Chapter Text
Feng Min was a winner. She was a winner and had been winning since her very first victory in the 2012 Nebula Arc national championship. She had carried her esports team, the Lazer Bears, to the very end. She remembered the way that the crowd had cheered when she made the winning play, a tricky combination of speed and coordination that took her weeks to master, and the way her teammates had clapped her on the back after they had gone back to their dormitory. She remembered the way it felt to keep winning, tournament after tournament, championship after championship, with no obstacle too great to overcome. She remembered her ultimate triumph, beating their rival team, the Shock Demons. No one was left in her way. She was the Shining Lion, the reigning champion, the ultimate winner. And she loved it. Winning was everything to her.
Min was the fastest learner in the Nebula Arc community. When new content was added, she was always the first one to figure out optimal plays with the new characters and she always found new techs before anyone else. She took pride in that, happy that her incredible talent was being recognized. But she always wanted more. With the Shock Demons vanquished, there was no other obstacle to beat. Despite this, she needed to keep proving to her audience that she was the best. She couldn’t afford to lose to anyone, to drop a single place in the Nebula Arc leaderboards. Desperate to stay on top, she would spend longer and longer amounts of time playing Arc, looking through every character and map over and over just to find a new combination or strategy she could show off. Half an hour of testing a character now turned into two hours. She couldn’t stop herself.
Eventually, there was nothing in the game that she hadn't discovered. Still, she kept searching, but her discoveries were now fewer and far between. With less rest and no new strategies to make up for it, the pressure and obsession with staying the best started to get to her. She started losing. When she was little, one of her mom's favorite proverbs was “To build it took one hundred years; to destroy it one day.” Younger Min never understood that. “How could something so big break so fast?” She had asked her mother. Her mother had never given her a direct answer, only told her that she would understand when she was older. And now that Min was older, she finally understood it. Everything that Min had worked for, everything that she had fought for, was collapsing in on itself right before her eyes. Her fans had turned on her, waiting for her to slip up and pouncing every time she did. Everyone loves an underdog, but Min was an underdog no more. Now Min had become the ruthless opponent for the next new hero to defeat.
Without any chance left of being the Shining Lion she once was, Min left her team. She wanted to try something else, win at another thing. But games were all she was good at. She had been playing video games since she was able to use a keyboard, moving on would be like abandoning her whole life. But there was nothing to go back to. She had impulsively and preemptively severed her contract with the Lazer Bears, ruining her chances of rejoining and making all the other Nebula Arc teams refuse to sign her. It just sucked. Min didn't know when it had started, but she started going to the bar at least six nights a week. Because what else was there to do. She stopped caring where she ended up after a night of drinking and would probably have been kidnapped by now if the barkeep wasn't so vigilant. Directionless, she alternated between the bar and her tiny apartment for when the bar refused to give her more alcohol.
Min sat in her usual booth at the back of the bar, aimlessly staring at her cheap beer. As she took another sip of her drink, she thought about what went wrong and ended her up here, alone on a weekday night, drunk and depressed. Not now, Min. She thought to herself. You can’t afford to make yourself feel even shittier right now. But as she thought this, she came upon a new realization. Why does it even matter? Why does anything matter? She pinched the bridge of her nose as she fished a crumpled wad of yuan out of her jacket pocket. She stood up and shakily walked out of the bar into the night. As she staggered out into the dimly lit street, she noticed a crow looking directly at her a few feet away. The crow flapped its wings and flew into a pitch-black alley. Min didn’t know why she followed the crow, she just needed to see where it was going. She walked into the alley and immediately tripped over a cardboard box, knocking her onto her hands and knees. She tried to get up, but her head was spinning and her muscles ached. Drunk, she felt herself about to faint. I can't faint, not here. She thought to herself. The last of her strength gave out and she collapsed in the filth of the alleyway.
The first thing Min notices when she wakes up is the air. The smog back in Shanghai was almost suffocating, wherever she had ended up this time was quite literally a breath of fresh air. What the hell happened last night? she thought to herself. As she blinked the sleep from her eyes, the next thing she noticed was all the trees. Min wasn't sure if she had seen this many trees in the same area before in her life. Taking in her surroundings, she slowly made her way to a rundown shack not far off from where she woke up. Looking up at the building, she saw the moon peeking through the tall pines, illuminating the ferns and the puddles on the ground. A few yards away she saw a stack of boxes with a wooden pallet propped up against them. Must be a shipping yard? Or maybe a construction site? She shrugged and continued her slow walk to the old faded brick structure.
As she peered at the labeling on a box, she tried reading the faded text:
Macmillan. That could be a place or a name or a label for the box itself. Whatever it was, she wasn’t familiar with it. Next line.
Seattle. She had no clue what that was.
The next word was Washington. Where had she heard that before? She racked her brain.
Her eyes widened. Oh, shit.
She was in the United fucking States. America. How the hell had she gotten there? Looking around in disbelief, she noticed a young boy with a beanie and deep dark circles crouched behind a box about ten meters off, nervously peeking out in the opposite direction. Had he been there the whole time? Suppressing the wave of suspicion, she slowly approached him. What would she even say? She settled on a simple greeting.
"Uh, Hi?"
The boy jumped. He seemingly hadn't noticed her, too busy looking out for whatever was deeper in the forest. After a second of confusion, his eyes widened with recognition and he put his finger to his lips.
