The plan was to surprise however many of the guards wandered into this apartment and then to get back to my own place and charge out of that door while they were distracted and wondering what happened to the ones sent to investigate. I just couldn’t do it. The look in those eyes was too much to bear. The fear, confusion, and pleading on each of their faces as I slaughtered them was too innocent, too childlike. I tried to tell myself it was only because I never gave them a chance, but they had never once attacked me. I had slaughtered them preemptively and without provocation.

Goblins were monsters. It was a simple truth of 99 percent of all games, movies, and literature. They were fodder to be slaughtered for experience or loot, enemies in service of a greater evil, or cave-dwelling bandits that raped, murdered, and ate humans. The world had been turned upside down, and yet I had slaughtered these creatures based on my own preconceptions and fear.

I opened the door again and tossed out the corpses. Hopefully, the fear of ending up like their brothers would keep them at bay long enough for me to figure out what to do. I needed to get stronger, but I wasn’t willing to continue slaughtering innocent creatures. I wasn’t prepared to become a true monster. Not yet.

I didn’t sleep that night. The eyes followed me, begging me for mercy, asking me why, telling me I was the monster, not them. After a few hours, I gave up on closing my eyes. It was better when I could look around and see something other than those desperate, pleading eyes.

I lay in bed, mumbling every phrase I could think of, hoping one of them would finally open my status window. I needed something to focus on besides those damning eyes. “Status. Player status. Help. Interface. Menu. Interface Menu. Player info. Player Stats. Options. Alt F-Four. Admin. Game Master. Tutorial- “Ding~!”

Tutorial activation was declined on April 13th, 2027 T.C.E.

“Fuck,” I groaned. It must have been one of those pop-ups from when I was sleeping in my chair, but the date was odd. C.E. meant “Comma Era” and was the “politically correct” and now the widely used notation for the years measured by the Gregorian calendar. Still, I had never once seen a T in front of the acronym. I kept mumbling random phrases for a few hours, hoping to activate something but nothing else got the slightest response.

As my phone told me that it was officially morning, doing something became more attractive than lying in bed, despairing about my mistakes, and hating myself. Usually, I would play a game, but all my favorites were multiplayer, and even the single-player games were streamed from the cloud. All I could think to do was to clean the bathroom. It was still caked in blood.

I subscribed to the tower’s cleaning service, so I didn’t have the proper equipment. I had towels, dish soap, hand soap, and an economy pack of cleaning wipes I used for my desk and computer. The cleaning crew wasn’t allowed anywhere near those.

I soaked one of the towels in hot water and began to scrub from the top down, starting with the smears on the counter and door. As I scrubbed it and the dried blood mixed with the water, it became a rusty, red-brown sludge with a horrid stench. Something in that smell reminded me of the blood spurting out of a goblin’s throat, and I was grateful I was next to a toilet. I heaved and puked bile, but I hadn’t had an appetite this morning, so all I could do was despair as my empty stomach attempted to empty itself.

It took another few hours of scrubbing, rinsing the towel, scrubbing, and rinsing the towel, over and over again until the bathroom was clean enough that I could go over it with a few wipes to sanitize everything.

Video games were so simple. You killed a monster, it made a face of simulated agony as it fell, and it either left a corpse or vanished depending on the game. But the eyes never begged you for mercy or asked you why you were killing them. One thing that games had never been able to imitate realistically, although not for lack of trying, was the look of a soul behind the eyes of a thinking creature. There was no smell of blood, no shit and piss as a creature voided its bowels in terror, or it leaked out after death and before you threw them out in the hallway. Bloodstains vanished on their own over time, if the game even included them at all, and you never had to do it alone. Even in a single-player game, you could be talking with friends in chat the whole time.

I moved on to trying to scrub blood out of the thick shag carpet of my apartment, but it was so much more arduous than the tile floors.

After an hour of scrubbing, the carpet of my apartment’s carpet was as clean as it was going to get. It looked less like someone had dragged a body and more like someone had spilled a case of red wine and tried to clean it, so I moved on to the vacant apartment I had lured my last two victims into. I got about halfway through scrubbing the stain where my first victim’s head had leaked brain fluid and blood onto the carpet when I snapped and broke down sobbing.

These goblins hadn’t even done anything to me. They were guarding my door because I had slaughtered the guards around their den. I would never know what their true nature was because I had struck first. They probably didn’t even know I was human. Maybe, if I tunneled into a different room, I could act as if it wasn’t me. I could leave my weapons behind and try to make peace.

I sat there for hours atop the blood of my victims, pondering how I could coexist with the creatures. No creatures that express such human emotions could be a stereotypically evil species without empathy. I had to make amends somehow.

I forced myself to eat a pop tart that evening, but I didn’t sleep that night either. Going two nights without sleep was something I had done countless times, but I had never felt so tired or run down before.