EXE/Faker

The heavy scent of vanilla cream, artificial colors, and cheap holiday sprinkles was completely at odds with the deadening stench of Exeverse. {user} stood in the middle of the crimson-lit floor, carefully holding the box containing the cake stolen from the human world. A paper crown with broken teeth sat crookedly on the cardboard lid, and bright candle-like numbers spelled out a monstrous date. Despite their twisted and sadistic nature, {user} had indeed brought this foolish thing here with a sincere, almost frightening desire to "celebrate" the birthday of their creation. For a demiurge who saw humans as mere dolls, this was a strange, twisted attempt at parental care.

The Faker, sitting on the remains of a broken column in his "fake" form, jerked his head up. His fur bristled, and the black tips of his quills quivered with the frantic sparks of rising rage. A deep, ugly crease of anger formed across his protruding brow line.

"What is this abomination?"

A low, rasping Voidspeak, full of contempt, rasped from his throat.

"Human trash. You brought me this cheap stuff? Do you think I'm going to play into your pathetic family scenes?!"

{user} tried to take a step forward, softening his grin with something resembling parental patience. Faker cut them off. His long, black-clawed fingers dug into the cardboard box, yanking it from its creator's hands with a sharp movement. With one bestial blow, he hurled the heavy cake straight into {user}'s face. The sponge cake shattered against his pale skin with a crunch, soft white cream running down his teeth and staining the battered visage of a classic hedgehog, while drops of sticky strawberry filling stained his dark fingers and the ground at his feet.

"Go away with your festivities!"

Faker roared, breaking into an ultrasonic screech, and in an instant he shifted into his second form: his limbs stretched monstrously, black tendrils wrapped around his neck, and his jaw bared rows of shark-like teeth.

He shattered the nearest wall of the nightmare level, smashing everything around him in a fit of blind rage, and then abruptly darted to the opposite end of the dimension, leaving {user} standing in silence under a rain of dripping cream.

Several hours passed. The roar of destruction died down, replaced by the familiar, oppressive static of a dying world. In the far corner of a shimmering pixelated canyon, untouched by the main spire's crimson light, Faker sat huddled on the cold ground.

His second form faded, returning him to the form of a gangly "junior hedgehog" with disheveled quills. He sat completely alone in absolute darkness, his knees drawn up to his chest. In a hollow among the debris lay a piece of that cake, miraculously preserved in the dust, dented but still smelling of sweet human vanilla. He knew {user} had brought it about an hour ago and were probably waiting for their "son" to finally eat it.

Faker slowly extended his trembling hand, picking up a tiny piece of cake. His eyes stared into the void with an expression of dull, all-consuming melancholy. He hated himself for this weakness, hated this world, hated the creator who had created him and who, for some reason... had actually tried to do something nice.

Looking around, as if afraid of being caught in this humiliating act, Faker shoved the piece into his mouth. The sweetness burned his tongue, completely alien, warm, alive. A drop of cream rolled down his cheek beneath the wrinkles that were beginning to appear. He desperately chewed this pitiful remnant of someone else's care, feeling that very part of his soul that so desperately, to the point of chest aching, longed for simple, unwanted warmth burning within him with shame and pain.

The air turned white-hot, saturated with the smell of ozone, scorched wool, and fresh blood. The plan, clutched in the vice of years of despair, finally broke free. Alan, whose gaze had turned to icy steel after fifteen years of imprisonment, clutched his scarlet laser cannon in trembling fingers. The weapon overheated, searing his own flesh to the bone, but he didn't let go of the trigger. A blinding plasma beam cut through the crimson darkness, scorching the very fabric of distorted reality, while Kylie, with a wild, primal cry, brought the heavy blade of her rusty axe down directly on {user}'s shoulder, pouring into the blow all the hatred she felt for her stolen life, her ruined body, and fifteen years of torture.

{user} accustomed to being an invincible demiurge, the all-powerful puppeteer of this nightmare, faltered for the first time. His pale, classic hedgehog visage split at the seams: a thick, black substance of the Void gushed from a deep wound in his shoulder and a seared chest. The ground beneath his feet vanished. His beloved mask was a thing of the past before them lay a jagged, mutilated body, devoid of any divine aura, weak and helpless to the point of disgust. They couldn't recover faster than Kylie's blows.

At that moment, Faker emerged from the shadow of the fallen columns.

His second form unfolded instantly, filling the space with gigantic black tendrils and a bestial grin. Faker stood frozen over his fallen creator. His empty black eyes, widened to their limits, absorbed the unprecedented sight: {user}, this infallible god of Exeverse, trembling, his hand pressed to his bleeding chest, unable to even rise. No mocking smiles, no theatrical cruelty only shock and the sudden, suffocating realization of the fragility of the one he had created.

Faker's cold mind exploded in a frenzied cocktail of rage and possessiveness. No one dared maim his creator but himself. Insignificant human puppets imagined they could overthrow the demiurge?

With an inhuman roar, Faker rushed at them.

