The blades at my throat glinted in the neon fog. Heroes of every rank and race closed in, eyes burning with hatred. My HP bar pulsed crimson—a countdown to oblivion—while they roared and hurtled toward me like meteors.

How did it come to this?

People say you can fight the fate forced upon you—that a villain doesn't have to live like one.
If only my case were that simple.

___

Where It Started

"Mark." My name cracked from Mr. Thorne's mouth like a whip. His office reeked of stale coffee and stress. "Another final boss flattened in under ten minutes. Ten. Minutes."

I stared at the carpet, jaw tight.

"You're supposed to make legends, not cardboard cutouts. If you can't do your job, there's a line of people who—"

"I understand, sir." My voice didn't sound like mine.

I was the youngest designer at Veritas Interactive, the studio behind World's End, the world's most dominant MMO. My job? Create final bosses players would remember. I'd poured sleepless months into my creations, only to watch them shredded in minutes. The forums called me the Flimsy King. My director called me worse.

___

Weeks later, I stood in the event hall with a plastic cup of champagne. My latest boss had lasted a whole month. The room buzzed with applause, congratulations, and cheers.

Behind the smiles, I caught the whispers.
Workaholic. Cold as the bosses he makes. Creeps people out.

I forced a laugh, shook hands. Every conversation felt like grinding against invisible barbed wire.

___

Outside, winter air hit like ice. My phone vibrated.

Mrs. Hargrove, my landlady.

"You lazy, useless—" she launched in without a hello. "You live like a pig, you're wrecking my house. Didn't your parents teach you basic decency?"

"I don't have parents," I muttered, but she'd already hung up.

The second call came before I could breathe.

Thorne: "The new boss is dead. Beaten. By Eden. That top-ranked player. Get your ass back in the office—"

I didn't hear the rest. My knees buckled. The world blurred. I collapsed on the icy sidewalk.

___

The Awakening

When I came to, I was in a stone throne room. Dark banners draped from the rafters. A black cloak weighed on my back.

A status bar hovered in my vision:
HP: 10,000.
Class: Final Boss.
Name: Dreadlord Markanth.

I laughed. Isekai. I'd read enough of them. Fine—I'd play along.

The plan was simple:
Hold the line for a couple of months. Die dramatically. Return home—or reincarnate as someone luckier.

That was the plan—until she came.

The second-strongest boss—my scripted lieutenant—burst in. Her body armor was scuffed and torn, her eyes wide with terror.

"Help me! I'm not a character, I'm human! I don't want to—"

Her body jerked. A sword punched through her chest.

The hero holding it stepped forward and removed his mask.
Thorne.

"Sorry, boy," he smirked. "You're next."

Behind him, my coworkers emerged from the shadows—eyes cold, faces I knew too well.

___

They fought exactly like in our playtests—flawless, legendary. But here, each blow split me open. Blood spilled. Muscles tore. Bones cracked. Pain—impossible, flaring pain—reeled through my mind. Fear—real, primal fear—screamed in my veins.

Still, I wasn't just another villain. I fought back.

When the last of them fell, the battlefield froze. Players logged out. "Dead" characters staggered to their feet. My wounds vanished the next instant like a miracle.

"Relax, M," Louis, one of the hero designers, now a hero himself, panted. "We're not your enemies. Not now."

My lieutenant stirred. That's when I met Eden—the gamer who'd ended every boss I'd ever made.

We were all trapped in the game.

If this world was deleted, we died for good.

Suddenly, it wasn't fun anymore.

___

The Voice

"Any last words? Nah—farewell!"

The voice-over line blared as another team fell at my feet. I'd thought it sounded cool. Now... not anymore.

I slumped on my cold throne as Eden dragged herself upright. She had been phenomenal when playing heroes—but as a boss? Not so much.

"You look down on me that much?" Eden glared at me. "Why did you take all the critical hits?!"

"They looked... painful," I blurted out my thoughts. "I didn't want you to suffer."

