Disclaimer[]
DISCLAIMER FOR ANY INDIVIDUAL WHO READS THIS STORY: This is a mere work of fiction, but does contain real-life topics such as alcohol/drug abuse, death/suicide, and also possession (more on that within the story.) If you are not fond of these topics, it is strongly recommended to not read this story. However, if you do take great interest in games like these being written into horror stories for you and your chums to become MORTIFIED with, then go forth and read this. I’m not stopping you. I hope you enjoy the story, nonetheless.
The Backstory[]
My name’s Timothy “Smithy” Edwards, and this story starts with my best friend, Jeremy Henderson Martinez. Jeremy and I were inseparable. He was the kind of kid who lit up a room just by being there—the “real deal,” as we used to say. But his home life was anything but bright. His parents were kind people deep down, but both struggled with alcohol and drugs. I did my best to avoid their chaos whenever I was over, but in the past few months, things had gotten worse.
About a week ago, Jeremy admitted to me that he didn’t feel safe at home anymore. He said if things got too dangerous, he’d come stay with me. Then he said something that hit me like a brick:
“If I don’t make it, I want you to have my computer.”
I laughed it off at the time. I wish I hadn’t.
On Day 5, his fear became reality. Jeremy called the police. But before he could finish, his mother—drunk, high, and out of her mind—stormed into the room. She killed him in the middle of the 911 call. His father was arrested too, but his mother took the full weight of the sentence: life without parole. His dad got 50 years.
I was devastated. I kept replaying everything in my head, wondering if I could’ve done more, if I should’ve dragged him out of that house myself.
That night, while I was drowning in guilt, the doorbell rang. On my doorstep was a heavy box with a note taped on top:
“Jeremy wanted you to have this. His last wish.” —Grandpa Martinez
Inside was Jeremy’s computer. His grandfather had shipped it to me. My hands shook as I carried it inside and set it up. When I finally powered it on, Jeremy’s desktop appeared—a mix of games, music programs like FL Studio, and project folders. One icon caught my eye...
Doki Doki Literature Club.
Only… it wasn’t the normal version. It was Jeremy’s mod—the one he’d been working on for months before his murder.
Act 1[]
When I booted up the game, I knew something was different. The title screen didn’t look like the one I remembered. The sprites weren’t the glossy, anime-styled art from Team Salvato. They looked like posable vectors, almost like something drawn in Scratch—brighter, cartoony, oddly lively. It gave the game a different energy.
Act 1 started the usual way: Sayori met the protagonist outside his house, begging him to join the Literature Club. Her sprite had been redrawn in the same cartoonish style I saw on the title screen. So had the backgrounds. Even stranger, every line of dialogue was full-fledged voice acting. At first, I was impressed. For a fan project, this was ambitious.
The scenes played out the same as the original… until Sayori and the MC stepped into the clubroom. Yuri and Natsuki were already there, both redesigned in that same cartoony style.
Yuri greeted MC like normal. But Natsuki’s dialogue was different:
Natsuki: “Seriously?! You brought another boy here?? Way to kill the mood.”
“Another boy?” I muttered to myself. Then he appeared. A new sprite faded into view: another male character, drawn in the same style as MC—only with curly hair and glasses. I didn’t need a second look. I knew immediately. It was Jeremy. He had told me once, long before he died, that he wanted to mod himself into DDLC. And here he was.
His sprite was unfinished though, almost uncanny. Male students in the game wore ties; Jeremy’s didn’t. His eyes were pale, almost colorless. And strangest of all, his sprite had no mouth—but when he spoke, I heard his voice, clear as day.
Monika entered last. Her design had been altered too. In the original, she always stood facing directly at the screen, smiling at the player. But here, she stood at the same angle as the other girls, almost… ordinary. I shrugged it off as a design choice. But deep down, I had the sinking feeling it was foreshadowing something darker.
Sayori broke the silence with new dialogue, her voice carrying it’s usual bubbly cheer:
Sayori: “Oh! I didn’t know we had two new members joining today! Welcome!”
Act 1 continued like normal, just rewritten to accommodate Jeremy’s presence. The pacing was smooth, the additions seamless. It felt like a very high-effort fan mod. Uncanny, yes—but nothing I couldn’t explain.
At least, until Day Four. In the original game, Sayori’s mask doesn’t crack until Sunday. Day Five is the breaking point, when she confesses her depression. But this time… it happened early.
