AlleyB255
Mark Harold's goals are crystal clear: build a final boss for his company's MMO. Make the monster last long enough to keep players hooked. Keep his job as a game designer.
He's been laser-focused on it. So focused that he became an NPC, a non-player character, to everyone around him: a loser to his boss, an outsider to his coworkers, a joke to the player community, and a son his mother sometimes forgets she has.
But all of it turns to dust the moment he wakes up inside the very game he built, as the final boss. Not just him. His coworkers, his family, the entire city are pulled in too. Now they're heroes. The narrator. NPCs.
That's when they realize: their goals, their motivations, their conflicts, their feelings, none of it is real. The lives they thought they had are nothing but a hallucination. Even they aren't who they believed they were.
Now, trapped in endless loops of battle, pain, breakdown, and death, Mark and his people face a choice: stay bound to their new roles and endure the torment forever, or get deleted as a bug and die for good.
Or strike a deal with the real boss, one that comes at a price they might not all be able to pay.
One final ending. One choice. One villain's last deal.