Donovan was forcibly yanked out from the underground cell that he had respawned in, cursing and clawing at the ‘mere plebs’ as they dragged him back to the surface. This was the fifteenth time in as many hours that he had been forced to face the same sentence that he had desired to inflict upon his former employee, but there was little to nothing that he could do.

He had neglected to set his respawn point back in the Andromedan Empire, and so too had all the other oligarchical asshat Players that had followed him on this venture. As such, they had been forced to respawn again and again inside the very place that Axton and the other ‘inferior commoners’ had set up for just such a situation. Thomas, a fellow oligarch, had been correct in his assumption that Donovan and his cronies would neglect such a basic thing.

With typical youthful and hubris-laden short-sightedness, they had neglected to prepare for a possible eventuality, and now they were paying the price. Each one had been ganked and griefed at least 10 times by now, but none of them had made the smart move of simply logging off and attempting to wait out the ‘filthy peasants’ that they despised so much.

Donovan was forced to his knees once he was out in the open air, the harsh sunlight causing him to sweat bullets as the hot dusty sand beneath his kneeling legs caused even more pain. A gag was placed in his mouth to keep him from raving aloud and he was forced to wait in the hot day air as his executioner walked out from some artificial shade.

“Hurry up!” yelled a Player as one of their number slowly walked towards his target. “I’ve got to take my kid to practice soon, and I want to make one of these fuckers eat grass before I have to bail.”

“Yeah, yeah.” Said the current executioner. “There is a queue for a reason, you know. You can bail if you want, but when you come back, you’ll get the next one. That’s what we all agreed to, after all. Any ideas on how I should do it? Anyone?”

At this question, a bunch of Players began to shout suggestions. Everything from a simple beheading to death-by-tickles was being offered as a way to end Donovan for the 16th time that day, and Donovan himself began to feel a growing degree of concern. Maybe it would be a good idea to simply refuse to respawn when he met his end this time. As much as he hated to admit defeat or that he had been outplayed by such inferior pieces of trash, he was now under the assumption that if he just kept coming back then he would be forced to face these mongrel monsters again and again until he refused to respawn.

“Alright, I’ll go for death by dismemberment.”

Donovan’s 16th executioner equipped a massively oversized axe. It was obvious that the current executioner had spec’ed heavily into physical strength, as he lifted the weapon high with what seemed to be less effort than one would need to pick up an average full bottle of soda. He looked over Donovan for a bit before bringing down the axe. The head cut straight through Donovan’s left arm at the shoulder, severing meat and tendons while shattering bone.

Donovan’s scream was stifled by the gag, but it only intensified as the next strike removed his right arm. With the chains holding him down having been released, Donovan fought hard to rise to his feet and run. He got only three steps away before he tumbled to the ground as a searing pain alerted him that his right leg had been severed just below the pelvis and it was not long after that when a fourth blow reduced him to a limbless torso bleeding out on the ground.

“Is he dead yet? Give the bastard a good kick and find out!”

Donovan began to realize just how fucked he was. Likewise, it was slowly dawning on him that this was the kind of pain that he had inflicted before and was trying to inflict on others. The sheer horror of it all and the utter lack of compassion, mercy, and care that he was experiencing; he was one who had done such things. In his drive for the thrill of doing unto others, he had never thought of what his victims had felt or experienced by his own hand.

He glanced back over his fractured shoulder with a look of fear that begged for mercy and survival. As he did so, he could see himself in a reflective surface, and this made him realize that he had seen that form before in so many of his victims, Player and NPC alike. The eyes that were filled with nothing but hatred and fear and sorrow, the look of shock and panic that screamed for escape, he had seen them so many times before but had never realized what they truly meant.

It had taken so many deaths in such short order by those who enjoyed his suffering for him to begin to see that it was he himself who was the true inhuman being. This last shock was what fully started the shift in his consciousness, and while the drift was gradual it was picking up steam. He was being toyed with, like how he had played with his prey, and now that the shoe was on the other foot, he was slowly starting to feel what could be called remorse.

It could be said that this was an unintentional bit of ‘shock therapy’, with Donovan’s mind being forced to endure a similar fate that he had brought to hundreds of others in-game. He had been griefed so hard that his perception was beginning to shift, like someone playing a murderhobo in a TTRPG who was forced to watch as their own characters were killed off in horrific fashions for each time that they had dipped into such degeneracy.

He saw the axe rise and felt it slam into his back, only to rise again and then fall. He was hacked at again and again until his Avatar could no longer take it and died, lingering on as a broken corpse for a few seconds before fading from the world. As he was presented with the Respawn screen, Donovan did nothing. He sat down where he was and began to hold himself as his eyes stared into the distant void that was around him. Had he learned something from all of this, all from facing the same thing that he had been up till that point?

Certainly, he was still a degenerate bastard who really did want to kill, maim and burn, among other things, but was he now fully aware of the pain he had inflicted on others? Did the shock of it all, possibly including a possible realization of his own degeneracy and the ramifications of it, push him to the brink of despair? Well, at least he decided to avoid going back to that hell and he simply logged out rather than allowing his avatar to respawn.

When he exited the pod he said nothing to anyone in his household and went straight to his room, staying silent as he curled up in his massive bed. He tried to close his eyes and sleep it off, but each of his own deaths was now firmly in his mind and would not leave. In fact, as he tried to divert his thought process he was only dragged deeper into his suffering as his mind wandered until he began to wonder how he would have felt if he had been tortured and damaged in the ways that he had done to others.

Maybe this was the start of Donny turning a new leaf. Or perhaps it was just him wondering how he could escalate his malice to offset his own mental suffering.

He would not sleep that night, nor would he go back to the game the next day, nor would he game the day after that, either. Instead, he refused all contact and stayed cooped up and distant as he began experiencing the very same PTSD that he had forced a decent number of Players to deal with.