She frowned and came a little closer. Suddenly, her heart started throbbing and she got a really bad feeling. Before she could turn and leave, he suddenly grabbed her arm and quickly pulled her down to the ground behind the box. Min was not having this. Struggling to yank her arm free, she took a deep breath to yell for help. Before she could, he clapped his hand over her mouth. “Shhhh,” he said nervously. This skinny guy had fingers of steel, because she could not wrench her arm free. Min was sure she was being kidnapped. She didn’t want to know what this strange boy was planning on doing with her, and she wasn’t going to find out. She bit his hand, kicked him in the groin and immediately took off in the other direction. She saw some brick structures in the distance, maybe there were other people there? It didn't matter. She needed to get the fuck out of here.
“Wait!” The boy yelled after her. “Be carefu-”
Before he could even finish his sentence, Min heard a snap and felt a searing pain in her shin. The nerves in her lower leg overloaded and went numb almost instantly as she let out a loud shriek. She had stepped in a fucking bear trap. "FUCK!" Her pained swearing quickly devolving into just crying as her pounding heartbeat sped up even more. S he looked up frantically and saw a giant humanoid figure walking towards her with a mean looking machete in his hand. Panicking even more, her brain went into overdrive. Go go go go go, you have to run, Go! She thought to herself as she pried frantically at the trap cutting deep into her shin.
Heartbeat pounding in her chest, Min rubbed her fingertips raw scrabbling at the massive bear trap clamped on her shin. The large man took his time walking up to her, though he was more monster than man. He was wearing a mask made of brutally twisted and broken bones held together with industrial wire, complete with two small eyeholes and a set of pointy teeth. Giving up on opening the bear trap, she pushed off her good leg and tried to run away from the masked man. As she tried to run, she accidentally put weight on her definitely broken leg, and pain shot up her whole body. Her nervves spasming, she tripped and fall forward into the dirt with a pained cry. Using what little strength was left in her, she weakly pushed herself up and started pulling herself forward over the forest floor. She heard loud footsteps get even louder as her heart threatened to beat out of her chest. She squeezed her eyes shut and braced herself. Suddenly, Min felt a jagged blade rip through her back. She shrieked in pain, her voice splitting as her body trembled. Sobbing as she struggled against the pain, she lifted her arm to keep dragging herself forward. Before she could move any more, the man stomped on the small of her back with his massive boot. She screamed and collapsed in a bloody heap on the ground.
Barely conscious, Min felt herself being picked up. She barely felt the jagged metal sticking out of the man's shoulder puncturing her stomach as she was thrown over his shoulder. Blood streamed out of the open wound that split her back open as he firmly gripped her waist to keep her from falling off. She felt the man's strides across the forest, each step shooting pain through her whole body as the man's tight grip made her back throb in pain. the man slowed down, and she felt her body weight being shifted. The man unceremoniously impaled her shoulder with a hanging meat hook and all of the woozy pain suddenly sharpened again. She screamed again, louder than she thought was possible. Min hung several feet off the ground, all her body weight hanging by the meat hook that had impaled her shoulder. She saw the metal hook poking out from under her collarbone and sobbed loudly. She was really going to die. Blood loss taking its toll, her cries grew weaker as she felt her body slowly failing.
After what felt like an eternity hanging up there, she felt someone grip her firmly under her armpits and she whimpered as they pulled her up and off the hook. As her feet touched the ground, her strength gave out and she fell forward. Whoever had taken her down from the hook caught her and slowly helped her to her feet. “You’re gonna be okay,” She heard them say. She had lost too much blood, she knew she was dying, but the person, who she now recognized as the tired beanie kid from before, seemed to think she could come back from this. Before he could do anything else, her heart started intensely pounding again. The boy’s eyes widening, he pushed her away from him and turned to face the man in the mask. The masked figure swung his rusted blade at the kid as Min struggled to steady herself against a tree. The boy crossed his arms over his face to block the swing and shouted in pain as the blade bit into his forearms. Hoping to keep the killer’s attention, the boy started to run in the opposite direction. Min, adrenaline pumping through her, tried to push herself off the tree to get away, but her shin was definitely broken and putting weight on it sent a stabbing pain up her body. She tumbled forward and bit the dirt with a pained cry. Dizzy from blood loss, she slowly pushed herself up and looked back at the masked figure. She watched as that horrific mask turned from the boy who was yelling for its attention and fixed its vicious stare onto her.
She struggled to crawl away as the monster approached. She was really going to die. She heard the tired kid yell again as he ran back towards them, but a loud snap and a horrible scream meant that he would likely meet a fate similar to Min's. The killer picked him up and without hesitation, impaled him with the hook that Min was just hanging from. The kid screamed as he hung there, and the monster turned back towards Min.
Stupid kid,
she thought as she started coughing up blood.
Now we’re both going to die.
Her arms gave out and the masked man kicked her in the face, breaking her nose and sending her once again to the ground. The boy couldn't do anything but watch. He shouted out to try and get the monster’s attention, but nothing was going to stop him from finishing his prey. Min, laying in a pool of her own blood, struggled to even lift her head up. Like before, she felt the rusty blade come down on her back over and over, each hit making a disgusting wet noise as Min cried. As she laid there, the man with the machete stepped back and watched as Min slowly died. As she felt her body shutting down, she thought about the failures that had led her here.
I failed again,
she thought to herself.
I’m a failure.
Her vision gave out and she could only feel her blood on her skin.
Hopefully the afterlife treats her well. And then there was darkness.