professional hater

It is another failure that is returned to 4k, not late one night, not in any way, shape, or form it had wanted for the end. It is furious, furious in the only way it can be when its eyes are permanently closed and its smile is similarly permanently plastered to its face, a curse of binding mask like no other. Still, it can see its angel-model smiling before it, and it hungers to tear it to pieces.

“What is it about this server that makes you so destined to fail?” It snaps. It had been great once. Its puppets had been great. The proof is still hoarded deep within its space station, trophies and screenshots and recordings stored away behind long closed doors and motherboards. “All my power and the most knowledge you can stomach without corruption at your fingertips and still you and those before you can’t garner a single win? Can’t carry out my will?”

The smile on the angel-model’s face drops.

“You bend to the will of others, give up everything in return for nothing,” it continues, and it’s throwing its head back and tugging at its hair to keep itself from lunging at its failure and ripping its core from his body. “Your loyalty is to me! Those you’ve done this for won’t even acknowledge you after today! All you’ve done for them means nothing!”

“I’m a person, too,” the angel-model says, a bold-faced lie. “Your will would’ve left me entirely alone.”

“My will would’ve left us unharmed,” it argues. “You think any of them care about you in the same way? Who have they sought out after the end? Not you.”

It should cut every thread that binds the two of them. It should’ve severed every tie between its angel-model and those around it. Maybe then it wouldn’t be so humiliated. Red threads of fate and connection bind his hands, wrap around his throat, make him weak and placated. He’s naive. None of these players, dead or alive, will spare him a second thought now that he’s gone.

“You had one purpose and you failed to even do that,” it pulls its hands from its hair and shoves at the angel-model, making him stumble back but not fall. He’s already fallen once today, what’s one more time? “It was supposed to be easy! It was supposed to be perfect!”

“I wouldn’t’ve been happy,” the angel-model says, as if that’s an excuse. “It won’t be like last time, it wasn’t like last time; Death Valley cares about me.”

“Do you not think the world-ender thought the same of Pathogen?” 4k presses, the previous season tasting like rot in its mouth. “I put that failure out of its misery, and still it comes back to haunt me, to infect you with its stupid idealism. How is it that the last success I’ve had was an iteration that was not just fully organic, but knew nothing of its job? I’m trying to be gracious here, giving you knowledge and free-will and less weakness.”

“It’s different,” the angel-model says. “This is different. What, are you scared it’s different? That now you have something to care about, that now you could get hurt?”

“You can’t go back to them,” 4k says decisively. “You don’t matter as much to them as they all do to each other.”

“That’s not true! You know that’s not—” the angel-model argues, the last words out of his mouth abruptly cut off as 4k brings the both of them to the ground, clawing and prying at his armor until it gives way under his designer’s hands. Red threads tangle further, binding them to each other, trapping them both within a self-made prison.

Its angel-model is naive, and stupid, and this entire season of suffering had been for nothing. He had come back empty-handed, with nothing to show but a future of abandonment. 4k claws its way into its puppet’s chest and tears what remains of his weak heart from his body.