Chapter Text
Jamato had just surrendered the future of the server, and the lives of everyone in it, to save his own life.
Oh, he could see the irony now, too late for it to be funny. In his attempts to save the server, he had created the monster that would end it. In separating Spoke from any innocents he could hurt, Jamato had handed him a merciless army. In attempting to strip him of any dangerous items, he had allowed Spoke access to the most lethal weapon in the world.
And, trapped in this one-by-two obsidian box, Jamato couldn’t even warn anyone about the force of nature that was now bee-lining towards spawn.
Jamato slumped against the rough black-purple wall, sliding to the floor. Head between his hands, he watched, numb, as the tears that slid underneath his mask dripped onto the floor. It was easy, in retrospect, to see how he could have stopped this. Jamato could have made the arena smaller, so there would have been nowhere for Spoke to hide. He could have left the gear out entirely, so Spoke couldn’t have defended himself from other players. He could have checked his inventory before throwing him into solitary, or hell, Jamato could have thrown him in solitary from the get-go!
Really, Jamato should have gotten rid of him right from the start. Back when he first began to understand the depth of what Spoke was capable of, before Spoke’s death would’ve meant anything to the powerful players of the server, when there were very few repercussions to any action.
He leaned back, resting his head on the wall behind him. The ceiling looked no different from the floor.
Jamato could have figured out how to kill Spoke without his death tying back to him, if he had just tried a little harder. It would have been difficult, very difficult, to prevent the ripples of his death from spiraling back to spawn, but it could have been done. Looking back at it now, it was what should have been done.
But, just as every other time he had considered ending Spoke’s life himself, a face, a scene, flashed in front of his eyes. Spoke, young and innocent, looking up at Jamato with nothing but trust in his eyes.
Thanks for being my friend, Jamato, Spoke had said, smile so wide it almost split his face open.
Of course. What would I do without you? His younger, naive, self had responded.
Every single time, as Spoke's smiling face drifted across his vision, Jamato knew that he couldn’t take the voidlings life with his own hands. Could order his death from his office, yes. Could watch him die from the distance of his colosseum, probably. But he wasn’t strong enough to kill the only person he had, in his life, called a best friend.
And he had paid for that. The rest of the server would, too, now pay for that.
This was a type of despair Jamato had never quite felt before. It was not possible to mine through however many layers of obsidian, find a way out of purgatory, and then beat Spoke to spawn with nothing to his name. He’d made his bed–or box if one wanted to be literal–and now he had to lay in it.
… It was uncomfortable.
Jamato had never lived in particularly fancy houses, too focused on other things to put that much effort into decorating a base, but at least there he had leg room, and could hear something other than his own breathing. That Spoke hadn’t even had the decency to make the box two-by-two was another slap in the face, demonstrating again what the voidling had allowed himself to lose.
Jamato sighed, fingers twitching upwards towards his face, before dropping back down. There was no point wiping his face off–even if anyone could see him right now, it wasn’t like they could see through the mask anyway. He didn’t need to look put together right now as it wasn’t like he would even be seeing the few piglins left in the nether, much less anyone he needed to look put together in front of. Spoke had made a fool of him once again. Jamato truly had been stripped of everything.
Unless.
Jamato snapped upright, almost slamming his head into the wall in front of him. But was it even possible? With nothing on him?
Jamato slowly lifted his shaking hands, pressing his body against the wall behind him in order to give them as much room as was possible in such a small space.
He had never tried to exploit without a proxy, something else to take the fall should the world lash back at him. Never even heard of someone attempting to do so. Even Spoke, for all his arrogance, had never attempted it either. It was practically suicide.
But if he succeeded…
If Jamato was able to reset this chunk, he would either be surrounded by netherrack, or standing on solid ground. It would take him minutes to mine out of wherever he ended up, rather than the potential hours the obsidian would take him, and he wouldn’t have to figure out how to climb out of the pit he was in. He could restock in his office, or in one of the Null storage rooms, and maybe, maybe, he could beat Spoke to spawn. He knew how the Null operated, after all (well, for the most part. He clearly hadn’t been thorough enough), and the routes they took to avoid Clownpeirce’s notice. He could make his way around them, if resetting the chunk was something Jamato could actually accomplish.
Jamato was done for anyway. At least this way, he could attempt one more time to fix his mistakes. The risks are relatively slim, he consoled himself. At this point, I know what I'm doing. None of my exploited objects have disappeared in years. If anyone could do this, it was Jamato.
