176 Fear the Slipper

This world was strange. 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 in and out without warning. One moment I'd be standing beneath a bright blue sky; the next, a moonless darkness swallowed everything, static haze crawling across the horizon. Time was no better. Seconds stretched into hours while entire weeks vanished between breaths.

It didn't feel like I was inside Joan's memory anymore.

The NPCs only made it worse.

Some behaved normally, trapped in their script loops. Others were completely wrong.

One homeless man I kept encountering held a cardboard sign that changed every time I passed him. Back in Lost Legends Online, he used to stand near the Temple gates shouting, "The end is near!"

Now his sign read:

'We live in a game. The world is a lie. We are playthings to a child.'

Each time, he rocked back and forth and cried as though he was on the verge of breaking through reality itself. That wasn't even the strangest part. On my fifth pass through the ruined market district, I found a priest kneeling before a sandal-shaped altar.

"I worship the foot," he whispered. "Only the foot. Praise the foot."

Th priest started singing hymns about toe alignment and holy pedicures. Sure, there had been a guild in LLO called the Sole Disciples, but they were mostly a meme guild that spammed stomp emotes during raids. This guy's devotion was genuine.

But nothing compared to the old man with the slipper.

That NPC was a nightmare.

He looked like a bugged-out grandfather rendered in the wrong game engine, shouting through distorted audio.

"GET OUT! YOU DAMN BUG! AWAY! AWAY!"

His walking animation barely functioned. He shuffled a few pixels at a time. But the moment he threw that damned slipper, it transformed into a glowing homing missile of death, rendering instant kill just about every time.

Fortunately, Divine Word: Raise wasn't consumed in this world. Instead, I simply respawned somewhere random.

This time, it was the tavern.

Groaning, I rolled off the warped wooden floor just as the bartender clipped through the counter and vanished. My head still throbbed from my latest death, which involved the old man falling from the sky and smashing a slipper into the back of my skull like a meteor of divine punishment.

I rubbed the sore spot.

"What even are the rules here?"

I had no map, no compass, and no quest markers. More importantly, I couldn't find Aixin. She hadn't shown herself once since I'd used Divine Possession to hijack Joan's body and enter this place. I was thinking there would be a battle for Joan's soul or something, but that was clearly not the case.

Regardless, I kept looking for Aixin.

I wanted to punch her, desperately. Sure, I had no real chance against someone who could casually summon Heavenly Punishment swords, but if I could get her talking, maybe she'd slip up and reveal something useful. Knowing Aixin, she'd probably turned her mistakes into traps. It sucked being weak, but I have to deal with the cards I was dealt with.

"Worst case, I die again and respawn inside a foot cult. Wouldn't be the strangest thing that's happened today."

As I rubbed the last of the respawn haze from my eyes, the tavern doors creaked open.

A group entered.

There were eight of them, give or take. Their footsteps didn't match their strides. Their shadows jittered. Everything about them felt wrong, as though they were being rendered in real time. I remained seated at the far end of a warped bench, my posture instinctively straightening.

I saw Joan among them.

She didn't acknowledge me. Her expression was blank, yet her presence was unmistakable. Her priestess robes flowed behind her without a speck of dust or a single crease from travel. She looked as though she'd simply fast-traveled into the scene.

Without a word, she sat beside me.

On my other side, a lanky man wearing nothing but shorts slid onto the bench, his bare knees uncomfortably close to mine. I studied them one by one. A knight in battered armor. A mage wearing robes embroidered with glowing runes. A man in modern office attire who looked as though he'd wandered in from an entirely different genre.

Their appearances varied, but they all shared the same unsettling quality as Joan.

They looked like people, but they didn't feel entirely present. They started talking. Their voices weren't wrong in tone or volume. It was the content. Everything was delivered in the same flat, almost robotic cadence.

"Did anyone catch last night's drama?" one asked, sounding like a customer service AI making small talk.

Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

"Yeah," another replied. "The pacing sucked. The lead's acting was way too try-hard. Anyway, let's focus on the job."

"The corrupted weather triggers in Sector D-Zero-Two remain stable," Joan reported, hands folded neatly over her staff. "However, NPC drift is escalating near the Wall. One was able to track a strange NPC. Possibly bugged."

The guy in shorts grunted.

"I'll log it. Add it to the anomaly list. Anything else?"

"I found pathing issues near the ruined cathedral," another said. "The doors keep looping their open animation without input. Also, two merchant NPCs started speaking Latin for no reason. I clipped it and sent it to the archive."

A tall man in a pale blue cloak leaned forward.

"This Alpha Test is critical," he said. "The client wants the psychological realism perfected. If they're not satisfied, we don't get paid."

"We need better idle behavior for high-awareness NPCs," someone added. "The uncanny moments aren't subtle anymore. Random philosophical monologues keep breaking immersion."

"I liked the foot guy."

"Focus."

My cheek twitched. Alpha Test. The phrase cracked something open in my memory. Karen—Joan's player back on Earth—had once mentioned participating in an alpha test for Lost Legends Online. I'd never thought much about it. Just another college side job.

But this wasn't normal QA.

These people weren't merely testers. They were inside the game. Or perhaps outside it, looking in. And Joan was one of them. I glanced at her. She continued staring straight ahead as though I didn't exist. This was the closest I'd come to understanding the nightmare I'd been trapped in.

