CHAPTER 34: SHEPHERD’S HERD

’It was supposed to be just another creepy and unsettling zone. Maybe it’s just ambiance, ambiance, yes, ambiance, shut up Cory, shut up...’ I told myself that over and over, like a spell I could believe in if I just said it enough times, abracadabra it into existence.

...

Hold on a fucking minute.

Wroeg’s Hollow was an obscure corner of the map. A niche place designed mostly for the Cleric quest that no one even bothered with when I was palying Early Access. Of course it felt lonely, of course the place was quiet, because we were pioneers or trailblazers or whatever.

But now, it’s been like, what, a week since launch? An entire week meant a normal casual player could probably reach level 15 if they have a good timetable... And we’ve been inside this Hollow for what, two days already? So at this point, I couldn’t lie to myself anymore.

Something was wrong.

Very wrong.

"There is no one here..."

We hadn’t seen a single player ever since we entered, even those 3 bandits were outside the Wroeg and were not inside. No randoms wandering in by mistake, no trolls looking to grief low-levels, no wanderers on horseback just exploring the maps, and not any other clerics. Of course, we were only online for 2 hours a day, but do you really meant to tell me that it’s not enough to see any trouble?

In any MMORPG, that would’ve been weird. But this was Darkmoon Adventure we’re talking about, a literal groundbreaking, billion-dollar potential of a game that had barely launched a week ago. People should be flooding every quest route, cramping the map even when the pods cost 3 days of their salary.

Not to mention, the Cleric class was meta-defiance, literal unnerfable, always useful and exploitable, braindead easy as mentioned, so anyone aiming for support roles would’ve at least tried to unlock it.

But this zone was empty. There were no voices, no players indication, footsteps. No flickering name tags in the fog, it was just... us. I checked the minimap again, and sure enough, CJS69Real and Hailie

I stopped walking. The dirt trail under my boots was damp and cracked, split by crooked roots like dead fingers reaching up from the ground.

I turned around slowly, eyes wide. Hailie looked back at me, smiling gently like she always did, trying not to acknowledge the chaos building behind my eyes.

And that’s when I said it, I screamed louder than I meant to. My voice cracked like something snapped inside me.

"It’s a TRAP."

My shout echoed strangely as if we were in a cave and the trees themselves weren’t sure how to carry sound anymore. The canopy above stirred, but there was no wind.

I grabbed onto Hailie’s wrist with one hand, then sprinted towards the nearest tree that seemed safe for balance, my mind’s spiraling. We weren’t just lost, we weren’t just in some weird sub-zone. But we were trapped! Somewhere outside the main server, outside the world, somewhere we weren’t supposed to be.

How do I even put this, uh...

In older open world games, when you entered an interior, like a shop, a gym, a restaurant. You don’t actually walk inside, you’ll get teleported under the map, very far under where they actually put the interior, this was to reduce the amount of assets that needed loading, as far as I know.

In modern and more high-end games where developers feel the need to boast about how "our game requires 200GB worth of disk" to hide the fact that they are spineless and talentless freaks who can’t optimize for a smoother gaming experience. The interior and all the NPCs inside are loaded in tandem with the rest of the word.

That aforementioned fact, though, just proved that any game could have a kind of out-of-bounds area where when a player enters; they’ll get teleported away in order to seperate them from other players. We could be below the world? Far on top? 100 square kilometers out to the side?.

But why the fuck were we getting that treatment? A level 29 Warlock and a level 1 Ranger (soon to be Cleric)? Are we really worth the processing power?

I fumbled through the menu, fingers trembling, and typed a single message into Party Chat for Hailie’s sake:

"This isn’t part of the game. I think we’re trapped, an alternate instance... maybe even another dimension.

She blinked at the message as her expression shifted. And that was when the fog thickened.

It rolled in like a wave, smothering light and logic alike. The path behind us vanished. The roots under our feet deepened. The very geometry of the world stuttered for a heartbeat, trees leaning impossibly sideways, rocks blinking in and out of place. And in the center of that distortion, it arrived.

It had been there the whole time, and the world had only now decided to let us see it.

My breath left my lungs in a quiet whimper.