On Day Four, her voice wavered. Sometimes it was chipper, but other times, it was so faint I had to raise my volume just to hear her. By Sunday, instead of confessing her feelings to the MC, her sprite trembled. Then the cheerful facade shattered completely. She broke down in tears. Her voice acting turned into raw, ragged sobbing. The sound was too real, too painful—not like a real recording of someone crying their lungs out, but a bit too close for comfort.
Through broken breaths, Sayori whispered:
Sayori: “I’m happy people care about me… I really am… but I still feel so alone. It hurts. It hurts so much. This depression… it’s too heavy for me to bear.”
The text box glitched as she spoke—letters scrambling, jittering, then snapping back into place. Her sprite twitched between her cartoon smile and a weeping, distorted frame that Jeremy must’ve drawn himself. This wasn’t scripted tragedy anymore. This was something else. Something worse.
Then came Monday: Festival day. The day Sayori was supposed to die. Jeremy’s sprite was absent from the clubroom, but on his desk sat a note:
“Something’s wrong with Sayori. I left to go check on her. See you at the Festival! — Jeremy”
The screen faded to black. My stomach sank. I knew exactly what scene was coming next. The camera panned up to Sayori’s house. The cheerful background music cut out. My palms were sweating. Even though I’d seen it before, I wasn’t ready to watch her die again.
The front door creaked open. The screen flickered to black for a split second. And then—nothing. Just her bedroom. No body. No haunting music. Just an empty room with a snapped rope hanging where she should’ve been.
The MC’s dialogue popped up, confused:
MC: “Sayori? …Where are you?”
MC: “This… this doesn’t make sense. She should be here. She has to be here.”
MC: “I need to find her! But… should I?”
Then the choice menu appeared. Three options:
Yes | No | sayoriswing.mp4
Clicking the third option did nothing. My throat tightened. I chose “Yes.”
MC: “I have to find her.”
The game immediately shut itself down. And just like that… Act 1 was over. That third option—sayoriswing.mp4—wouldn’t leave my head. It hadn’t worked in the game itself, but I knew DDLC well enough to remember how Monika loved to toy with the actual files.
So I went digging. Deep in the game’s directory, past the usual scripts and assets, I found something new. A folder that hadn’t been there before. Its name:
“deaddokis.”
Inside were three subfolders: sayori, natsuki, and yuri. The last two were locked, inaccessible. Only Sayori’s would open. Her folder contained three files:
- A sprite of her hanging body, just like the original suicide scene.
- The same sprite, only in her school uniform.
- “deadsayori.png”—empty, like it wasn’t really a file at all.
And then there was a fourth file: sayoriswing.mp4
I clicked it.
The video began in Sayori’s bedroom. Her body dangled from the ceiling, eyes closed, expression calm. For a moment, I thought it was just a reused asset. Then the background glitched into a flood of red static. Sayori’s eyes snapped open—wide, terrified. Her sprite jerked and spasmed, feet thrashing as if she was really fighting for air.
A choking gasp cracked through my speakers—wet, broken. The rope above her didn’t connect to the ceiling anymore. It connected to a hand. Jeremy’s. He stood in the corner, gripping the rope with one pale, clawed hand. His eyes were gone, hollow sockets dripping static. His mouth stretched too wide, teeth bared in a grin that looked carved into his face.
He didn’t attack. Not yet. Instead, he began to swing her, slamming her against the wall. Once. The entire room shuddered, the screen warping like corrupted VHS. Twice. Sayori’s sprite flickered, frames stuttering out of sync. Three times. The sound cut entirely, leaving only silence and faint static under the red wash. Four.
The textbox appeared at the bottom of the screen. Only one word:
“stop”
Five. The screen went black. In that darkness, I heard it: a single gasp, the sound someone makes when they’re drowning. Then silence.
When my desktop reappeared, a new file was sitting in the folder. “deadsayori.png” had been unlocked. I opened it. The cartoonish style of Jeremy’s mod was still there, but twisted into something grotesque. Sayori slumped against her bedroom wall, body bent unnaturally. Her pupils were gone, her eyes bloodshot, streaked with crimson tears running down her face.
The rope was still knotted tightly around her throat, the skin beneath it raw and dark. Her mouth hung open, thick streams of red smeared across her lips and staining the front of her school uniform. Her chest and collar were caked in dried, pixelated gore. Behind her, the wall was splattered with jagged blotches of dark crimson, like someone had smeared them with their bare hands. The rough, uneven patterns almost looked like a toddler’s painting—childish and frantic.