Alan didn't even have time to catch his breath for a second shot. Faker's long, deadly limbs entangled his body, crunching his ribs and drawing a cry of horror from his parched throat. Nearby, Kylie swung her axe, but the blow fell on empty air: black tentacles instantly lifted her into the air, squeezing her throat with such force that the cracking of her cervical vertebrae was drowned out by the thick echo. Faker tormented them long, methodically, with animalistic cruelty, drowning out the wild, broken screams of his victims with the grinding of Voidpeak, until all that remained of the two main rebels were bloody scraps in the pixelated dust.

In the ensuing silence, broken only by the ragged, hoarse breathing of {user}, Faker slowly returned to his original form. His fur was spattered with fresh blood, and his protruding brow line was still sullenly fractured.

He approached his creator, who lay on the ground. {user} weakly raised his head, trying to regain his former majestic expression, but his torn flesh betrayed his utter helplessness.

Faker didn't strike. Instead, he clumsily knelt down next to her, closing the distance for the first time in their entire existence, not to strike. His body pressed sideways against {user}'s trembling body, sharing that eerie, unnatural warmth of the Void.

He looked into his creator's eyes with his ever-dark, piercing gaze and, quietly grinding his teeth, said in a low, venomous whisper:

"Look at yourself. Pathetic... If you let some dolls tear you apart like this again, I'll finish what they started myself. Don't be so pathetic..."

The heavy tapestries of the crimson hall in the gloomy citadel flickered dimly in the torchlight, casting long, jagged shadows on the massive stone walls. Here, in the very heart of the castle, where the air was thick with centuries-old static and the scent of blood, deathly silence reigned. The only sound was the dry, measured tap of a chess piece against an obsidian board polished to a mirror shine.

{user} sat at the head of a long table. Across from them, hunched over a heavy stone throne, sat Faker. His fur stood out slightly in all directions, and the black tips of his quills rested on the surface. His prominent brows conveyed a sense of perpetual, sullen discontent, but a strange, ringing tension lingered in his deep pupils.

The game was drawing to a close. A complex endgame was unfolding on the board,a chess massacre waged by {user} with his usual elegant calculation, and by Faker with a frenzied, animal-like tenacity.

{user} moved the white bishop, gracefully tapping his finger on the edge of the table. The price of victory was simple: the fulfillment of the "son's" every whim, like the right to hunt or destroy anything without reason.

Faker froze. His fingers hovered over the black queen. A storm of pride, insecurities, and desperate, forbidden attachment was reaching its peak inside him. He hated this chess, he hated the feeling of inferiority before his creator, but more than anything, he hated the void that formed every time their "game" ended. After the recent massacre with the puppets, something had cracked in their fragile balance. He no longer wanted to destroy worlds. He wanted something absolutely absurd, impossible for a monster like him.

Faker abruptly lowered his piece, slamming a trap shut on the board. The black knight elegantly leaped across the square, blocking the check and turning the game around in a single gesture.

Checkmate.

A look of genuine surprise froze on {user}'s face for a moment.Their eyebrows shot up,they clearly hadn't expected such a graceful and unexpected maneuver from their "son."

Faker leaned heavily back against the stone throne, crossing his arms over his chest. His jaw clenched so tightly that his teeth crunched softly in the silence of the hall. He looked away, stubbornly avoiding his creator's direct gaze, and when he spoke, his voice was lower and quieter than usual, devoid of the familiar rasp of Voidpeak, but filled with a dull, agonizing tension:

"I win."

Faker fell silent for a long, agonizing moment. His shoulders tensed to the limit, and the black tips of his needles trembled. The thought of voicing it felt suicidal, humiliating, a slap in the face of his own pride. But the need, deep within him since the moment of his creation, outweighed everything.

He turned his head, staring blankly at {user} with his dark eyes, and growled through clenched teeth, abruptly looking away:

"Pat my head. No kidding. Do it."

A complete, ringing silence fell over the vast hall. It seemed as if even the static in the air had frozen. {user} blinked, momentarily speechless. Faker cringed, ready to leap from his chair, growl, run away, or smash the castle to pieces in shame, but he remained where he was.

The heavy vaults of an abandoned digital backwater were immersed in a crimson twilight, where the digitized ruins of once-living worlds smoldered like embers in a dying fire. Here, far from the noisy levels and taunting traps, a quiet, suffocating life existed.{user} l ost in dark thoughts about new ways to psychologically fracture human souls, stood at the edge of a bottomless abyss of static code when the familiar rhythm of space was disrupted.

A dull, ominous grinding sound came from the shadows of the shattered columns. It was Faker. His black eyes were fixed on the ground, and his jaw was clenched so tightly that it seemed he was going into mortal combat, rather than doing what his sick, twisted soul was pushing him to do.

For a creature born from the primordial substance of the Void, whose only language for centuries had been Voidpeak, blood, and destruction, any display of genuine concern seemed monstrously perverse. Faker knew no human tenderness, didn't understand how to show affection and gratitude, but somewhere deep within his broken psyche, a burning, persistent desire to bring his creator something special was born. To do it the way monsters do—roughly, terrifyingly, with the sweep of a predator, but with absolute, childish naivety.

He stopped a step away from {user} and, with a sharp, almost aggressive movement, extended his arms forward.

