided most of them were not worth completing. Two students walked ahead, speaking through layers of distortion. Their conversation reached him as radio noise beneath water until one fragment suddenly sharpened.

"… why would anyone even care…" Then static swallowed the sentence. Selective image. Selective sound. Something inside the simulation determined which details were allowed to matter. Z-69 tested the rule on a poster fixed to a wall. BE HAPPY! The letters were clear. The smiling cartoon beneath them crawled with static so violently that the world itself seemed to distrust happiness wearing a human face. Interesting. He continued toward school. Without instruction, the hoodie rose over his head.

His shoulders lowered. His gaze avoided strangers. Raito's body had practiced invisibility until it no longer required permission, lowering posture, gaze, voice, and expectation before the surrounding world could decide whether rejection was worth the effort. Z-69 could have straightened. Forced presence. Proved that he controlled the body rather than the reverse. That would have destroyed useful information. So he allowed the posture to remain and studied what it protected.

Evergreen High appeared at the end of the road. Brick walls. If you encounter this story on Amazon, note that it's taken without permission from the author. Report it. Long windows. A weak flag moving in cold wind. The building possessed the dull institutional confidence of a place where emotional breakdowns happened according to schedule, humiliation accumulated between bells, and attendance remained mandatory afterward because routine was treated as evidence that everything still functioned.

Students absorbed him at the entrance. No one looked long enough to see him. Their attention did not merely wander. It slid away. Repelled by a boy who had spent years teaching the world that overlooking him would be easier. He chose the rear seat beside the classroom window. Best position to vanish. Best position to observe. The teacher entered. Chalk touched the board. His mouth moved.

The words possessed grammar and sound, but meaning refused to attach itself, leaving the lesson as mechanical hiss transmitted through damaged speakers while every attempt to concentrate increased the pressure behind his eyes without producing even one useful fragment of information. When Z-69 concentrated, a warning tone grew behind his eyes. He stopped. Not surrender. Efficiency. If the content was locked, then forcing entry only spent energy for no return. He observed instead. Pens moved. Students shifted.

Boredom settled over the room like wet wool. Even boredom possessed texture here. Sticky. Gray. Suffocating. Z-69 looked through the window and reached the obvious conclusion. This was less a dating simulator than a depression simulator wearing cute packaging. Fine. The terminology changed nothing. The girl from the title screen would appear eventually. Uniform. Paintbrush. High probability: student. Higher probability: key character.

The explicit failure condition meant the Tower expected violence to become relevant, and sooner or later it would either place the girl between Z-69 and an objective or make her the objective, then punish him for reacting according to the methods every previous floor had rewarded. He needed to identify her before the game decided the circumstances. By lunchtime, he had a theory. He also had an empty stomach. The cafeteria smelled stronger than the rest of the school. Oil. Sugar. Cheap meat. Sauce. Salt.

Real smells sharp enough to hook the human body more effectively than anything else in Evergreen. His stomach contracted. Not the abyss inside his true body. Not the survival system that treated living matter as energy. This was smaller. More embarrassing. Human appetite. He filled a tray with chicken nuggets, sauce-drowned meatballs, bread dense enough to function as construction material, and a juice box whose sugar content probably violated several medical guidelines. Everything appeared gray.

Smell ignored the filter. He sat alone and ate quickly because the body wanted food immediately, not because haste served any tactical purpose. The tray emptied in less than a minute, and warmth spread through his stomach with enough chemical certainty to ease the pressure in his chest by a fraction, proving that this human body could be manipulated through ordinary reward just as effectively as his undead one could be driven by energy deficit. Briefly. Then the hollow returned. Not physical hunger this time.

The body wanted the small feeling food had produced, not nourishment itself but the brief chemical argument that being alive could contain something other than pressure. Z-69 stared at the tray. His hand began moving toward the snack counter before conscious approval. He stopped it halfway. Interesting. The craving had crossed into action faster than thought. He released the hand and followed the impulse as an experiment. Raito's backpack contained cash. Too much cash. He placed the folded stack on the counter.

The cashier blinked. Nearby heads turned. Cafeteria noise briefly sharpened into whispers before the simulation blurred attention back into hiss. Z-69 purchased enough snacks to withstand a minor siege. Jerky. Chips. Chocolate. Cookies. Soda. His bag filled. His pockets became heavier. He opened the jerky first. Salt struck his tongue, followed by spice and preserved meat. The body responded with a small surge of pleasure humiliating in its effectiveness. Shoulders loosened. Breathing eased.

