Chương 44: Stumbling to the finish line

It was a few hours after the impromptu war reenactment that Jin and Hashimi found themselves back at Jin's apartment, staring blankly at each other. While Yang, the soldier on gatekeeper duty, answered most of their questions. Head Sergeant Lei's fake warzone reenactment had truly heightened the day's excitement from a solid 2 to a jittering 7. Jin, personally, had never seen a fight on that scale before. Anyone who said that you didn't have a lot of emotions to process afterwards likely hadn't either.

He was still only in the middle stages of his foundation establishment as an Illusion Room cultivator at that. Had the army suddenly turned against him, he likely would have drowned underneath the bodies if he tried to fight. He shook his head. He'd always known that humans had an animalistic and violent side to them. Hell, he'd been dealing with that more here than ever before. He'd even killed that crazy girl who'd escaped from the Mad Monks Sect.

But being so violent and animalistic as to need a standing army to defend or attack? It recontextualised everything that he'd thought he'd known about modern Earth. He'd thought he had been living in a civilised world, but that had just proven to be blatantly false. There was nothing civilised about war, and there had been so many.

"That was…" Hashimi trailed off.

"Yeah…" Jin muttered.

"So, Joel ferried Ellie all the way from Boston, past bandits, hordes of zombies, religious nutjobs and the dangers of winter, only for her to have to die to have a chance at a cure," Hashimi suddenly said without much preamble. She was obviously trying to distract them; Jin wasn't really feeling it, but was grateful that the attempt was being made.

"The question is, now we have the data of the soldiers, but where exactly does that fit in with the narrative? We haven't introduced any such characters. If Joel decides to let Ellie die, then the story ends; if he doesn't, he has to fight his way through the Fireflies, not zombies," she said. Jin shook his head. This whole thing had been severely overcomplicated.

"We could just keep the original scenario, end it, and then fade to black. The following words appear.

"You have surmounted the challenges of human emotion and made your choice. Time will tell if it was for the good or for the bad. Now, you must face the challenge again, lacking any abstraction. Fight or perish," Jin suggested tiredly. This whole thing had been dragging for way too long.

"No integration?" Hashimi asked doubtfully.

"Isn't that a bit on the nose?"

"Why include it in the narrative? The narrative is perfect. The whole point of a story is to maximise immersion, which increases skill gain even when lacking combat. Now that the immersion has been increased to the maximum and the morale has calcified at hopefully high levels, they just need to train their combat skills. The effect should be better," Jin said with a shrug and leaned back from where he was sitting, letting his head hit the wall. This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road.

If you see it on Amazon, please report it. Hashimi seemed hesitant.

"Wouldn't that make it two different scenarios? You said that the fatty Elder told you you needed to submit the same thing you showed back then."

"It's just a natural continuation," Jin muttered.

"It will be in the same Illusion Room, so technically, I was showing the same thing, just unfinished."

"It sounds a bit pedantic," Hashimi said, shrugging her shoulders.

"It can be argued. The most important thing in these cases is to know how to present and logically articulate your case. If your argumentation is sound, they will accept it or not. If they don't accept logic, then they're looking for reasons to fail you for purposes not relevant to testing. In which case, they would have failed you regardless of what you did." The girl tilted her head, brown hair falling over her eyes, which prompted her to blow them away.

"That seems a bit circular?" she asked, rolling the word on her tongue as if tasting it.

"Then does it matter what we do? If they want us to win, they will make us win; if they don't, they won't?"

"There's a gradient," Jin muttered.

"But in principle, do you think there's a way to add the war scenario to the narrative?" He didn't necessarily feel like changing anything about it. It was good. Everything else would just fuck it up. Hashimi's eyes suddenly glinted. She spread out her arms over her head as if drawing a rainbow.

"How about this? After Joel makes his choice, the scene is interrupted by a large army of zombies attacking the hospital. Surviving or dying is now the issue, and they all have to fight side by side. We just make the Fireflies fight like the soldiers we saw. It doesn't matter if they look the same. Hell, we can even make them find some armour pieces in the cellar of the building, and they can suit up." Jin thought the thing through and found himself nodding his head.

"And if he takes Ellie?" he asked doubtfully. Hashimi scrunched up her face.

"Then the disagreement can be interrupted by the zombies?" she asked.

"But him fighting the fireflies is the whole emotional hook," Jin whined. Hashimi defensively raised her arms.

"Ok, how about this? He defeats the doctors and the leader, helps Ellie escape, but gets trapped behind. Then he has to help the fireflies. It doesn't always have to make sense." Jin rubbed his scalp nervously.

"Making it seem as one scenario but adding it in a way that doesn't implicate what we've done until now," he muttered.

"We can still put the fade to black and the "You have surmounted the challenges of human emotion and made your choice. Time will tell if it was for the good or for the bad. But first, you must fight to survive to see the result of your choice," he suggested. Hashimi snapped her fingers and pointed at him, "Yes!" she exclaimed, "Exactly!" Jin sighed. The girl, unlike him, was creative; it was easily noticeable.

He just took ideas from his previous world, reskinned them, made the battle realistic, and included the senses which had previously been missing, such as smell, taste, pain, etc. Increased the visual and auditory reality to make it more real and less game-like. Increased the resolution to levels that game engines in his past life couldn't run. He was doing all this, but he hadn't changed anything about the narratives he was porting yet.

He'd left out Dragonslayer Ornstein's partner and changed the gender of the crazy guy in Outlast if the experiencer was a female, but that was it. This was a bit of a bigger change. The question now was. Was he brave enough?

"Look," Hashimi started when she noticed his hesitation.

"I think you created a really wonderful narrative, ignoring the… You know. Anyway, we're doing our best to compete in a situation where we really don't have any advantages. Everything's been a gamble up until this point. The focus on narrative, the inclusion of mutations that haven't occurred yet, and the heist. I don't think we can give up so close to the finish line; Ellie and Joel deserve it, even if Joel won't exist in the Illusion Room and was just our placeholder." Jin, at the words, was crying on the inside.

'Don't praise me like this,' he whined in his mind.

'I only stand on the shoulders of giants.' But thinking about her words. How far they'd come, how many risks they'd already taken. He'd snipped the cannibalism because of Hashimi's warnings. Could he include something because of her hopes?

"99% of gamblers quit right before they hit it big," Jin muttered in a low voice as he rolled the decision around in his head.

"Huh?" Hashimi asked with a nonplussed voice. Jin, for his part, realising she wouldn't get the reference, just gave her a serious nod and expressed his answer in words she could understand.

"Fuck it, we ball," he said solemnly.

"Huh?"

"Nah, I'd win," Jin continued.

"If that's a reference, I'm really not getting it," the girl replied.

"One small step of Jin, one big step of Jinkind."

"Now it just feels like you're making fun of me."

"I have a dream that one day, an Illusion Room cultivator shall be judged by the content of their work rather than the composition of their genome. To achieve this fabled world of equality, we will all have to put in an amount of work that some would consider inhumane. But when has anything great been achieved by lying about? Think, in these hard times, not what we can do for the sect, but rather what the sect can do for us."

"..."