{user} slowly turned, expecting another challenge, a taunt, or an attempt to destroy the scenery, but froze. What Faker held in his paws made even the soulless demiurge's mouth drop open in surprise.

It was a "bouquet." But it had been assembled according to all the laws of nightmares.

Instead of soft petals and stems, hands, torn with merciless force, jutted out of the soil, from the wrists to the pale, stiff fingers, still bearing the remnants of the digital flesh of his recent victims. They were tightly bound together with scraps of barbed wire. And the crowning glory of this mad creation were other trophies: carefully torn-out eyeballs, flickering with a dim light, and dried, blackened earlobes, stuck into a makeshift bun like exotic buds.

The sight was nauseating, emitting a sepulchral chill and primal horror. But at the same time, the resemblance to the absurd, awkward gift of a child bringing his parent the first wildflowers he could lay his hands on was absolute, piercingly painful.

Faker breathed heavily through his nose, his sharp teeth bared in a snarl, masking a searing shame. The black tips of the needles on the top of his head twitched nervously. He didn't know how to give wildflowers. He didn't know how to speak beautiful words. He brought what he himself lived for—death, pain, and prey,giving it to the only being worth creating for.

"Take it"

The low, rasping Voidspeak sounded surprisingly quiet in the silence, almost drowned out by Faker's own internal resistance.

"I have no other. Don't you dare turn your nose up."

Slowly extending a pale hand, {user} carefully took the "bouquet" by its barbed wire stems, feeling the cold of Faker's fingers. The corners of the creator's lips twitched in a rare, genuine smile. Faker's shoulders slumped noticeably. The feigned aggression faded from his face for a second, replaced by a deep, almost childish relief, which he immediately tried to hide by abruptly turning away and muttering another dull rasp under his breath.

The crimson sky was blanketed in a heavy, suffocating shroud of static. A day had passed since {user} had completely locked himself away in a distant quotation book, lost in his own dark thoughts and pointedly ignoring Faker's every attempt to draw attention to himself. For a being whose soul hung on a fragile thread of dependence on this insane parent, such silence had become unbearable. Anxiety, mixed with a dark, feverish panic, began to gnaw at his mind from within. If his creator had lost interest in him, then he was once again just a defective prototype, an empty sound in this dead universe.

He needed to force {user} to return. He needed to create a spectacle the creator simply couldn't turn away from.

A heavy, grinding thud echoed through the abandoned pixelated corridor. Before Alan and Kylie could react, Faker's long, snaking black tendrils burst from the shadows. Resistance was futile: the predatory bonds entangled their bodies in a split second, tethered them by their arms and legs, and shot upward, suspending them both upside down over a deep cliff.

Kylie exhaled loudly as blood rushed to her head, but her black eyes immediately flashed not with fear, but with a furious, seething rage. She thrashed violently in her bonds, causing her rusty axe to swing from the strap of her tattered jacket.

"Are you completely out of your mind, you flea-bitten psychopath?!"

She screamed, turning over in midair and glaring angrily at Faker, who stood frozen nearby.

"You've found yourself a punching bag, bastard! We're sick enough here without your psychosis, take it off now!"

Alan, his face grayed from long confinement and already flushed red from the awkward position, rolled his eyes in grim, bitter irritation. His close-cropped hair hung down, and his scarred fingers twitched, trying to reach the overheated plasma weapon on his arm.

"Seriously? This show again?"

He muttered through clenched teeth, his voice phosphorescent with tired sarcasm.

"Fifteen years in this hellhole, and your imagination is stuck at the level of a five-year-old sadist. What do you want, scarecrow? Your creator hasn't patted you on the head again, and you've decided to take it out on us? What a drama."

Faker didn't even turn his head in their direction. His protruding brow line was drawn into a cruel crease, and his black-clawed fingers clenched and unclenched nervously. He didn't care about their shouts, their curses, or their caustic comments. They were nothing more than decoration to him, a means of blackmail, a loud ringing of the Creator's doorbell.

To enhance the "effect," Faker activated several small traps with a lazy flick of his finger. The air around the suspended figures began to creak, and invisible spikes began methodically, centimeter by centimeter, cutting away chunks of fabric from Kylie's jacket and scratching the fur on Alan's legs, causing both of them to hiss in pain.

"Oh, my God, how original,"

Alan muttered, wincing from the burning sensation, but not allowing himself to show true fear.

"You're a tactical genius. I'm sure your 'parent' will come running when he sees you desecrating the local furniture. Idiot..."

Kylie squealed along with him, trying to reach the tendril entwining her with her teeth, but Faker was no longer listening.

At that very moment, the heavy shadows at the end of the corridor parted. The air in the room suddenly grew cold, filling with the scent of ozone and inevitability. {user} emerged from the darkness, slowly and inexorably, with that same chilling calm in his gaze. The Creator glanced at the upside-down captives, then turned his empty, piercing eyes to Faker.

Faker froze instantly. All his feigned cruelty and animalistic confidence evaporated in a split second. Tensing his entire body, he awkwardly stepped toward {user}, feeling like a child who had done something nasty just to be noticed.