The gray pressure inside his skull lifted by one millimeter. He disliked how well it worked. He ate another piece. Then color crossed the edge of his vision. So faint he almost dismissed it. Gold. Soft gold. Not a supernatural aura. Not literal light. More like sunlight passing through dust in a world that had forgotten both. A girl walked through the hallway outside the cafeteria. School uniform. Shoulder-length hair. Tote bag. Sketchbook held against her chest. Her face did not crawl with static.

Her edges remained stable. She was rendered. The gold existed in the way Evergreen stopped feeling completely dead while she occupied it, easing the pressure behind Z-69's eyes and drawing Raito's body toward relief before conscious thought could determine whether the response was attraction, dependency, recognition, or another mechanism of the trial. His grip tightened around the jerky bag. Not because of the meat. Because the body wanted her presence to keep the hollow quiet.

A translucent box appeared inside his vision. SYSTEM CHOICE (1) FOLLOW (2) DO NOT FOLLOW The hallway dulled. Sound dropped away until only the fluorescent hum remained. Z-69 attempted to look back at the girl. His gaze dragged toward the options as if attached by magnetic force, and a ticking began inside his skull without numbers or visible clock, using rising discomfort to shorten thought until the first available answer felt less like a decision than a door out of pain. Pressure increased.

His breathing shortened. One hand twitched as though searching for a mouse that did not exist. So that was the game. The Tower was not offering choices; it was applying discomfort until selecting one became relief, then disguising coercion as agency by preserving the existence of two visible options. Z-69 slowed his breathing. In through the nose. Out through the mouth. The body resisted, then followed. A narrow space opened between pressure and action. Enough. He fixed his attention on the first option.

A click sounded inside his head. (1) FOLLOW The box vanished. Sound returned. So did the hallway. His lungs loosened. Z-69 followed the girl. He maintained enough distance to avoid obvious pursuit without risking losing her among unfinished faces. She climbed to the second floor. Then the third. Then pushed through the rooftop door. Cold wind met him outside. Evergreen spread beneath a low gray sky like a charcoal drawing: roofs, roads, trees, and streets flattened into monochrome quiet.

The girl crossed toward a sheltered corner and sat with her back near the wall. She opened the sketchbook. Paint. Brushes. Tools that should have carried color but appeared gray through Raito's filter. As she prepared them, the gold around her thickened slightly. True color seemed to exist beyond his perception and leak through a fracture created by her presence. She began painting. Steady strokes. Calm. Unhurried. Watching her resembled watching a candle inside a room filled with soaked wood. Small. Stubborn.

Irrationally alive. Z-69 remained near the door and observed. Footsteps climbed from the stairwell. Loud. Careless. Confident. Three boys entered the rooftop. Their faces remained static. Their intention did not. They approached the girl with the familiar ease of people who had repeated an act often enough to stop expecting consequences, each step carrying the confidence produced when cruelty had previously been rewarded with laughter, silence, or adults choosing not to notice. One spoke.

Most of the sentence degraded into hiss. A single part reached Z-69 clearly.

"Who do you think you are?" The girl shook her head. One boy tore the sketchbook from her hands. She stood and reached for it. They tossed it between themselves while laughing, forcing her to turn after it. Another sentence cut through the distortion.

"No one's looking." The boy holding the sketchbook threw it onto the concrete. Pages scattered across the rooftop like wounded birds while a brush rolled toward the edge, tapping softly over the concrete with a small precise sound that carried more clearly than the boys' laughter because the simulation considered destruction emotionally relevant. The gold around the girl flickered. The easing inside Z-69's head disappeared. Gray pressure rushed back all at once. The prompt returned.

SYSTEM CHOICE (1) INTERVENE (2) DO NOT INTERVENE His vision narrowed immediately. The wind dulled. The boys blurred. Only the options remained clear. The ticking returned faster than before. Z-69 tried to look away. Pain flared behind his eyes. The Tower increased pressure. He lowered his chin. Breathed. Controlled the body's need for relief. Found the smallest gap between impulse and action—and placed his attention on the first option. CLICK (1) INTERVENE The world rushed back. Z-69 walked toward them.

Not quickly. Not dramatically. With the quiet pace of someone interrupting an activity too boring to justify urgency.

"Hey." The boys turned. One scoffed. Then the simulation allowed the challenge to arrive clearly.

"Who the hell are you?" Z-69 lifted the premium jerky bag and gave it a small shake. Plastic crinkled sharply in the wind.

"If you leave her alone, I'll give you this." The boys stared. Then laughed. One stepped closer.

"And if we don't?" Z-69 felt the body relax by a fraction. A predator's looseness—produced without Predator Path, Hunger, enhanced strength, or the dead body that normally carried them. His voice remained mild.

