Limitless Evolution As a Snake

[System: There is no crack, Matt. There is no exploit. There’s no dev sitting behind a curtain who forgot to patch something. You’ve just been mistaking mercy for a glitch.]

I grab for anything, any scrap of the logic that’s kept my head off the floor this whole time, because if the game logic doesn’t hold then nothing does, then I’m just a snake in a sewer who got lucky a hundred times in a row and luck like that runs out, luck like that is currently running out on the one girl who’s ever put her hand on my scales like it means something.

There’s always a reset, I say. There’s always a reload, a checkpoint, something, some version of this where I get to try again if I mess it up bad enough-

[System: There is no reload button.]

The words don’t even land loud. That’s the worst part. I’m a twelve-foot bulletproof serpent who can crush steel, but those quiet words hit me harder than any hydraulic hammer. Old Mate doesn’t shout it, doesn’t need to, just lays it down flat and quiet like a coffin lid.

[System: There are no dev codes, Matt. There are no patches. You are in real life, your girlfriend is dying in real life, right now, with her hand on your chest and her voice breaking on your name, and you cannot pause the game, because there was never a game to pause.]

The ledger stops scrolling. Every red line just sits there, frozen, hanging in the white nothing like it’s waiting to see what I do with it.

[System: This is the bit where you find out if you’re actually somebody, or if you’re just a lucky bit of string that’s about to run out of luck.]

Old Mate’s voice echoes in my head. Six seconds, Matt. Not six turns, not six frames. Six seconds, real ones, ticking down whether you believe in them or not.

The white floor doesn’t feel like nothing anymore. It feels like it’s holding its breath. And somewhere past all this dead quiet, past the ledger and the cosmic bill collector wearing my dead uncle’s voice, Lyra is still out there dying for real, on a floor that isn’t white, in a city that never once cared whether I thought this was a game.

[System: You’ve been running up a karmic tab since day one, mate. Every time you dodged a bullet by sheer dumb luck, every time you hand-waved an assassin because she had nice legs, every time you treated a literal death-match like a comedy sketch, the System was taking notes. You thought you were the main character. You thought the rules didn’t apply to the Red Koi Smoke Serpent because you’re funny and you’ve got a smoke tail.]

I saved her! I roar, my ghost-coils thrashing against the white grid. I pulled the poison out! I used the venom glands as you told me to!

[System: And where do you think magic toxin GOES, you absolute dropkick?! You think a curse brewed by a high-tier assassin just disappears because you sucked real hard?! It needs a host! It needs a PRICE! You tried to play God with a D+ Rank body and a vape cloud for an ass, and now the bill is due!]

Fine. Fine, whatever, mercy, glitch, semantics, I don’t care what we call it; I just need it to work. Take my IP, I say, and I’m not even talking out loud anymore; I’m just throwing it at the void with my whole chest. All of it. However much I’ve got banked, take it; I don’t care. I’ll grind it back.

[System: Mate.]

Take my Rank too. D+ is D+, it’s not like I’m attached to the number; bump me down to F if you have to, I’ll climb back up, I always climb back up.

[System: Mate.]

The smoke hands. Take the smoke hands. I don’t even use them right, half the time I just look cool and forget I have a whole extra pair of arms. Take them, take the stats behind them, take whatever skill points I dumped into Constrict; I’ll respec, people respec all the time...

[System: MATE.]

The word slams into me like a door shutting on my tail. I stop. My mouth is still open like an idiot, still ready to keep bargaining with a wall.

[System: Look, I’m not gonna tell you those points aren’t real. You earned them. I watched you earn them. But right now you’re standing in front of a wound that predates the whole System, mate this predates me, predates the ledger, predates every mechanic I bolted onto your scaly little life to make it feel like something you could win. You can’t patch a hole that was there before the walls were built.]

It’s real to me, I snap back, and it sounds pathetic even inside my own head.

[System: Yeah, and a Monopooly hundred is real to you too until you try to pay your electric bill with it.]

I don’t have a comeback for that. I want one. I want to scream that I earned every one of those points, that I bled for them, that I clawed my way up from a snake nobody could even see coiled in a Zoo enclosure.

But some part of me, some quiet, ugly part that remembers dying at a desk and hiding in a mason jar, already knows where this is going.

[System: A blood debt like this doesn’t touch Rank. Doesn’t touch IP; it’s not reading your character sheet, mate, it’s reading her soul. Raw. Whatever left underneath all the mechanics we slapped on top to make your life feel like a game, you can’t overwrite that with a discount code.]

Then give me something, I say, and my voice cracks right down the middle, all the cockiness gone, just some kid begging now. Anything. Tell me what number I need to hit, and I’ll hit it.

[System: There is no number.]

The void flickers.

The white grid flickers, showing a live feed of the rooftop.

Lyra is on her knees over my grey, lifeless body. Her hands are shaking violently, pressing against my cold ventral scales, her silver hair spilling over her face as she screams my name into the empty night air. She looks completely destroyed. Broken. The fierce, confident ex cop elf who takes zero shit from anyone is sobbing like a child because my heart stopped beating.

00:05.