The next day, at 07:59:30 Earth time and 07:58:30 Blue Star time, there were less than ninety seconds left before the players would be forcibly logged out of the "game."
"..."
Just then, the unlucky green-skinned player I Want to Sleep Another Thousand Years, who had been nailed to a wooden frame on some altar, finally slowly opened his eyes again in the darkness.
Yes, he had logged in, right on time.
Very soon, aided by the full-sensory visor, his consciousness was stuffed back out of the void and into that battered, green body still nailed to the wooden frame, covered in wounds and wracked with agony.
"?!"
The moment he logged in, he naturally gritted his teeth and prepared himself to endure torture.
But he waited one second... two seconds... three seconds. It was only after more than ten seconds that he realized in astonishment that the constant, bone-deep pain—the kind that made him want to tear his entire body off the frame alive—had not come?
Instead, he felt hollow, as though something had been extracted from his body?
Other than that, there was only a faint stinging pain where his hands, feet, and body had been nailed down.
Those Chaos cultists and demon monsters had not tortured him today?
"..."
Having noticed something was wrong, he immediately opened his eyes, which had long since adapted to the cave's darkness, and nervously looked around.
At a glance, he saw that the altar area deep within the cave was still dim, but not completely dark. The braziers around the altar were still burning, their faint flickering firelight and the shadows of certain things still swaying over the stone walls. By that light, he could make out several motionless things scattered haphazardly across the ground.
Those were...
The corpses of Chaos