176 Fear the Slipper

This world was strange in a way that wasn’t just unfamiliar. It was disjointed and broken, like a corrupted save file stitched together by a sadistic game master. Day and night didn't follow the sun. They flickered, glitching in and out like a bad transition effect. One moment I’d be standing under a bright blue sky, and in the blink of an eye, it would be a moonless night with no stars, just static haze crawling over the horizon. Time bent and stretched with no sense of pacing. A second could last hours, and a week might flash by before I even took a breath. It didn’t feel like I was inside Joan’s memory anymore. No, this was something else. A horror-themed psychological dungeon disguised as nostalgia.

The NPCs didn’t help. Some of them behaved normally, following their script loops. But others… others were just wrong. One homeless guy I kept running into held a cardboard sign that changed each time I passed him. I remembered him from Lost Legends Online. He used to shout "The end is near!" near the Temple gates. Now his sign read, “We live in a game. The world is a lie. We are playthings to a child.” And he’d cry, rocking back and forth, like someone on the verge of breaking through reality. That wasn’t the worst of it.

I passed a priest on my fifth loop through the ruined market district. He was kneeling before a sandal-shaped altar, whispering, “I worship the foot… only the foot… praise the foot!” He started singing hymns about toe alignment and holy pedicures. I mean, yeah, sure, there was that gang in LLO called the Sole Disciples, but they were mostly just a meme guild that spammed stomp emotes during raids. This guy? This was different. His conviction was genuine. I almost saluted out of respect. Almost.

But nothing compared to the old man with the slipper. That NPC was a nightmare. He looked like a bugged-out grandpa who didn’t belong in the same game engine, shouting in cracked audio, “GET OUT! YOU DAMN BUG! AWAY! AWAY!” His walking animation was jerky, barely moving a few pixels at a time. But the moment he threw that damn slipper… somehow summoning it from his inventory without a cast animation… it became a glowing, homing missile of death. Instant kill! Every single time! I learned that the hard way. Over and over.

Fortunately, I didn't have to waste a Divine Word: Raise. Instead, I respawned randomly. This time, it was the tavern… I groaned and rolled off the warped wooden floor just as the bartender clipped through the counter and vanished. My head still ached from my latest demise, which came in the form of the old man falling out of the sky and smashing his slipper into the back of my skull like a meteor of divine punishment.

I rubbed the spot and muttered, “What even are the rules here?”

I had no map, no compass, and no mini-quest markers. I couldn’t find Aixin. She hadn’t shown herself even once since I used Divine Possession to hijack Joan’s body and dive into this world. I was starting to suspect she wasn’t hiding… Maybe she was watching. Letting me flail around in her curated madness, maybe waiting for me to stumble across some nugget of lore or lose my mind first.

I wanted to beat her up. Desperately! Sure, I had no real fighting chance in direct confrontation, since she could casually summon a dozen Heavenly Punishment swords without breaking a sweat… but I figured if I at least found her and got her to talk, I could drag something useful out of her. She had to slip eventually. Right? Everyone makes mistakes. Even gods.

Then again… knowing Aixin, she'd probably turned even her mistakes into traps.

“Meh,” I muttered aloud, brushing some dust off my shoulder. “Worst case, I die again and get respawned inside a foot cult. Wouldn’t be the strangest thing to happen today.”

Just as I rubbed the last of the respawn daze from my eyes, the tavern doors creaked open and a group of people filed in with uncanny timing. I froze. Something about their entrance didn’t feel natural… not in the dramatic way a protagonist might arrive, but in the glitchy, too-synchronized stutter of entities being rendered in real-time. There were maybe eight of them. Their footfalls didn’t match their stride. Their shadows jittered. I remained seated at the far end of a long, warped bench, my back instinctively straightening.

Then I saw her. Joan.

She didn’t blink at me. Her expression was blank, and yet her presence was unmistakable. Her priestess robes flowed behind her like she had just fast-traveled into the scene, no scuff marks, no dust, and no sweat. She took a seat beside me without so much as glancing in my direction. On my other side, a lanky guy wearing nothing but shorts casually slid onto the bench, his bare knees far too close for comfort.

I studied them one by one. Their appearances were different: one wore a knight's cuirass, another a robe patterned with glowing runes, and a third wore modern-looking office clothes as if he had stepped out of an entirely different genre… but they all had the same strange aura as Joan. It was as if... they weren’t entirely here.

Then they began to talk.

Their voices were wrong. Not in volume or inflection, but in their content. Their voices were consistently flat and almost robotic…

“Did anyone catch last night’s drama?” one of them asked in that weird monotone, like a customer service AI reciting small talk.

