I finally found it. The princess’s corpse buried in the miles-wide pile of rubble. I pulled the bloody veil off her face. She looked just like me. I probably would have laughed when I saved her. “You’ve finally saved yourself!”— that was probably Biologist’s ending to this little game she came up with.

I knew she was the one who set this all up for me.

“The Tower of Ascension!” she happily chimed out when I woke up first, so long ago.

“If you can make it to the top and save the princess, you’ll go to heaven! But watch out, one small misstep and you could die. If your HP ever drops to 0, you’ll be sent straight to hell!”

At first I thought that may have really been how the afterlife worked, that this was something like Valhalla. But as I climbed the floors, I started to understand the truth, even though I didn’t want to. I’m not going to heaven, and I’m not going to hell.

I’m in purgatory.

This event was enough to prove that. Even after I fell miles, wearing full platemail, then crushed my multiple tons of stones, I’m not dead. Turns out, nothing happens when you hit 0 HP. Nothing would have happened if I saved the princess either, I’m sure. I’d bring her all the way back down, then Bio would have started some kinda bullshit new game + or something.

Heaven and hell are for people who deserved to be born, and go through the trial of life. Hell, maybe I’m lucky I even get to be in purgatory. Biologist even made it pretty fun. She must have saw all those D&D videos I watched lately, and used that as inspiration. That’s a real friend, right there—one who models your afterlife after your most recent obsession.

I sat on top of the rubble, looking around the featureless, cloudy landscape. I’ve been doing this for a long time now. It took me weeks to find the princess. I don’t have anything else to think about.

I’m sure Biologist went back to the real world now. I hope Rose gets a big kick out of the way things ended for me. I don’t want them to be sad for me. How pathetic is it, growing emotional attachment to someone who was never supposed to exist? They should have known I was getting ripped out of their world, sooner or later.

I kept digging around the rubble in the area, curious about what else Biologist put in the final floor. Judging by the red fabric scraps and shattered bits of glass, it was probably a big fancy room with nice carpet and chandeliers. There was probably a whole cutscene planned, I feel bad she never got to see my reaction to it.

To be honest, I’m not sure where the game fell apart. Maybe Biologist wasn’t so good at creating purgatory games. Or, maybe, God himself have put an end to it. “Don’t give fake people the hope of an afterlife”—He probably said. Oh God, I hope this didn’t get her sent to hell or anything because of this. She’s one angel who would make a hell of a Lucifer.

I kept digging around, finding big stashes of gold coins and jewels and gems. That stuff would have been fun to find, but it’s not like I could’ve done anything with it all. In a chest, I found a framed photo of me, Rose, and Bunny. It was a cute (probably fabricated) picture, but I wonder why Bio didn’t put herself in it. Did she still not consider herself a friend of ours? It wouldn’t have been the same without her. I wonder if it won’t be the same without me?

More gems, more gold, more chipped pieces of ornate furniture buried among the fallen stones. This one particular bit of stone was unusually dark, pitch black even. It must have come from—oh.

This isn’t part of the debris, this is a sword. It took a minute, but I managed to get it loose. Oh man, this is nostalgic.

It’s the zebrasword.

God, I loved this thing. Swinging it around brought me right back to when I fought that silver thing in the warehouse or whatever. God, that was so scary, but so much fun. And I forgot how mesmerizing this thing is. It feels like my vision flashes every time I look to close at the infinitely tiny repeating black and white stripes.

I tried to recall the motions I did a long time ago, to kill the silver beast. A big circle in the air, then cut off the bottom corner to make a Q shape. Certainly this won’t cause anything weird to happ—

Oh. That’s a forty foot demon coming up through the ground. Sorry I didn’t believe you, Biologist. Maybe I am going to hell after all.

I ran, but I couldn’t escape the demon.

I tried to hide behind some rubble, but the rubble turned black and white and began to vibrate.

I dove into the grass, but the grass became long and wrapped around my limbs.

I threw everything in my backpack at it, but they all grew wings and flew right back around at me.

The demon was everywhere I turned.

It was everything I touched, and everything I felt.

It was like the world was closing in around me.

I tried to fight it off with the sword, but it didn’t flinch. That’s how I knew shit was serious.

Off in the horizon, I could still see the demon towering over the horizon line— but it was hard to see through the same demon half a millimeter from my eyeball. It’s not that there were many of them, there was just one. But that one was everywhere. I gagged and wretched, feeling them crawl through my throat and veins. I scratched my eyes to get all the demon off my face, but my busted up fingernails dripped with their inky white and black liquid that I smeared all over myself.

I fell to my hands and knees, but those became the demon too. They began to fuse with the ground, spreading black and white across the terrain. Soon, everything was the demon.

It was like it swallowed up existence entirely, digesting it with a cosmic matrix of organs. The shapes in the horizon flashed and pulsed hard enough make me violently nauseous. I couldn’t close my eyes, the strobe light effect was even worse then. The ground underneath me bulged and caved in simultaneously, shifting and squelching as the zebra-stripes covering endlessly expanded, retracted, and rotated.

I felt tendrils shooting up through my shoes and into my feet. They writhed in my flesh, until they struck nerves and sent me totally off-balance. It was like my entire world rotated 90 degrees around me—so dizzy I could die. I don’t know if I fell and hit the ground, or if I was floating. Or even if I was still in one piece. My legs felt like they were oriented in different gravity, one kicking the wall, the other standing off the ceiling. My body was as meaningless and disorganized as a pile of unsorted Legos being crushed by a hydraulic press.

As the digestion progressed, its effects grew more and more granular. My fingers were being reshaped and twisted through a two-digit number of dimensions. I couldn’t even writhe in agony, the muscular system required for that was spread out over the horizon and melting into ink. My insides were strung out for miles, forming some sort of pulsating shape. That was the last thing I could sense before my body had been completely reconstructed at the molecular level. The only thing left was my consciousness.

I metaphorically breathed a sigh of relief, as I at least still had my thoughts in tact. Though, I don’t know if that’s actually less scary than just vanishing. Right now I’m a disembodied consciousness in an endless ream of static—which is probably far worse—but the soul has a will to survive.

Well, not “survive”, because I didn’t. If I had survived, I wouldn’t be here. I’d be back at home with B—