The conversation continued.

"Seriously," one of them said, leaning back in his chair, "what kind of client forces us to use ancient toolkits and half-documented scripting languages? What even is SoulScript? It's not even compatible with the new runtime."

"The kind paying triple industry rates," someone replied. "You want to complain, or do you want to finish paying off your loans?"

"The skill system is still a mess," another added while fiddling with an invisible UI. "No casual player is going to enjoy this. Seven hundred active skills per class archetype isn't game design. It's a cry for help."

"But the emergent AI behavior is promising," Joan said. "One NPC tried to heal me after I got knocked unconscious by a ceiling fish."

A few heads nodded.

"Some of them are starting to argue about philosophy and resource management," someone said. "It's like the game is inventing its own religions."

That was when it hit me. Was the Hollowed World not real? Just a simulation? The thought didn't horrify me. It exhausted me. I rubbed my temples.

"This isn't funny anymore."

Then someone asked the question that immediately caught my attention.

"So what's the client actually like? Anyone met him?"

The coordinator, a stiff-looking man whose vest somehow never wrinkled, shook his head.

"Never. Just contracts and payments. But the money's real, and he's definitely around. Uses an avatar in-game."

"Oh yeah?" Shorts Guy raised an eyebrow. "What's he look like?"

The coordinator smirked.

"Just some weird old man. Plain linen shirt. Straw sandals. Always waving a slipper around like it's a divine relic. If you see him, say hello. He's got admin access."

The tavern door creaked open.

Every head turned, and there he was.

Same short frame. Same sunken eyes. Same stupid straw sandals and cursed slipper held in one hand like the wrath of God had been 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. Instead, his eyes were on me. He took a step forward, then another, and raised his arm. I didn't wait for him to speak. I recognized that slipper from a hundred painful deaths.

"NO NO NO! I GIVE UP!" I yelled, throwing both hands into the air as I backed into a stool. "I'm not fighting you, old man! Not today! Mercy!"

With a screech that sounded like a battle cry filtered through a dying chicken, the old man charged. The slipper came down like a meteor. I tried to roll away, but he was faster. His movements defied logic. One moment he was across the room. The next, he was airborne, descending like divine judgment.

I squeezed my eyes shut.

"NOT THE FACE! ANYTHING BUT THE FACE!"

But the blow never came. Instead, I felt a hand seize my shoulder as arms wrapped around me in a soft and protective manner. When I looked, I saw it was Joan gaining sentience at the moment. Her voice wasn't flat this time. It trembled with emotion.

"Not him, Father."

Everything stopped. The room fell silent, like a server freezing mid-frame. Even the air seemed to stutter.

I blinked, my face pressed against her shoulder.

"...Uhhh," I said. "What now? Father who?"

The slipper didn't strike me.

It struck Joan.

"Ow! Ow! Ow!"

She stumbled backward as the old man's sandal repeatedly smacked her head, shoulders, and arms.

"Why are you hitting me?! Why are you hitting me?!"

Whap.

Whap.

Whap.

I flinched with every impact, half-expecting her to explode into pixels or dissolve into corrupted data. Instead, she just stood there, confused and offended, like a daughter being disciplined by a lightning-fast ghost grandpa.

The old man finally paused.

"Huh."

He narrowed his eyes.

"The husk really did develop a personality. Even awakened its own spark. And 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."

Joan slowly lowered her arms.

"Father?"

The old man stared at her.

"Why are you calling me father?"

Joan rubbed her sore arm.

"Uhh... because you made this world. And... us?"

The old man barked out a laugh.

"No way."

He waved the slipper through the air like a philosopher's staff.

"I'm not your father. If I were, you'd have inherited at least some of my traits. Strength. Style. A healthy appreciation for slippers as instruments of truth."

He poked her forehead with the slipper.

"Simply put, you didn't come from my balls. At best, our relationship is that of an inventor and his invention."

It was at that exact moment, somewhere between metaphysical whiplash and emotional dismemberment, that I chose to open my big mouth.

"So... whose balls did she come from?"

The question slipped out before I could stop it. It was not as a joke. Not even meant as an insult. I was genuinely curious. The tavern somehow became even quieter. I regretted it immediately.

"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 across the floor. I tried to roll. I tried to cast Holy Sanctuary, Shield of Faith, or Anything Please Just Help Me, but nothing worked.

The old man struck my shins, my thigh, and just about everywhere. "YOU'RE ASKING WHOSE BALLS?!" he roared. "I OUGHT TO DELETE YOU FROM EXISTENCE FOR THAT, YOU CURIOSITY-INFESTED COCKROACH!"

"I MEANT IT AS A PHILOSOPHICAL QUESTION!" I yelped. "LIKE A CREATION MYTH!"

Whap.

"Then phrase it better, damn you!"

By the time he was finished, I was sprawled on the floor, twitching and muttering apologies into the woodgrain.

Joan knelt beside me, looking torn between guilt and amusement.

"You okay?"

"No," I groaned. "He hit me in the legacy."

I wasn't dead, but I was beginning to understand why death sometimes appealed to people. The old man crossed his arms, satisfied. The slipper vanished back to his side like a gunslinger holstering a revolver.

"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 was as cruelly personal as that damned old man's slipper. What the hell was even happening here?