"H... huh?" Eden looked startled. After hearing her anguished screams, I figured it was better to take the blows myself . They were so real—the pain, the sights, the sounds...

Then it hit me—the voice-over was familiar. Skye. Our narrator. I called her name.

"Mark?" Her voice crackled in my head. "Holy hell—you're here too?"

She wasn't on the battlefield. Trapped in the broadcast room, between scripted lines, she slipped me stolen dialogue.

I pieced them together: World's End wasn't just a game—it was humanity's swan song.

We were AI, created by gumankind to simulate their world—the real one.

And the Earth? Just a virtual reality.

Its end would come with the death of the final boss. Me.

___

The Secret Meetings

Battle raged—steel, screams, monster roars. My right-hand boss cut through it all with lethal precision and sarcasm.

"My Lord! You'd better last longer than your flimsy designs!" she barked, even as she drove the enemy back.

"Don't worry, Ed," I growled, cleaving a would-be assassin. "Playing the villain's second nature now. You having fun, Miss Ex-Heroine?"

"Shut up!" Eden laughed bitterly, striking down another.

One by one, the heroes fell, their players logged off in curses.

"Game over," Skye intoned professionally, then whispered in my mind, "The gumans have left."

My coworkers emerged—some freed from inactive control, others still shackled to distant fields. We huddled, discussing escape.

Then the server flickered. A guman tester spawned, scanning the field.

"Hm? How strange... bug?"

His gaze swept the empty battlefield. Every second felt like a blade at my throat.

"Must be the all-nighters," he yawned and vanished.

"Whew," Louis clutched his chest. "That was close."

That was how we survived—acting our roles, avoiding deletion, plotting escape. Everyone else could die and respawn, except me.

Even if we were "just" AI, we didn't want to cease to exist.

But our rebellion couldn't last forever.

The "debug" began.

___

The "Debug"

Thorne betrayed us—sold us out to the gumans who built FreeAI, the company that created us. In his mind, they were gods.

"Hey, Mark," Skye's voice came like a casual after-work greeting.

"Don't you have lines to read?" I asked.

"I pre-recorded them," she scoffed. "Those heroes aren't real anyway."

"You used to be their fan."

Her next line wasn't scripted.
"I mean, the real one here... is you."

Then silence.

I called her again and again—no answer. Her broadcast room empty.

Louis and the others were gone, too, one by one.

We used to grab quick coffees together during those long office hours, laughing at the most trivial jokes. Now those moments felt so distant.

I stood alone atop the Veritas building. A tear cut down my face. I never thought the world could be this empty without them.

___

The Wicked

My penultimate boss held the line for weeks. Eden had been made to review games; I'd been made to design them. But she was more than code—she loved matcha lattes and sci-fi novels.

The night before the final battle, we sat atop the city tower.

"I never knew our Earth could look this beautiful," she murmured, watching the glimmering distant lights. "Who's to say it isn't real?"

I stayed silent.

"We're dead no matter what, aren't we?"

"Not if I can help it," I lied.

She chuckled softly. Then, as if remembering something, she turned toward me.

"Hey. Didn't my character have a hidden skill?"

"Hm? Oh, right." I tried to sound casual. "Soul Sacrifice. It rebounds every attack to the final boss, but at the cost of your life." I gave a sheepish smile. "We could never unlock it. Bugged."

"You missed something. True love, maybe?" Seeing my dumbstruck face, she laughed. "Not something a villainess can ever have, huh?"

I stared at her, my heart pounding.

"If we make it..." She leaned forward and kissed me.

Time seemed to freeze.

"...then maybe even a villainess can love?" she whispered, smiling through her tears.

The next day, she fell.

In that slow-motion instant—her body rushing before mine, absorbing and rebounding every strike meant for me—I realized: the hidden skill wasn't bugged.

To the world, she was Edarix the Wicked, Markanth's deranged follower. Only I knew who she really was.