“Yeah,” another replied from across the table. “But the pacing sucked. Honestly, the lead’s acting was too try-hard. Let’s focus on the job, though.”

“The corrupted weather triggers at Sector D-Zero-Two appear stable for now,” Joan reported, hands folded neatly over her staff. “However, NPC drift is escalating near the Wall. One was able to track a weird… NPC. Possibly bugged.”

That last part made the guy in shorts grunt. “I’ll log that. Add it to the anomaly list. Any other strange behaviors?”

“I noticed some pathing issues near the ruined cathedral,” another chimed in. “The doors loop their open animation without input. Also, two merchant AI started speaking Latin for no reason. I clipped it. Sending to archive.”

A tall man in a pale blue cloak leaned forward, his face expressionless, eyes empty. His voice was slightly more authoritative but just as soulless. “This Alpha Test is critical. The client wants the psychological realism to be perfect. If they’re not satisfied, we don’t get paid. You all know the contract.”

“Improvements,” another added, tapping their temple like it was a reflex. “We need better idle behavior for high-awareness NPCs. Their uncanny moments are no longer subtle. It doesn’t really help that our NPCs would suddenly engage in spontaneous philosophical monologues. It breaks immersion.”

“I liked the guy yelling about the foot,” someone muttered.

“Focus,” the leader said.

My cheek twitched.

‘Alpha Test.’

That term cracked something open in my mind. Karen, the person behind Joan back on Earth, once mentioned being part of an Alpha Test for Lost Legends Online. I hadn’t thought much of it at the time… just part of her old college job, testing game builds for cash. But this… this wasn’t normal QA.

I glanced sideways at her. She continued to stare forward like I wasn’t even there, like my presence was just background noise to their operation. Had she known all along? Was this some kind of developer layer hidden beneath the game world, a dev server patched over the reality I thought I was inhabiting?

I leaned back slowly, resisting the urge to stand up or lash out. I needed to listen. This was information… dangerous, confusing, and maybe not meant for me… but it was the closest I had come to understanding this nightmare simulation, and probably there was more to it.

They kept talking as if I weren’t even there. Like, I was just another background prop in their dev meeting. One guy leaned back against his chair, arms folded behind his head like he was on a break, not halfway inside a glitching nightmare world.

“Seriously, though,” he said, “what kind of client forces us to use ancient toolkits and half-documented scripting languages? What even is SoulScript? It’s not even backwards compatible with the new runtime!”

Someone from across the table chuckled with a dry, metallic rasp. “The kind who pays us triple industry rate. You want to complain, or you want to finish paying off your loans?”

“I’m just saying,” another added, this one fidgeting with a piece of invisible UI only he could see, “the skill system is a hot mess. No way a casual player’s gonna enjoy this game. There’s like, what, seven hundred unique active skills per class archetype? That’s not a design choice, that’s a developer cry for help.”

“But the emergent AI behavior is promising,” said Joan, her tone flat again as if she’d flicked a switch from emotion to neutral. “The NPCs are exceeding behavioral expectations. I had one who was trying to heal me earlier after I got knocked out by a ceiling fish.”

“Yeah,” another nodded, tapping the table rhythmically with his knuckles. “Uncanny as hell, but impressive. Some of these AIs are starting to argue with each other about philosophy and resource management. It’s like the game's developing its own religion or something.”

That was when it hit me.

Was the Hollowed World… not real?

Just a simulation?

The thought didn’t come with horror. It came with exhaustion.

I rubbed my temples and sighed, letting out a slow breath through my teeth. “This isn’t funny anymore,” I muttered to no one in particular.

Then someone asked the question that was probably on everyone’s mind.

“So, what’s the client like anyway? Has anyone met him in person?”

The coordinator, a stiff guy in a vest that never seemed to wrinkle, shook his head. “Never. Just contracts and payments. But the money’s real, and he’s definitely around. Uses an avatar in the game.”

“Oh yeah?” Shorts McSandals raised a brow. “What’s he look like?”

The coordinator gave a little smirk. “Weird old man. Plain linen shirt, straw sandals, always waving a slipper like it’s a divine relic. If you see him, give him a holler. He’s got admin access.”

Just as he said that, the tavern door opened again with a sound like a creaky gate in an old horror movie.

There he was.

Same short frame. Same sunken eyes. Same stupid straw sandals and deadly, cursed slipper held in one hand like the wrath of God was bound to its sole. Everyone turned toward him at once and greeted him in eerie unison.

“Hello, sir.”

“Welcome back, client.”

“Praise the slipper.”

But he wasn’t looking at them.

His eyes were on me.

He took a step forward, then another, and then raised his arm. I didn’t even wait for him to shout. I recognized that slipper from a hundred painful deaths.

