Work Text:
When the world reached something that could be called modern, it had already lived several lives.
Martyn saw it as time went on—how the world generation updated every once in a while, the way redstone finally behaved itself instead of fighting back, the way water flowed properly without that faint, nagging sense that it might forget how at any moment. The world had learned how to be stable and behave, but that didn’t mean it had forgotten the past.
There were places where the past clung stubbornly to the present, where outdated mechanics left impressions like fossils pressed into sediment. The Square Hole was one of them. It started as a joke at the beginning of the game—it was in practice a trap or punchline, which was Grian’s particular brand of architectural malice—but over time it became something else entirely. It was like a wound that refused to close. It widened with every death, deepened with every fall, and remembered each body that passed through it even as the world around it updated and moved on.
Martyn found himself thinking, distantly, that it was fitting. Time had always been the real theme here. Time—how much you had, how quickly it could be taken from you, how little control you actually possessed over its direction. Each update dragged the world forward whether the players were ready or not, forcing them to live through history instead of merely referencing it.
Impulse’s death was fast, and almost understated for how much it mattered.
At the clash near the Pyramid of Gluten, Scott moved with his usual calm inevitability, and then Impulse was gone—seventh place claimed without much ceremony or spectacle. The server felt quieter afterward despite rising tensions between the other surviving players, as though it had exhaled and never quite drawn breath again.
Cleo followed long after, and this one hurt Martyn.
The Lighthouse of Time stood proud yet damaged against the sky, a moment meant to symbolise the constant change, and they fell into a trap the Villies made. It was a misstep into stone sharpened with intent. Sixth place, claimed by irony so sharp it may as well have been deliberate.
Martyn stood very still when the message appeared on his comm.
Cleo had been his only teammate, and she wasn’t an ally of convenience, but of actual trust. They were someone who understood him without explanation, who fought alongside him instead of orbiting around him. Losing them felt like the ground shifting beneath his feet, the fight suddenly louder and lonelier than it had been moments before.
That left five.
Martyn, Jimmy, Grian, Gem, and Scott.
The alliances were obvious, but they were fragile, stretched thin by exhaustion and the creeping awareness that there were simply not enough players left for subtlety anymore. Martyn and Jimmy stood together more by necessity than trust. Grian and Gem held stubbornly tight, and Scott, although leaning toward the Villies, hovered between them like an anchor.
No one rushed the end. Instead, they talked.
They gathered near the Square Hole and discussed how it would finish, voices calm and measured, as if they were arranging a ritual rather than an execution. There was something almost respectful about it—the way no one argued when the decision was made, and how they all seemed to understand that this world deserved an ending with intent.
They agreed to have a sanctioned fight above the Square Hole, because of course it had to be there.
They built the platform together, five figures working in uneasy cooperation as an X-shaped arena took form over stone and shadow. A single block-high wall traced the arena, and it was just enough to pretend there were boundaries. More stalagmites were placed deliberately at the bottom, sharp and merciless, reminders that even survival here required precision.
When it was finished, Martyn took his place at the center. The others spread out along the arms of the X, weapons drawn and armour gleaming. Martyn felt the imbalance immediately—not just spatially, but symbolically. He had always been in the middle of things like this. Between roles, between narratives, between remembering and forgetting.
No external voice gave permission. Instead, pressure built behind Martyn’s eyes as something vast and unseen leaned closer.
Now, the Watchers murmured, not aloud but everywhere at once.
The fight began.
Grian moved first, momentum incarnate as always. Arrows flew before anyone fully reacted. He slammed into Jimmy with brutal efficiency, tearing through hearts in a way that left no room for denial. Jimmy shouted something—half-laughter, half-disbelief—as he stumbled, scrambling for footing.
Martyn didn’t look.
He and Gem converged on Scott from multiple sides, blades flashing as they pressed him hard and fast. Scott fought back with terrifying calm, with every movement and strike deliberate and measured—the same composure Martyn remembered from another world.
Limited Life. Mean Gills.
Scott was at his side then. He stuck with Martyn until the very end, and he was the only one who trusted Martyn completely when the clock turned red and mercy ran out.