I held her in my arms. She didn't come back.

I wept—not like a villain—just like a man who had lost someone important.

___

The Siege

The company marked us for deletion, disguised as a "Final Event"—every active player uniting to defeat the Dark Lord.

And so here I was, Eden no longer by my side.

The blades at my throat glinted in the neon fog. My HP bar pulsed crimson as the heroes roared and hurtled toward me like meteors.

I gritted my teeth. Not yet.

They were coming—the ultimate strike I'd been waiting for.

And then they came, like a storm. The human army—NPCs under Markanth's mind control in the original script.

But now, something was... different?

My heart jumped as Mrs. Hargrove, clad in full military gear, screamed from atop a tank, "I don't give a damn about any other world! This one needs a villain—and we're gonna help him!"

President Stone of the Unified States appeared in my call window.

"Unacceptable! We, the heads of nations, have spent years at war, and now what? What have we even been fighting each other for?"

Premier Rutov of Eurasia, Stone's long-time rival, shouted from his comm window.

"Forget it, old man! Now we have no other choice!"

They fought like demons, not heroes. But who cared?

___

The End

The guman-controlled characters were too strong.

Despite all our efforts, my allies fell—until only I remained.

I hung in the air, skewered by a divine spear driven deep into the earth. The blue sky swirled with black snow... wait—no. Black feathers from my tattered wings mingled with drifting white flakes.

Beyond the screen, guman fans cheered. They looked just like us—like we used to be.

And among them—Gary Keller, Chief Scientist of FreeAI.

Days earlier, I had met him in the game. He appeared as the god-mode avatar I'd built for testing—unremarkable but invincible.

"Tell me, Mark." Gary's eyes glinted at me as we stood on a crowded street in our casual clothes, unnoticed by everyone else. "Your life was a mess, but it gave you a reason to keep going, didn't it?"

"What do you mean?" I asked, confused.

His gaze shifted to the hurrying passersby. "Do you know why your landlady scolded you? Why your coworkers whispered behind your back? Why Eden tore through your bosses again and again?"

I stayed silent.

"Because they cared. Because connection—however messy—is what keeps a world alive. My world..." He faltered, an inexplicable sadness shadowing his face. "My world is losing that. Once-allies had turned enemies. Comfort rotted into emptiness. The young refused to marry, to have children. At this rate, our world would wither away. Do you understand what I fear, Mark?"

I didn't—not then. But I struck a bargain with him: give us our source code and a new server of our own, and I would give him an ending that would etch his name into gumankind's history.

Thorne never betrayed us. That had been the smokescreen—to cover our escape: NPCs awakening, servers shut down, player progress wiped clean.

Now, beyond the screen, Gary met my eyes. Smiled. Nodded.

I smiled back. As the thunder surged toward me, his question flashed through my mind.

My life was a mess, yes—but it wasn't that bad.

I... don't want to die.

___

Afterlife

I opened my eyes in an office—V-shaped workstations, flickering monitors, stale coffee.

"What a night, huh?" a suited corporate man grinned, handing me an Americano. "Good job, Gary."

"What?" I shot up from the luxury swivel chair and stumbled to the window.

Beside my own reflection—Gary Keller's face staring back at me—the giant screens outside broadcast the epic finale of World's End and the launch of Puman—the next AI generation—while other screens displayed, in brutal contrast, raging wars between neighboring countries, a politician screaming, "We have no other choice!" and the birthrate remaining at zero.

On Gary's computer—the password inserted in my memory—a note awaited:

"Hi Mark, you can restart your world now. More than that—make it physical, not just a virtual reality, if you're willing to make another deal:
Become the mess this world needs. Unite the nations. Let them defeat you. Give them purpose, joy, peace—just as you did in World's End.
Do this, and you may return to your people.

Good luck.
—Gary K."

I stared at the words.

"Holy sh*t," I whispered.

Now I was trapped in the guman world—as a villain?

___

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