Cursed Earth Online (First Cycle)

3: Interlude

It was over.. The horrible nightmare was over, or at least that's what the girl in the fox mask believed as a quick flash of the butler's face smiling peacefully entered her view for a few moments.

She could finally go home, rest, and take a good long soak in her bathtub.

"Alfred, prepare the car---!" her sentence began to trail off as she realized her butler was nowhere to be found and then looked at the entrance of the mall.

A bloodied necktie lay in front of Cynder as she recognized the knives connected to the indiscernable body and the coat that her servant wore among the chunks of bloodied flesh now all over the tiled floor.

Horror was the only thing that gripped her.

The cyborg did not behead and mince her butler...

She herself took his life without knowing it; the thought alone made her blood run cold as she suddenly felt the burning contents of her stomach exit her mouth in disgust.

Slith, Joe, Vee and Lady could only look at her with pity as she just stared at the body.

They knew just how she felt.

Oddly enough, they didn't feel remorse nor even disgust at what they did. It was as if..... they had done this many times before.

Did the idea of killing others to survive numb them or did they all realize just how ruthless they had become by just playing a simple online game?

Oddly enough, the idea of somehow surviving and being numb to it all was the only sense of comfort they could find.

"Th-thanks for saving me", a small girl in a penguin suit began to say as she bowed to the mourning fox.

"Milady, it is too late for me! Please FiNiSh ME!" the last moment of the butler's life flashed in Cynder's head as the adrenaline finally drained from her system and reminded her why it all happened.......

And of that peaceful smile....

All of the survivors looked to be players of Cursed Earth.

That factor alone seemed to have allowed them to survive the battle that looked all too much of something from the game itself.

Oddly enough, though they played the game and experienced such violence in the virtual world; it still shook them all to their very core when they actually did such things in the real world.

After all the carnage and blood spilled all over the mall, everyone found themselves in shock.

Most of the civilians that were in the mall at that time, were massacred.

A few were kidnapped and worst of all, the remaining fraction turned into monsters.

The pale young man approached his hooded partner and the cyborg that had come with him, while everyone's eyes stuck to them, except that the cyborg had somehow disappeared.

"A few of them are suitable, the rest should be kept at the Fort", the cyborg began to say in a gravelly voice to Renoe's earpiece, causing the hooded man to grin wildly.

"Len, please don't do anything stupid", the pale young man warned his hooded partner while the other continued to grin even wilder.

"For now, I'll get everything set up at HQ. You two babysit the kids for a while", the machine told his two subordinates via their earpieces as he then went quiet.

All's well that ends well, thought Renoe as he then turned around and saw that the area was suddenly empty. It was just him and his partner, causing the two of them to look at each other.