I collapsed.

[CJS69Real]: Hailie.

[CJS69Real]: Logout, slowly.

I typed it with a shaky hand. But then my heart dropped into the pit of my stomach as Hailie shook her head at me.

I was confused at first, so I tried logging out myself.

[ERROR]

Logout function unavailable in this zone.

"Oh my god. Oh my fucking god."

At first it looked like a fog rolling in. It was dark, viscous, low to the ground, like tar being poured from an invisible bucket.

Then came the legs, I would call them that because that was the term us filthy mortals came up with to cope with the fact that we didn’t have the appropriate vocabulary comprehensible for those limbs. They were too long, too many joints, inhuman. Each one touched down like a broken marionette made of shadow and wires.

Then the torso.. A ribcage? I don’t know, it looks like a ribcage, but upside down, its bones gaping open like jaws. A thousand slits blinked open across its body, were those eyes? mouths? sensors? Each one weeping something black and syrupy.

It dragged something behind it. Chains, maybe? They weren’t attached to anything, yet clanged and screeched like they were hauling the entire weight of the Hollow’s suffering.

And then I saw the face.

No.

The lack of one, rather.

It was just a void, shifting, pulsating, as if the concept of "identity" couldn’t survive in its presence. A name floated above it, but it flickered violently like a glitched-out label.

[The Null Shepherd]

My knees gave out. I collapsed, hand covering my mouth as I felt my lungs constrict. The fear was taking over my breathing. This thing was designed to reach into the player’s soul and squeeze. I could hear my own heartbeat pounding against my ears.

"I-I can’t... I can’t do this. I... No..." I began whispering to myself, before rapidly typing nonsense into the chat in a frenzy as my eyes fail to see the keyboard.

It’s the fucking Null Shepherd.

In hindsight, I should’ve known. But you know what they said, no one can have the power of hindsight.

The thing peered inside me with infinite curiosity, trying to understand what broke me, and how to make it worse.

I wanted to scream and to log out... But no menu came up, no escape key worked.

This was it.

This was how it ended.

Until I felt her arms.

Hailie.

She was holding me, pulling me back. Her thin, real-feeling arms wrapped around mine, her forehead pressed to my shoulder, trembling like a frightened animal. And yet, she was the stronger one.

She couldn’t hear what I’d screamed, she didn’t know about alternate dimensions or server anomalies or how wrong this whole place was. But she could see the darkness inside the monster’s face the way I did. So Hailie felt my panic, saw the way I fell apart, and refused to let it happen.

She gripped my wrist and shook it once, twice. Then she pulled back and stared straight into my eyes, mouth opening, trying, failing, then trying again.

Her voice was barely there; soft, cracked, confused about how to talk in deafness. But she forced it out anyway.

"D...d-don’t... be... s-scared..." She said, but I couldn’t answer.

She mouthed the words again, clearer this time, despite the tears welling at the corners of her eyes.

Don’t be scared.

"I-it’s okay... we’re okay..."

Her hand gripped tighter.

Perhaps she had done this a million times now, the way she said those words was... Eeriely comforting. I turned and saw her mouth moving again, trembling slightly as she fought against whatever weight was trying to crush her too.

"Don’t give up... Cory..."

Tears were in her eyes, and that did it for me.

I looked back toward the monster.

It was still watching. Its smiles flickered faster now, like it was amused at our little breakdown. Maybe it could smell weakness. Maybe it fed on it.

But Hailie didn’t let go. She held onto my arm like a lifeline, as if I was the only anchor in this twisted, forgotten version of the world, and she refused to let me sink.

I stared at her, this girl who couldn’t even move her own body in real life, who was deafened and helpless in the middle of this nightmare, yet and she was comforting me.

My fingers closed around hers.

I swallowed, heart hammering, and slowly rose to my feet. My shield hummed faintly as I summoned it back into my grip, the familiar weight grounding me.

I gritted my teeth, forced breath back into my lungs. I wasn’t ready, I wasn’t brave. But I couldn’t let her hold the weight alone, not in this place, not now.

"Alright, fuck it, I’m protecting this precious little angel if that’s the last thing I do!"