Mythos Of Narcissus: Reborn As An NPC In A Horror VRMMO

"Have you ever thought about the day of your passing?"

Daffodils, their voices, kept on haunting me despite my shield of ignorance.

"One of the most painful betrayal."

"Your confidence is nothing but a slow and insidious killer."

"No matter how you prepare, no matter how you control and brainwash others, there will always be a way where your being can be ruined."

"They will put you in a stake, hanged and showcased to the world beyond."

"There will be no day where your flesh lies flat, for it has been consumed but fate and ire."

The sight of a remnant of what should be an impossible mortality, have claimed a string within my heart like it has been ripped from its cord.

It reminded me that no matter how tall I reached.

"Your end is inevitable."

I might still end up falling.

"This is quite the sight, don't you think?"

The air was suffocating.

Not in the way heat choked or pressure crushed—but in the way reality itself recoiled, as if resisting our very presence.

Even for those of heightened existential awareness, this place was not meant to be looked upon, let alone stood within.

The god's corpse was too vast, too broken, too impossible to be real. And yet, it was.

And it was changing even though it was impossible, since I've covered my surroundings with my perceptive extension as long and wide as I can, against the opposing force of the god's corpse.

Each second, the shape of it was subtly different. Its bones realigned, its fractures shifted, its proportions restructured—not as if it was healing, but as if the very nature of its existence refused to settle.

It was not dead in a way that could be understood.

This was a corpse too large for death to claim properly.

I could tell.

Verina and Lupina were disturbed.

Lupina's wings twitched restlessly, her tail lashing behind her in a barely contained fight-or-flight response. She kept shifting her weight, eyes darting across the ever-changing details of the skull towering above us.

Verina, for all her calm, had gone silent. No commentary. No snark. Not even an attempt to analyze what she was seeing.

Just a cold, analyzing silence.

Or maybe something was grabbing her throat.

I somehow could care less.

But to what end can my empathy stretch beyond my own reason. Still, their bodies—still adapting to their newly heightened existential height—were not ready for this.

And that was fine.

They weren't meant to be here.

"Go back," I finally said, my voice firm but not unkind.

Lupina turned to me, "Huh?"

Verina simply blinked.

"This place is… wrong for you," I explained, sweeping my gaze across the ever-shifting remains. "The very air here is rejecting you."

Lupina frowned, looking at Verina for confirmation.

Verina nodded once. "She's right."

It wasn't shame or failure that prompted my decision. It was simply a necessity.

Verina and Lupina had their limits. And that was fine.

"This information needs to be reported back to Viviane and the neuromorphic network for analysis," I continued. "Since psychic communication is impossible in this space, someone has to return manually."

A static-filled buzz filled my head every time I even tried establishing a telepathic link. It should be the same thing for my so-called secretary since Kuzunoha let my action be.

Whatever this corpse was, it carried a residual presence that even denied psychic connection.

Verina exhaled softly, closing her eyes for a moment before nodding. "Understood."

Lupina clicked her tongue, clearly unhappy but not about to argue. "Fine, fine. But if I come back and you two got eaten by some weird corpse-ghost thing, I'm not avenging you."

Kuzunoha chuckled.

"Noted," I mused, waving a hand.

And just like that, they departed.

Lupina kicked into full speed, her wings spreading wide, her jet-like tail igniting as she blasted off toward the sky, cutting through the unnatural mist like a streak of motion.

Verina followed, her Black Wheels humming with telekinetic arcane force as she glided upward at a calculated pace.

Within seconds, they had vanished into the distance, leaving only two figures behind.

Me.

And Kuzunoha.

Alone with a god's corpse.

The silence settled in.

No wind. No movement. No signs of life.

Only the subtle, eerie warping of reality around us.

I turned my gaze toward Kuzunoha, who was standing with an almost relaxed posture, arms crossed, crimson eyes glinting with a smug amusement she didn't bother hiding.

For all her playfulness, she was unreadable when she wanted to be.

I sighed.