He was doing this to save the server, after all. It would fold, for its own good.
Jamato braced himself, before pushing his hands against the obsidian wall, and then through it. The world resisted at first, it always did, before relenting, as it always did. It split around the space where his hands were pressed through, tearing open a rift between them.
The code looked the same as it had the countless other times Jamato had pushed past the world’s limits: strings of what looked like ones and zeros trailing infinitely downwards, colored in hues that were almost those of real blocks, but were just ever so slightly off. They didn’t glow, exactly, but unlike the unlit inside of the obsidian box, where he still couldn’t see where his legs ended and the ground began, each slowly falling string of code was distinct. There was no light, but neither was there darkness, and so while they did not light up Jamato’s prison, it was easy to see where each string of code stood in relation to all others.
Unlike every other time, Jamato did not pull his hands out of the hole he had torn into space. Now, he pushed them in.
The resistance was something Jamato had accounted for, and the code bent around his hands like it had for every other object he had forced into it.
Jamato had not, however, been ready for the feeling. Raw code being forced out of its natural path, pressing against the code which made up his body in its attempts to right itself, twisting and turning as though it was sentient. Exploiting always felt inherently wrong, like trying to move a bodypart that wasn’t there, or grow one's hair back into their scalp. Doing it through a proxy, however, was incomparable to touching it with nothing but gloves between his skin and the server’s raw code. Its resistance almost hurt, code simultaneously burning and freezing and also feeling of absolutely nothing, flowing around as something not quite water or air or anything solid. It was the same feeling Jamato usually experienced, but multiplied almost tenfold.
The rush of limitlessness was similarly amplified. Having the universe at the end of a stick was not comparable to having it at your fingertips. There was always a thrill that came with having the entire world bend to your will that never went away, no matter how many times he did it, but at that moment? Jamato felt almost like a divine being.
It was as though the server was confirming that despite the setbacks, he was doing the right thing.
The elation and terror that such proximity to code burned through his veins was almost overwhelming–if Jamato hadn’t had years of experience, his whole body would most certainly be shaking uncontrollably. As it was, he could contain his physical reaction to just barely quicker than normal breathing, and the slightest tremor in his fingers.
Exploiting was a very delicate process. A brush against the wrong line of code, hesitation underneath one stream for too long, even pulling out of the rift he made too fast could result in catastrophic backlash. Even once one understood how to perform an exploit flawlessly, if they exploited in the same way too frequently the server would learn how to adapt, “patching” that method. The shaking Jamato just barely couldn’t stop was dangerous, a far greater risk than he would in any other circumstance allow himself to gamble on, but his time was up.
Squaring his shoulders and taking a deep breath of the stale, foul, neither air, Jamato leaned forward. He was the best exploiter on the server, he was capable of resetting just one chunk. Slowly, carefully, he threaded his fingers through the lines of code lethargically trailing downwards. They reacted almost instantly, warping around the space between his fingers and pressing against the fabric covering his hands.
Code followed a pattern, one that as far as Jamato was aware, repeated infinitely. As long as he knew where he was within a chunk, he could predict what any line would do once tampered with. Even out in the farlands, where the code forgot how to read itself, and lines chose what speed to fall at, the ones and zeros all still drifted downwards. The strings all still remained in the same patterns.
Jamato took another deep breath, and, ignoring the bead of sweat dripping off his face, ever so slightly lifted his hands.
And was not immediately wiped off the face of Unstable.
Though he could not let his body relax, even slightly, a wave of relief rushed through Jamato. This was possible. He was right. Jamato was going to finish this.
Slowly, delicately, he coaxed a line of code to a slow, then to a halt. Even slower, Jamato then began to lead it backwards. One by one by one, string by string, Jamato began to set each of the chunk’s lines of code against their natural flow.
Though he knew it would be, the process was still harrowingly slow. Time had no meaning in the nether, and even less in Jamato’s little box, and yet it still somehow managed to drag on. It did not help that there was no typical amount of time an exploit took. Really, the only logic that Jamato had found to hold true every time was that if an exploit was successful, nothing would happen, and nothing would happen, and then suddenly everything would happen all at once.
Really, if Jamato didn’t know how perseverant Spoke could be, he would most certainly have wondered how Spoke ever had enough patience to become the talented exploiter he was.