Martyn’s grip tightened.
He wasn’t in that world.
Diamond rang as Scott parried Gem and turned, blade sweeping for Martyn’s ribs. Martyn barely blocked it as the impact jarred up his arm. Scott’s expression flickered into something close to resigned irritation, like he’d already done the maths and didn’t like the answer.
For a second, Scott laughed. It was sharp, frustrated, and breathless with inevitability.
“Seriously?” he barked, and then Martyn struck.
Scott staggered, boots scraping against stone. There was no scream or dramatic protest when he fell, only the rush of air and the distant, hollow punctuation of impact below.
Smajor1995 was doomed to fall by InTheLittleWood
Gem turned on Martyn almost immediately. Diamond rang against diamond as instinct overrode friendship. They traded blows in a tight, brutal exchange, neither committing fully as they both measured the other’s limits, until Martyn broke away at the flicker of movement near the platform’s edge.
Grian.
Martyn turned and hit him hard enough to send him skidding backward. Boots scraped and stone chipped. Grian tipped over the edge and disappeared.
Martyn’s breath caught.
The fight fractured into chaos after that.
Jimmy tried to press Gem despite his injuries, desperation lending him speed but not enough force. Gem met him with grim efficiency, her superior hearts making the outcome inevitable. She drove him back step by step until there was nowhere left to retreat.
SolidarityGaming was doomed to fall by GeminiTay
Martyn felt it in his chest—a sharp, aching twist of pride and grief tangled together. Jimmy had lasted so much longer this time. He fought smarter and learned how to survive. It was the same stubborn refusal that, once upon a time ago, had built a kennel out of scraps, and barked defiance at stronger players and called it a joke so fear wouldn’t win.
And still, it ended the way it always seemed to for him—in freefall.
Gem came for him next. Her strike caught him off-guard, sending him tumbling off the platform and down into the Square Hole. Air rushed past. Stone blurred. His body braced for impact…
Martyn slammed a bucket of water down with practised desperation, swimming on the tip of a stalagmite as momentum resolved into survival again by the thinnest margin imaginable. His hands shook violently as the water stream pushed him down, breath rugged and clothes soaked.
Above him, he could hear voices. He could hear fighting, and realised dimly that Grian wasn’t dead. He hadn’t stayed below. He’d climbed the ladder and assumed that Martyn hadn’t survived the fall.
Gem didn’t see it coming.
Martyn looked up just in time to see Gem shoved backward, her expression flashing in shock before gravity took her. She fell in front of him, so close that he felt the rush of displaced air.
GeminiTay was doomed to fall by Grian
Martyn didn’t climb up the ladder. He stayed where he was, now crouched on a stalagmite, heart hammering as he waited for Grian.
Eventually, Grian realised. He paused his pacing up above, then he jumped. Water splashed again, and the final fight began where everything else had ended.
Down in the Square Hole, time felt wrong. Sounds lingered for too long. Movements dragged on as though every previous death pressed against them both. Stone dragged close, and stalagmites gleamed dully in the low light.
They fought fast and brutal.
Martyn’s hearts dropped. Five, then four.
Grian was fairing worse. His movements were sharp but frantic as desperation bled into every strike. Martyn could tell he was low without seeing the numbers.
Then, Martyn ran—not away, but toward a corner.
At the last moment, he spun.
Grian was slain by InTheLittleWood
Grian collapsed against the stone, and his body quickly vanished.
Almost immediately, Martyn could feel the Watcher’s eyes, their attention heavy and undeniable. He felt it before he understood it—it was like a weight settling over the space where a sky should’ve been, attention pressing down from every direction at once. The ladder beneath his hands suddenly felt small and insubstantial. Every rung pulled him upward not just toward the surface of a world that had crowned him again, but toward finality and judgement.
He climbed the ladder slowly, not because he was tired—adrenaline still sang in his veins—but because some part of him already knew what waited for him next. He had felt the quiet after victory, and the way the world held its breath when there were no more players left to count.