"It is going to hurt." They laughed harder. The first boy swung. Wide. Messy. Confident in the way stupidity became courage inside a group. Z-69 shifted by centimeters. The punch missed. He should have ended the confrontation cleanly. One strike to the abdomen. One to the jaw. Enough pain to stop movement. Enough fear to prevent another attempt. But when his feet moved, something surged through the human nervous system. Not Hunger. Not Thunderlight. Adrenaline. Hot. Immediate. Alive.

Beneath it waited something belonging to the Raito identity package: resentment packed down through years of avoidance, humiliation swallowed because reacting required energy, and disgust that had never found a target safe enough to strike. The boy overextended. Z-69 drove a fist into his stomach. Harder than necessary. The boy folded with a wet gasp. Pain traveled through Z-69's knuckles and wrist. It hurt. The hurt felt good. A second boy lunged. Z-69 struck his jaw once. Then again.

The second hit served no tactical purpose. It landed anyway. The boy dropped to one knee. Z-69 heard the human heart pounding inside his chest. Loud. Close. Animal. The third boy attempted a tackle. Z-69 turned into the impact. Their bodies collided, and the simulation reminded him this was not his real body through a sharp twist in one ankle and a burst of pain along the ribs. That pain made the buried resentment bare its teeth. He seized the boy's collar and slammed him against the wall. Once. Then again.

The second impact was not efficient. It was satisfying. A cold portion of Z-69's mind registered the escalation. The hotter part did not care. The first boy tried to stand. Z-69 turned and punched him. Blood split across his knuckles. The sight sharpened the world. That was the sickest part. Evergreen rendered violence more willingly than ordinary human faces. Pain gave edges to the rooftop. Groans arrived without static. Blood possessed a clarity happiness had been denied. The second boy began crawling away.

Z-69 kicked him in the ribs. Once. A wet cough followed. His body wanted another. The desire did not belong wholly to Z-69 or wholly to Raito, because the simulation had layered an undead fighter's efficient violence over a teenager's accumulated resentment until restraint, satisfaction, and the wish to continue occupied the same bleeding hands. One boy staggered upright again. Z-69 struck him short and hard. The boy fell and stopped moving.

All three remained alive, which Z-69 verified automatically through breathing patterns, posture, eye response, head position, and the absence of impacts likely to produce immediate intracranial death, but the confirmation did not reduce the body's desire to continue. Then he noticed his fists were still clenched. His hands trembled. Not from fear. From wanting one more hit. Enough. The command came from him, not the Tower. Z-69 opened his fingers one at a time.

Raito remained inside the body as residue rather than another person, a pressure composed of disgust, isolation, neglected appetite, and the desire to silence every ugly thing through force because quieter methods had never produced visible results. Thin for now. But present. A leak capable of becoming a flood if every violent act produced more relief than food, sunlight, or human contact. Z-69 turned away from the boys. The girl watched them. He had expected fear. Relief. Perhaps gratitude.

Instead, her face had become flat. Cold. Empty in a way more dangerous than panic. Not hatred. Something beyond it—the quiet calculation of what should be done to people once they had demonstrated they would continue hurting others. Her right hand rested half-hidden beside her skirt. A pencil lay inside it. Not loosely. The point angled forward between her fingers. Ready for an eye, throat, or hand reaching too close.

She had not waited helplessly for rescue; she had waited for an opening narrow enough to make one sharpened pencil matter. Z-69 met her gaze. For one moment, her expression slipped. The eyes widened. Fear arrived too quickly and too cleanly. Practiced. The pencil lowered. Her grip relaxed. The gold around her fractured along hairline cracks before pulling itself together again. Fragile once more. Innocent once more. Z-69 said nothing. He crouched and collected the scattered pages. One at a time.

He recovered the sketchbook, smoothed a bent corner, and retrieved the brush from near the rooftop edge. Only after placing everything neatly together did he stand. Up close, the gold around her appeared clearer. Still faint. Still not enough to call hope. But stubborn. A candle refusing to admit the room was drowning. Z-69 held out the sketchbook. She accepted it with both hands and gripped it like an anchor.

For several seconds, she did not speak, bow, thank him, or offer any response expected from a rescued girl; she only watched with breathing too shallow and eyes too wide, studying whether the person who had stopped one threat had merely become a more dangerous one. The Raito identity supplied interpretations. Suspicion. Contempt. Annoyance. Z-69 ignored them. He reached into the bag and removed the premium jerky. High quality. Expensive. Still absurdly fragrant inside a dead world.

Behind them, three boys groaned against the concrete. Wind moved through her hair. The monochrome sky pressed over the school. Z-69 offered her the bag.

"Want some beef jerky?"