One of Jamato’s fingers twitched, snapping his attention back to his hands in the way only the icy wave of horror could. Jamato hadn’t even realized he had begun to zone out, but that was the fickle nature of exploiting. It only took one moment of hesitation to destroy everything. This was why he never risked exploiting so haphazardly!
The lines of code drifting through his fingers moved ever so slightly with the motion, bumping into those next to them, ones and zeros linking together and latching one string to two, to four, to eight, and onwards and onwards.
Code, in every direction, began to slowly drift against its natural pull. Rippling like a lazy river, the strings bumped into one another, ones and zeros twisting together, sticking onto each other, softly pulling more and more and more strands against the current, quickly escalating far beyond the chunk Jamato was in.
Shit.
There was no need to verbalize how nightmarish the scene that was unfolding in front of Jamato’s eyes was. It was a small miracle that first accidental connection hadn’t immediately imploded, much less every single one afterwards. And who knew how far this was progressing? It wasn’t like the not-quite weight between Jamato’s hands gained or lost anything. The difference in feeling between a small or massive exploit was negligible, as after all, the server hosted the brunt of the process and resources.
Something close to a hysterical laugh built up in the back of Jamato’s throat, which he was barely able to bite back. His hands shaking any further would do him absolutely no favors.
Instead, Jamato took another deep breath. The anxiety clogging his throat almost drowned out the taste of ash.
For the nth time that week, Jamato strained to figure a way out of the hole he had found himself in.
For the second time that day, his head remained empty.
Backing out now would immediately alert the server to something happening here. Like a body trying to purge a virus, the code would immediately try to correct itself, banning Jamato, and possibly deleting the entire chunk–if not worse, considering this exploit had expanded far past the chunk-border by this point–in the process. But if he saw this out, and whatever the originally small scale exploit was rapidly growing into, succeeded?
He had no idea. Theoretically, he would still be rolling back however far this was affecting, but how could anyone feasibly predict the feedback between chunks or the reaction time between Jamato and the more finicky lines of code? He had absolutely no references to base off. This was new territory no sane player would attempt.
But… that was also an opportunity, wasn’t it?
Backing out would kill him. Committing would be making history. Jamato would probably have the best understanding of how the code truly affected the server. In no circumstances would he have attempted anything along this scale. Never. But now that he was already knee deep?
If Jamato backed out now, giving Null to Spoke would have been even worse than pathetic. If he decided to give up now, every action he had taken up to this point would be pointless. JamatoP would see this through.
And then, suddenly and all at once; the world violently shook as glowing white cracks ripped from the rift between his arms, connecting with the cracks mirrored in the same way in every single chunk within and beyond sight, and JamatoP fell forward into weightlessness .
…
…Was this death? Was this existence post ban?
Jamato would see nothing, could feel nothing. There was no up, no down, no air and yet no need to breathe. It was just white. Blindingly, impossibly dark, blank white. He couldn’t even feel if he was able to move any of his limbs, with nothing to send feedback to his nerves.
Really, it almost felt like the code he had just held wrapped between his fingers, but without the excitement code radiated into one’s body.
…Hopefully, this wasn’t Jamato’s entire afterlife. Or the server after his mythical failure of an exploit. This nothing was not quite the same as the the biting cold of the void, but there really was no telling what Jamato had just done.
Something obviously happened, but this…
If Jamato could feel his body, he was pretty sure he would be shaking. He might have just thrown all of the knowledge he had been compiling, that he had sold the server out to save, to the wind.
Fortunately, before he had the time to really ponder any of his decisions–if time even existed here–with as little ceremony as his falling into this nothing had, Jamato fell back out.
He had just moments to process being able to feel air and see color again, before slamming into the hard, green, ground.
…I would like to return to being unable to feel my body, was his first thought after enough pain faded he could regain conscious thought.
This isn’t obsidian. This is grass! was his second. In shock, he lay face-down on the ground, flexing his fingers into and out of the soft plants below him. Had he somehow teleported? But Jamato didn’t have a stasis in the overworld. How was this possible?
“Jamato!? What happened to you, are you alright!?” A familiar voice, laced with far more care than Jamato had heard in years called out, louder than the ringing in his ears the impact had caused.
This wasn’t possible. Jamato was hallucinating.
“...Are you crying?” the one person who seemed to always know what Jamato was hiding underneath his mask, who should be thousands of blocks away and still in the Nether, almost uncharacteristically asked.
