Work Text:
The world was fraying at the edges.
Avery’s hands were slick with sweat against his mouse, his heart hammering a rhythm of pure, unadulterated terror against his ribs.
On the screen, the environment was breaking—textures stretching into long, jagged needles of gray and yellow.
And there, standing amidst the digital decay, was the man who had been a ghost in a machine for months.
<TheMostMayo> I’M NOT LETTING YOU DIE FOR ME
Avery meant it.
He had spent so long chasing Derek’s footsteps, reading his panicked journals, and feeling the phantom weight of Derek’s warnings.
He wasn't just a player anymore.
He was a witness.
<d3rlord3> It’s okay you might not even remember me when you’re out of here
<d3rlord3> who knows how this place works
The words hit Avery harder than any mob attack ever could.
The idea of Derek—the real Derek, whose mind was being chewed away by a cosmic horror—simply dissolving into forgotten data was unbearable.
“I’ll remember,” Avery whispered to his empty room, his voice cracking.
“I’ll save the footage. I’ll make sure you existed.”
He typed it out, his fingers flying across the keys, declaring his loyalty to a man he’d never met in a world that shouldn’t exist.
He felt a strange, morbid sense of peace.
If they were going to be consumed by the King, they would do it together.
Then, the chat shifted. The frantic energy in Derek’s messages suddenly smoothed out.
It was too calm.
<d3rlord3> Avery what’s in your inventory
Avery blinked.
The question was so mundane, so normal for Minecraft, that it bypassed his defenses.
His mind scrambled—did he have a pearl? A flint and steel?
Maybe there was a way to craft a solution, a last-minute patch to the nightmare.
“What?” Avery muttered.
He hit ‘E’. The inventory screen popped up, gray and familiar, obscuring his vision of the world.
He looked at his hotbar—bits of moss, a half-broken sword, some food.
He began to list them in his head, ready to type back.
He didn't see Derek move.
He didn't see the pixelated arm swing.
THUMP
The sound of the knockback was loud in his headset.
Suddenly, the inventory screen vanished as his character was jerked backward.
The eyes—the sick, disturbing yellow-tinted eyes—disappeared.
<TheMostMayo> ?>wdaswadd
Avery’s fingers mashed the keys in a blind panic, trying to find the forward tilt, trying to catch a ledge that wasn't there.
The screen turned pitch black.
The coordinates in the corner began to spin into negative infinity.
<TheMostMayo> WAIT
But there was no one to hear him.
Above him, at the edge of the ledge, the silhouette of d3rlord3 stood perfectly still.
Derek had saved him the only way he knew how:
by becoming the monster Avery refused to let him be.
Avery was falling, and for the first time since he opened that storage locker, the world was silent.
The screen didn't just go black.
In the world of the King, "nothing" was never truly empty—it was a heavy, suffocating static that filled Avery’s headphones until his ears rang with the sound of a thousand dead servers.
Avery’s character model tumbled through the Y-levels, the coordinates on his HUD flickering so fast they became a blurred line of white text.
-500
-2000
-10,000
He stopped trying to press 'W'.
There was no floor to find. "Derek!" Avery shouted, his voice cracking in the quiet of his bedroom.
On screen, the chat was gone. The hotbar had desaturated, the icons for his sword and bread turning into gray, unrecognizable smudges.
Then, the hallucinations started. Floating in the void weren't blocks, but memories.
He saw the tree Derek had mentioned—the one that was supposed to have "nothing" on it.
But as he fell past it, it wasn't a Minecraft sprite anymore. It was rendered in hyper-realistic detail, its leaves made of yellowed parchment, each one inscribed with a line of Derek's frantic handwriting.
<d3rlord3> I can't feel my hands.
<d3rlord3> The monitor is the only thing that's real.
<d3rlord3> Avery, don't look back.
"I'm looking back," Avery whispered, tears stinging his eyes as the tree vanished into the heights above.