“NO, NO, NO! I GIVE UP!” I yelled, raising both hands as I backed into a stool. “I’m not fighting you, old man! Not today! Mercy!”

But mercy was a myth in this place.

With a cry that could only be described as a high-pitched war screech mixed with a chicken’s dying breath, he charged. His slipper came down like a falling meteor. I tried to roll away, but he was faster. His movements defied logic. He blinked across the room, and suddenly he was airborne, descending like judgment day.

I braced for impact, eyes squeezed shut. “NOT THE FACE!” I screamed. “ANYTHING BUT THE FACE!”

But it didn’t hit.

Instead, I felt a firm tug on my shoulder, then arms around me… thin, soft, but strong enough to shield me from the blow.

Joan.

Her voice wasn’t flat this time. It shook. It burned. It felt.

“Not him, Father.”

Everything stopped.

The room went quiet, like a server had frozen mid-frame. Even the air stuttered.

I blinked, confused, my face pressed against her shoulder.

“…Uuuuuh,” I said, muffled and dumbfounded. “What now? Father who?”

The slipper didn’t land on my face.

Instead, it landed on Joan.

“Ow, ow, ow!” she cried, stumbling as the old man’s cursed sandal of doom repeatedly smacked into her head, her arms, her shoulders, her back. She raised her arms, but not in defense. Instead, more in confusion. “Why are you hitting me? Why are you hitting me?!”

Whap.

I flinched with every impact, half-expecting her to explode into pixel particles or dissolve like corrupted data. But she didn’t die. She didn’t even glitch. She just winced, enduring the assault like a confused daughter being scolded with a newspaper by a goddamn lightning-fast ghost grandpa.

The old man paused between strikes, gripping his slipper like a divine relic of holy retribution. His eyes narrowed in disappointment. “Huh.”

He clicked his tongue. “The husk really did develop a personality. Even awakened its own spark. Now look at you: screaming like a toddler and emoting like a teenager. If I didn’t know better, I’d say you were a human being. One born from flesh and blood.”

Joan lowered her hands slowly. Her voice wavered. “Father?”

He squinted at her like she’d just slapped him with a logic bomb. “Why are you calling me father?”

Joan rubbed her sore arm. “Uuuh… because you made this world? And… us?”

The old man laughed, short and sharp, like a crow choking on a nail. “No way!” He waved the slipper in the air like it was a philosopher’s staff. “I’m not your father. If I were your father, you should’ve inherited at least some of my traits! Strength! Style! A healthy appreciation for slippers as instruments of truth!”

He jabbed the slipper into her forehead for emphasis. “Simply put, you didn’t come from my balls. At best… at best, I’m your creator.”

What's the difference? It was at this moment, somewhere between metaphysical whiplash and emotional dismemberment, that I chose to open my big, dumb mouth.

“So… whose balls did she come from?”

I asked it plainly and sincerely. Not even as a joke. I was legitimately curious. I mean, if she didn’t come from his digital loins, then whose were responsible for creating a spark like Joan?

The entire tavern went further than silent.

I regretted it instantly.

“Ahem,” said the old man.

Then the slipper came for me.

“OW! OKAY, TOO MUCH! OW! OW…NOT THE DICK, YOU MISERABLE OLD MAN!”

I flailed. I tried to roll. I tried to cast Holy Sanctuary or Shield of Faith or Anything Please Just Help Me Spell, but none of them worked. I was helpless. He slapped my shins, my thigh, and then, with cruel precision, aimed a divine smite directly at my dignity.

“YOU’RE ASKING WHOSE BALLS?! I OUGHT TO DELETE YOU FROM EXISTENCE FOR THAT, YOU CURIOSITY-INFESTED COCKROACH!”

“I MEANT IT AS A PHILOSOPHICAL INQUIRY!” I yelped. “LIKE… LIKE A CREATION MYTH QUESTION!”

He slapped me again. "Then phrase it better, damn you!"

I was pretty sure the tavern’s floorboards absorbed some of my soul as I lay there, twitching and muttering half-finished apologies into the woodgrain.

Joan knelt beside me, her expression somewhere between guilt and amusement. “You okay?”

“No,” I groaned. “He hit me in the legacy.”

I didn’t die this time, but I might’ve as well from the pain.

The old man crossed his arms, satisfied, slipper holstered like a gunslinger returning to his scabbard. “Next time you ask about balls, bring an offering first.”

I whimpered something about fruit baskets and therapy.

Honestly, I’d faced monsters, demons, and corrupted cultivators. But nothing, not even the terrifying Elder Lich of the Third Hell Layer… was as cruel or personal as that damn old man’s slipper.