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Of course, no matter how long The Last of Us was compared to the other scenarios they'd seen today, everything had to come to an end eventually.
The bloodied and weary Yang was standing in the operating room with the leader of the Fireflies, telling him that to have a chance at the cure, Ellie would have to die.
It was clear that the current experiencer was struck dumb by the development as he just stood there numbly, looking alternatively at Marlene and at Ellie, who was sitting on an operating table behind a glass wall.
The disciples around Jin set off a wave of muttering at the revelation while the Elders on top of the podium remained stone-faced. Only Elder Lung sneered derisively.
General Shroud, for his part, changed his position from arms at his side to arms crossed.
-/-
Yang stared at the woman in front of him while his vision blurred and his world spun.
He'd been inside of this scenario for what felt like days now. Moments of gut-wrenching combat interspersed which made minutes feel like hours interspersed with quieter conversations that stretched out time because of their seeming inanity.
During this entire experience, he'd spent the most time with Ellie, his… charge. She talked like a real person. He could see the veins pulsing in her neck, signifying that the cultivators had even given her a heartbeat. She smelled dirty, like children often did, but with a hint of flowers and goats.
And now they would do what?
Remove the top of her head to root around in her brain?
"Why?" he managed to croak to drag out the time so as not to appear indecisive in front of the general.
Marlene gave him a pitying look. "It's the only way," she whispered harshly. "Her immunity is so deeply rooted on a biological level…"
Yang couldn't hear what she was saying anymore. The whole world had turned to static. He looked to the left at Ellie, who was now lying there weakly, dozing off from the injection she'd just received.
The face of his daughter, waiting for him back at home, superimposed itself on hers.
The bite scar on his thigh ached.
The room continued spinning.
"No," he eventually whispered.
Marlene glared at him, and Yang felt the previously unthreatening Firefly guards standing behind him, hefting their cudgels and swords.
"No," Yang muttered again as he fell to his knees. The face of his daughter and Ellie swam in his head. Blood surged through his body like a torrent, ripping away all rationality. But there was no strength left in his body.
He knew that he was making a fool of himself in front of dozens of spectators, the general, but he also knew that it was his only choice.
He couldn't try to prevent this ending. If he did, he'd be a bad soldier, and everybody would know.
He looked up at Marlene, who was looking down at him with pity in her eyes.
"She's a child," he eventually managed to say.
Marlene shook her head. "And her sacrifice will save millions of other children."
A grating noise suddenly came from the other side of the glass. A sound that Yang knew intimately from when he walked past the army butcher preparing the catch that the scouts sometimes brought back from their missions.
A hand went up to his mouth, and he felt acidity rise in the back of his throat. He couldn't prevent himself from puking, couldn't make himself look up.
Chunks of food spilled past his fingers and dribbled down onto the floor, connected by thin strings of bile, as his head lolled from the left and to the right.
"Sshhrrr-shrrr-shrrrr," came from beyond the glass, with the occasional stop as the handsaw got stuck in a bit of bone, and the process had to be started again.
-/-
Jin watched clinically as the soldier inside the Room experienced what seemed to be a minor nervous breakdown, spewing chunks on the floor with a glassy look in his eyes.
The other fireflies didn't look too good either, paling noticeably at the child being ruthlessly cut apart in the background. But their response had been programmed; Yang's reaction was the only interesting one.
The boy tilted his head, and glimpsed from his periphery as Hashimi averted her gaze from the large screen, and the disciples around them turned to throw them complicated looks composed of disgust and grudging respect.
Jin turned his gaze back to the screen and shook his head.
Something he hadn't thought about. The fact that the experiencer could choose whether to try and save Ellie or to sacrifice her meant that there was no need to include a forced scenario trigger. The surgery could progress naturally; if the experiencer wanted to save Ellie, they could act; if they didn't, they could not. If they chose to act but failed to save her, that was also a good enough ending in his eyes. Choosing to do "good" and being able to do "good" were two different things.
What he hadn't considered was the fact that being presented with the choice would incapacitate the experiencer to the point where they missed the time-window in which they could have even made it in the first place.
Perhaps it had been a tad cruel, knowing the human psyche's ability to build parasocial relationships with fake constructs appearing as humans, to confront them with one that was so real, only to then kill them in front of them.
He knew, like any Illusion Room cultivator, that these scenarios were fake, no matter how real they looked.
The average mortal, however? They might have a difficult time separating reality from fiction. Hadn't one of the main diseases of modernity been exactly that? Blurring the line between the real material world and the fake media landscape? Choosing to love in the latter rather than the former.
It turned out that… No matter which world they lived in, humans had way less agency and critical thinking than they thought. A worldwide Dunning Kruger effect when it came to the belief that one had free will and the power to exert it in the face of a reality ripping away at one's attention relentlessly.
"Did we… do the right thing?" Hashimi asked quietly next to him. Her eyes were transfixed on the grown man having what appeared to be a sort of mental breakdown in front of what was essentially the whole inner ring, a few Elders and his own direct superior.
"It is impossible to say until we have seen the consequences," Jin responded lightly, also feeling a tad uncomfortable at the scene being shown.. "In terms of what decisions are the right ones, we can only ever assume. Hindsight provides only the illusion of clarity that was never actually there."
While they talked, Yang, the soldier, slowly pulled himself together, shakily getting back on his feet and receiving a tissue from Marlene to wipe his mouth.
He took it and looked once to the left, where Ellie's corpse now lay on the surgical table with buckets placed underneath to catch all the spilt blood.
The look in his eyes was… Haunted…
He wouldn't have time to be traumatised for long.
The way that Jin had included the last battle into the scenario was that if the experiencer managed to save Ellie, the notice of the imminent invasion would come immediately after.