At the top, Martyn didn’t hesitate. He stripped off his armour piece by piece, letting it fall to the bottom of the hole in dull clatters. To him, they were proof of survival he no longer needed, and proof of participation he was done carrying. He stood at the edge of the Square Hole and looked down into it, then he jumped.
InTheLittleWood was impaled on a stalagmite
The impact of the stalagmite never came. Instead, the void quickly closed around him, absolute and intimate all at once.
Martyn floated, suspended without breath or gravity, heart still racing as the last echoes of the fight drained out of his body. Here, there was no up or down or sense of direction—only a strong presence and darkness that stretched in every direction, but it wasn’t empty.
It never was.
It remembered him, not as a player or a winner—but as something already catalogued and observed. Threads of memory resurfaced as he drifted—other endings, other arenas. He felt the sharp taste of victory curdling into something heavier.
“So,” Martyn muttered into the dark, voice carrying farther than it should have. “Here we go again.”
The void answered with Their attention. Their presence manifested as distortion and pressure behind the eyes, as the sense that time itself had leaned forward to listen. When they spoke, it was not as individuals but as a chorus, layered and almost hypnotising.
Again, they said.
Twice touched, twice crowned.
Martyn felt them circling the idea of him. He could almost sense their thoughts—he was a player who remembered, a winner they could not strip clean, a variable that refused to reset.
He was an opportunity.
Before their rhyming and ritual cadence, they pressed closer, impatient now.
You persist, they intoned, sound folding over itself.
You endure beyond forgetting. Time marks you.
The void seemed to tighten around Martyn.
Stand with us.
It wasn’t a command, not yet. It was an offer.
Then the cadence locked in, familiar and dreadful in its certainty.
Echoes ripple,
counting more,
ancients lurking by our door.
Refute their reach,
Let not in one,
or feel our wrath,
our will be—
The rhyme cut off sharply like a blade meeting resistance.
Martyn listened, weary but alert as the words slipped into grooves already worn deep in his mind. He remembered everything, from the first time they had spoken, to the promises buried between the lines, and to the way memory itself had been framed as both a reward and punishment.
“You’re rushing,” Martyn said quietly. “Didn’t last time go…poorly?”
The pressure spiked, and then he felt it. It was a counterweight at the edges of the void. Something threaded itself through the darkness, not overwriting but connecting. Where the Watchers felt like gravity, this felt like a current.
Martyn recognised it instantly.
“The Listeners,” he breathed.
Last time, they had torn him free. This time, they arrived faster.
Light bled into the void. It wasn’t blinding or burning—it overlapped with the darkness, like multiple realities had been aligned just slightly out of place. Martyn gasped as sensation snapped back into him all at once, nerves firing with sudden clarity. The Watchers recoiled, bristling.
The Listeners spoke. Their voices were quieter, still layered like the Watchers, but each phrase landed gently, then blurred at the edges, slipping just out of focus as soon as it was understood.
Don’t… underestimate connection.
Fractured parallels,
imperfections.
Threads entangled bind you all.
The void shimmered, and patterns were briefly visible—lines between players, and worlds brushing against each other.
Seek not to see,
and heed our call—
They didn’t finish their sentence, but the sound softened. It wasn’t speech, or even a voice, but a low, steady hush that spread through the void. The pressure eased instantly and the sharpness of awareness dulled just enough to stop hurting. Whatever tension had been building between the Watchers and Listeners faltered, lulled by that gently, insistent quiet.
It felt like being steadied and held.
The Watchers surged in response, anger flickering through the light, but the moment had already passed. The hush lingered, wrapping around Martyn like an anchor, grounding him in place.
He continued to float in the void, pulse finally slowing, and let out a quiet laugh. “Figures. Time breaks twice, and suddenly everyone’s interested.”
Neither side denied it.
The Watchers could not reward him. He already carried the weight they used to bind others. He was a failure of erasure, a walking contradiction to what the other players believed.
But the Listeners did not offer power, or ownership. They offered belonging.
Martyn closed his eyes, feeling time coil around him like an old, familiar weight. He wondered—not for the first time—what it felt like to remember in a world that thrived on forgetting.
For the first time, the void waited with him.