"I'm still looking."
The further he fell, the more the game began to peel away.
The "void" started to look less like a game glitch and more like a physical place—a vast, hollow cathedral made of shadow and silk.
Suddenly, a prompt appeared in the center of his screen. It wasn't a standard Minecraft toast notification.
It was a jagged, gold-bordered window:
[!] SYSTEM: COMPATIBILITY FOUND
"No," Avery breathed.
He saw it then.
Below him, a shape was rising to meet his fall.
It looked like d3rlord3, but the model was torn open, its inner code spilling out like glowing golden thread.
And woven into those threads was the silhouette of the King—huge, faceless, and draped in tatters of yellow.
Derek had lied.
He said he was going to trap it, but as Avery watched their forms blur together, he realized the truth.
Derek wasn't trapping the King; he was becoming the one with it.
He was the sacrifice that kept the entity from bleeding into the real world, and he had thrown Avery away to keep the "infection" from spreading to a fresh mind.
Just before the screen completely succumbed to the golden static, one last line appeared in the chat.
It wasn't from a player.
[d3rlord3] has left the game
[d3rlord3] has been deleted
Avery reached out, his hand hovering over the monitor as if he could pull Derek back from the edge of the code.
The gold brightness peaked, blindingly white, until his monitor hummed with a high-pitched frequency that made the glass vibrate.
Then, silence.
[Connection Lost] Internal Exception: java.io.IOException: The world no longer exists
Avery sat in the dark of his room, the blue light of the "Server Lost" screen reflecting in his wide, hollow eyes.
He looked at his hands.
They were shaking.
He moved his mouse to the "Recordings" folder.
The file was there.
It was data saved—the only proof that Derek had ever lived, ever fought, and ever cared enough to betray him.
Avery clicked 'Save'.
"I remember," he whispered to the empty room.
"I'm the only one left, but I remember."
»»-----------¤-----------««
Avery’s mouse hovered over the link.
His room was dark, the only light coming from the sterile white glow of the YouTube player.
The channel had no banner, no profile picture—just a string of numbers and a single video uploaded "1 hour ago."
Goodbye from d3rlord3
Avery clicked.
There was no intro, no face cam. Just a screen recording of a Google Doc.
He could hear the sound of a mechanical keyboard—heavy, deliberate clicks—and beneath that, a ragged, wet breathing that sounded like someone fighting through a physical weight.
On the screen, the cursor blinked steadily.
Then, the letters began to appear, one by one.
You know it's weird writing a final letter...
Avery leaned closer, his hand over his mouth.
He watched Derek struggle with the words.
He watched the cursor pause for long seconds when Derek wrote about his mind becoming a prison.
When the line appeared:
"Please don't think you failed, Avery,"
Avery felt a sob catch in his throat.
"I did," Avery whispered to the screen.
"I let you fall."
But the video kept going.
Derek was typing about the beauty of the universe—the things the King had shown him before it began to consume him.
It was a strange, terrifying comfort.
Even in his destruction, Derek was trying to give Avery something to hold onto.
The most painful part was the ending.
The frantic typing slowed down as Derek’s strength clearly began to fail.
Whatever you do at the crossroads. Keep going forward.
Or something like that
(I was never really good with endings)
The cursor blinked for ten more seconds. Then, the video cut to black.
Avery didn't close the tab.
He couldn't.
He realized that Derek had managed to do the one thing the King couldn't stop:
he had left a piece of his humanity in a format the entity couldn't corrupt.
A simple Google Doc
A recording
Avery opened his own editing software.
He took his footage—the void, the betrayal, the fall—and he spliced Derek's letter right at the very end.
He wasn't just making a "Minecraft Video" anymore.
He was building a tombstone.
Avery hit 'Upload' on his own channel.
He looked at the crossroads on his screen one last time, then he reached out and turned off the monitor.
For the first time in months, he didn't turn left or right.
He just walked away from the desk.