"So," I started, "What exactly can we do about this?"

Kuzunoha simply shrugged.

"Nothing."

That answer, though unsurprising, still caught me off guard.

I narrowed my eyes. "Nothing?"

"Nothing," she repeated with a smirk. "Not all things demand action, dear Lady Narcissus. In this case, there's nothing that can be done in front of a fallen god who had taken Carcosa for a momentary visit in all of its glory and divinity."

I turned my gaze back toward the corpse of a god.

The endless, shifting bones. The shattered remnants of something that had once stood beyond mortality, beyond time, beyond logic.

And now, it was nothing.

A ruin.

A graveyard without a burial.

Kuzunoha tilted her head slightly, studying me. "This place will pass."

I glanced at her. "Pass?"

She nodded, expression unreadable.

"This god's graveyard is not a permanent fixture," she explained. "It is merely passing through Carcosa. Just like how a fish swims through a portion of the ocean."

I frowned.

It was an unsettling thought.

Something so large, so imposing, so deeply wrong—and yet, it was merely… passing through.

"How long?" I asked.

Kuzunoha smirked. "That's the question, isn't it?"

I exhaled through my nose. I already knew the answer.

We had no way of knowing.

Instead, I turned back toward the corpse.

"…What god was this?"

At that, Kuzunoha hummed, as if genuinely contemplating the question.

She lifted a hand, fingers tracing through the air as she gathered something invisible.

And then, she cast a spell.

It wasn't loud. It wasn't dramatic.

It was ancient.

A whisper of an incantation that carried the weight of something far older than language itself.

Eldritch letters flared into existence around her, symbols twisting and curling in the air, forming a floating script of unknowable origin.

The light from the runes flickered—then twisted—then settled into something resembling…

A name.

Kuzunoha's eyes glowed faintly as she studied it.

"…An old one," she murmured. "Very old. Possibly older than Carcosa itself."

Kuzunoha lifted a single finger, tracing along the glowing script.

"This one had dominion over the future," she mused. "A god of foresight, perhaps? Or something even more intrinsic to time itself."

She turned to me, grinning.

"A young divine entity could try tampering with it," she suggested lightly. "See a glimpse of the future."

I gave her a blank look.

"No."

Kuzunoha chuckled. "Oh? Not even a little peek?"

"No."

"You're no fun, Lady Narcissus."

"I enjoy having eyes that aren't bleeding out of their sockets, thank you."

Kuzunoha sighed, dismissing the eldritch letters with a flick of her wrist. "Well, can't say I didn't try enticing you."

I didn't push the conversation further.

Because I knew better.

When one had looked into the future, that very future that was perceived could become the very anchor that I either strive to achieve or strive to avoid.

And that very action of striving towards something, might put the future into a constant state of oblivion, where nothing are powered by nothing, since nothing had been done and achieved yet, but still being used as a way to forge a path.

The future was a dangerous thing to see.

And this corpse of a god was not something to be tampered with.

There was nothing to be done. Nothing to be learned that wouldn't come at an unspeakable cost.

And so, we left. The corpse did not stop us. It did not react. It simply was, the quiet watcher.

The dead thing that refused to settle.

As we ascended, leaving behind the endless abyss of its remains, I could still feel it.

Not malice. Not hunger.

Just the lingering presence of something too large for even Carcosa to digest.

A shadow that had been forcibly erased.

A god's graveyard, drifting through existence.

And we had only seen a fraction of what lay beneath.

"Good, now that you don't have to worry about your own very own dead, Daffodil."

"If only you took the offer and peeked closer, maybe we can find out the cause of your misery later."

"Those who fear facing the future, will only see nothing but the past and its sorrow entirely."

"Everything that can be perceived in existence is nothing but an illusion, just like your freedom."

"Heh, to think that a miserable being like you dared to stop your own step."

These uncaring and seething Daffodils inside my head should be enough to steer me towards that very uncertainty that I should strive forward.

Because my life was merely nothingness that is powered by nothing.

But the will to live and open the cage free.