This wasn’t possible. He hadn’t spoken to Jamato in that tone in years. An outcome like this– it was unimaginable, implausible, incomprehensible–not possible!
Slowly, JamatoP rolled onto his back. Standing above him, hands on his knees, in all his rainbow and black glory, stood SpokeIsHere. No Null leader armor. No mace, no totem. Nothing but an open expression, soft concern instead of burning hate. It made no sense. Jamato slipped a hand underneath his mask to wipe his remaining tears (that the player in front of him had somehow been able to tell were still there) did not change the scene in front of him. A black hole in front of the blue sky, Spoke remained.
“Spoke?” Jamato rasped out. “…What are you doing?” Why was he here? Why did he look like that, why did he sound like that?
Spoke grinned, smoothly rolling past Jamato’s lack of answer to his question. “Right now? I think i’m crouching in a field, talking to someone called JamatoP about talking to someone called JamatoP about talking to someone called JamatoP about-” Jamato sat up, shooting Spoke a glare he knew the other could feel even through his mask. Spoke burst into giggles, cutting himself off, the voidling falling into an undignified sitting position right next to Jamato.
What a bizarrely domestic scene. It was almost scary, how easy this casualness felt. A warm breeze, healthy grass, the distant smell of flowers, a cheery Spoke, all things that were nowhere near Jamato’s box at the bottom of purgatory.
“Not helpful, Spoke.”
“Sorry, sorry my friend! I was actually just looking for you. You weren’t in the base when I got back.” Spoke said, mindlessly gesturing over his shoulder.
Like he was hammering the final nail into the coffin, Jamato leaned forward to see where Spoke was pointing. Off in the distance, just behind Spoke’s thumb, Jamato could barely make out the edge of his first base peeking out of the side of a vaguely familiar hill.
The base that had been blown up by the Invisible Mafia. In a hill that had been flattened.
Jamato dug his fingers into the ground in an attempt to steady himself, gloves easily breaking through the soft ground that was so unlike the obsidian he should be sitting on. Either Spoke was playing a cruel, cruel, game with him, to rub it in to Jamato that his old friend was so much worse than the beast in his nightmares, or…
Or Jamato had reset far more than he had been intending, or should even be possible.
Desperately, Jamato snapped his gaze back to Spoke. “Wh-where’s Null?” He questioned, more fear in his voice than he had been intending to let slip.
“Huh? What’s a Null?” Spoke asked, squinting at Jamato like he was the one acting strange.
“My– Null is my sword. A new one I just got, netherite. I was on my way to max it out.” A boldfaced lie. One that Spoke swallowed down as though it was honey, no corrections nor challenge. How cruel. How encouraging.
“Oh, cool! You gotta let me see it if you find it! Though it's still got nothing on George, sorry to say,” Spoke smirked, patting the glass accessory holding said salmon. Which should be dead. “Did you drop it?”
A lie sprang to Jamato’s lips like an arrow from a dispenser. “No, I think I remember now. I ran into some bandits. Everything I own got taken, but I’m still alive, right?” Spoke puffed up, glaring in circles around the two players sitting on the ground.
“Awh, seriously!? Just point me in the direction those chungies went! Don’t worry my friend, they’ll never see me coming!” Anger was laced between each word, but not a drop was aimed towards Jamato. His behavior was exactly like that of the Spoke in his distant memories, a Spoke that had died trying to obtain a command block. No discrepancies, no hesitation. Spoke was a fantastic actor, but Jamato still had his tells memorized. Spoke was not acting.
This shouldn’t be possible.
But if this was really, truly happening, then Jamato had not just rolled back the data of all the lands of the server, but also the data of all the players on it. Jamato had reset time itself.
What infinite possibilities this unlocked. Maybe he could regain all the items he lost. Maybe he could learn about the civilizations that had fallen long before he arrived. Maybe…
Maybe SpokeIsHere could be fixed.
Wasn’t this the best possible opportunity Jamato had ever found himself in front of? Jamato just had to stop Spoke from ruining himself. He could make sure Spoke never became a threat to the server, never risked the greater good or every player's future.
And, just maybe, Jamato could do it while being a little less lonely this time.
“No, no, you don’t need to do that. But considering how dangerous spawn is getting…” Jamato trailed off, successfully captivating Spoke’s attention.
“Hey, Spoke? How would you like to go on an adventure?”