If they choose to let her die, then the invasion would occur immediately after they had seen the results of their inaction.
In accordance with the script, then, the moment that Yang had glimpsed the corpse of the girl he'd spent the last ten hours protecting with his life, a firefly burst into the observation room.
"There's a whole army of them!" he shouted, nervously gripping his sword. "They're coming from the south, through the main gates."
Marlene stood stock still for a moment before shakily bringing a hand to her face and suddenly pulling herself together.
"Whatever differences we may have," she said to Yang, who was more corpse than man at this stage. "If we're run over now, it was all for nothing," she implored. "Fight with us, one last time, then we can part ways."
Yang blankly looked at her, then looked at the bone sword at her waist. Standard army issue, just like all the swords that the fireflies would wield in this conflict and which had been seen throughout the scenario.
Marlene, still wounded and technically on bedrest, pulled the sword out of its scabbard and handed it, handle-first, to Yang.
The soldier slowly raised his hand to grasp the offered weapon.
For a second, he looked as if he was undecided between beheading Marlene, stabbing himself, or charging out there to face the entire zombie army on his own.
Eventually however, he woodenly turned around and followed the other silent fireflies out of the building, through the winding corridors and out into the front courtyard where the others had already amassed with a strange military precision.
-/-
Yang felt like his soul had left his body and that he was now observing himself from far up in the sky. He could still move, and he felt the wind and the sunlight on his skin abstractly. He could move it, but the body wasn't his.
He stood amongst the fireflies, not his comrades, but somehow they were. They moved like the soldiers he'd trained with back in the army camp. He could even identify some that he knew by their movements. The large, hulking firefly standing next to his body picked his nose just like that Lang brute that he disdained. The one to his right, a short, swarthy fellow, was nervously muttering something.
The zombies arrived, but for the first time, he wasn't scared or even affected. He was task-oriented, and that was it.
He wasn't a fighter, not really, not a warrior, and hardly a swordsman either. But when he bid the body under his control to raise his sword and face the incoming horde of shamblers, clickers, bloaters and others.
Not through any particularly insane amount of practice or any innate gift or talent, he felt one with the sword. Filled completely with a purity of intent that he hadn't even known existed before.
There were only three things in the world right now. The sword and the extension of the body wielding it, the next enemy, and the soldier next to him.
The two forces met in the middle of the courtyard in absolute silence.
-/-
"How is he doing that?" Hashimi muttered as they watched Yang absolutely tear into the approaching zombie horde. "We've seen him fight this fight countless times now. He doesn't have nearly this much skill."
Jin tilted his head and considered the question. Yang ducked underneath a swipe and beheaded two zombies in a row before spinning, kicking a comrade of his away from an aerosolic infection thrown by a Bloater before sliding underneath the legs of a Clicker, coming out on the other side and bisecting it with a spin of his body.
The soldier then ripped a small bottle of alcohol from the satchel at his waist, swallowed it, brought up his middle finger and thumb with a small red crystal in between and snapped his fingers. He sprayed out the alcohol from his mouth and blew out a wide cone of fire at an approaching bloater, setting them on fire.
It was quite clear that it had been an improvisation and that Yang wasn't actually a professional fire-breather. There was a fleck of burning alcohol stuck on his face from the unprofessional and makeshift flamethrower he'd used.
He just.
Ignored it.
"Skill is one thing," Jin concluded. "Having the will to fight is another." He continued watching. "What you're capable of, like in any case, is only brought fully to the fore when you're emotionally invested in what you're doing. Be that cooking for your spouse, building a house for a friend, or fighting to protect your loved ones. Emotions can be a catalyst with which we can tap into the potential we never thought we had. They are the gateway to becoming, for a short time, more than just the puppets of fate, but actors in our own right."
The battle on-screen continued, Yang, becoming the mayor rallying point of the fireflies and eventually succeeding in decimating half of the zombies. Of course, eventually, he caught a hit, which put him in a position to take another. For all his newfound willingness to fight, it couldn't make him invincible.
He fell, and the screen turned black.
The inner disciples then saw as Yang found himself in front of a screen of his own, full of choices. The standard was to fight the exact same army again, just so that he could modulate exactly how many of whichever type of zombie he wanted to fight. There was also a randomising button.
Yang clicked that one.
Then, everyone found themselves watching a slightly different battle from the very beginning.
The scenario had concluded, and what was left was a slightly more modular version of what everyone else had done. An endless battle. Just that this one, to Jin at least, felt a bit poetic.
Failing to protect the one he'd vowed to protect, Yang was subsequently stuck in an endless cycle of violence and death. Was this hell? Was it redemption? It likely depended on the person experiencing it.
Yang eventually exited the Illusion Room, but it wasn't exaggerated to say that he was a changed man.
Jin knew these changes well, after someone finished an impactful piece of media it was common for them to consider themself a new person. Someone who'd make new choices and take life head-on.
The attitude usually disappeared after a few hours, but he was curious how long the change would last in someone who'd felt the sweat, the blood and the death on his own skin.
Just because none of the things Yang had experienced had actually happened in reality didn't mean that nothing had happened in his mind.
Before anyone else could speak, still somewhat processing, Elder Lung, with a red face and wrath in his eyes, stepped forward.
"A disgrace to everything that our sect has considered as a part of our founding principles since time immemorial. A rash and ill-advised adventure into seeing how much of our precious time can be wasted. An uninspired sham of a product that…"
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AN: Arc's almost over! I like the ending actually. I'm happy. If you're happy too feel free to support me on Patreon and get access to up to 12 extra chapters. If not please write down your complaints on a piece of paper and send them to your local swiss embassy!