It wasn’t just a sprite anymore. It looked like an aftermath screen. I was tempted to dig deeper into the files, but something told me the game wasn’t finished with me yet. So I launched it again.
Act 2[]
Act 2 didn’t begin outside like it usually did. Instead, it dropped me straight into the clubroom. But something was wrong. Yuri wasn’t the timid, reserved girl I remembered. Sure, her obsession with the MC was no longer hidden beneath nervous glances or hesitant stammers. I expected that.
But what I didn’t expect was that her sprite lingered too long after her lines, her eyes widening unnaturally every time she spoke. Her dialogue was rewritten—no slow descent into madness, no buildup. It was desperation from the start, like her façade had cracked overnight.
Monika wasn’t herself either. Gone was her composure and awareness. Her smile twitched at the corners of her mouth, her gaze flicking toward the edge of the screen between lines. She looked less like a manipulator in control and more like someone being hunted.
And then there was Jeremy. He was still present, but quieter than he’d been in Act 1. His lines were sparse, reluctant, as though each word cost him something. His sprite blinked more often now, and when it did, I noticed his eyes didn’t quite fit his face anymore. They seemed smaller, pulled back into their sockets, surrounded by uneven shadows of empty blackness. It didn’t look like a character anymore. It looked like a mask—a hollow mask with marbles rattling inside.
None of the others seemed to notice. Not Yuri. Not Natsuki. Not even Monika. Somehow, that was the most unsettling thing of all.
Act 2 mostly unfolded the way I remembered, with only minor changes. But on Day 3, no matter what choices I made, a new scene triggered. Yuri and Jeremy were in Yuri’s bedroom. Nothing romantic—just two friends sharing space. The moment felt almost normal, like a breather. Until Jeremy blinked.
When his eyes opened again, I saw it: a thin trickle of blood slipping out of one socket.
“Wait—did that just happen?” I muttered aloud, leaning closer to the screen.
But I wasn’t the only one who noticed. Yuri’s sprite stiffened. Her voice actress delivered the line with a sharp, startled edge I’d never heard before:
“…Jeremy? You’re bleeding.”
The performance didn’t sound scripted. It didn’t sound like a mod at all. Jeremy blinked again, confused. When his hand came back wet, his eyes went wide. His sprite trembled, shuddering like a corrupted frame. And then the music started: Sayo-Nara.
But not the version I knew. This one played faster, accelerating in tempo as new instruments layered in—discordant, off-key, like the soundtrack itself was panicking. Yuri’s calm, obsessive composure shattered. Her sprite leaned forward, eyes wide, mouth open in genuine fear.
“Jeremy… what’s happening to you?!”
For ten seconds, the screen was chaotic. Jeremy shaking. Yuri pleading. The music spiraling out of control. Then Jeremy collapsed. His body crumpled to the floor, eyes rolling back into black. The screen cut to black with him. He had passed out.
The transition into the next morning felt normal. Almost too normal. Yuri greeted me with her usual nervous smile, polite and shy as ever. No mention of what had happened the night before. No memory of Jeremy collapsing in her room. That was when it hit me: Monika. She had to be behind it.
But Yuri’s sudden amnesia wasn’t the only thing wrong. Jeremy had changed again. His sprite loaded in, and I froze. One of his eyes was missing completely, leaving behind a hollow socket that bled static. The other eye remained, but it was smaller, sunken into his skull like it didn’t belong there anymore. He wasn’t wearing his glasses anymore. Small, curling horns jutted from his forehead. From his back sprouted jagged, tattered wings, the veins etched in grotesque, sickly detail.
His mouthless face had stretched longer, more angular, his frame taller—towering just slightly over Yuri, when before he had barely reached Sayori’s height. Jeremy didn’t look human anymore.
The club reacted in different ways. Monika’s sprite shuddered, her smile twitching unnaturally. Yuri blushed, tilting her head, cheeks flushed like nothing had changed. But Natsuki… she noticed.
“Uh… what’s with the horns and wings? Is this, like, some kinda Halloween thing?”
She frowned. And before I could react, her sprite moved closer—leaning forward until her hand reached out and grabbed one of Jeremy’s wings.
The sound that followed rattled my headphones. Jeremy growled. It wasn’t a human sound. It was low, guttural, an animalistic rumble that vibrated in my chest. His sprite twitched violently, frames skipping like his body couldn’t hold still.
Natsuki froze.
“…Ohh. You… don’t like that.”
Her sprite recoiled fast, stepping back to her original pose. The growling stopped. For a second, the screen held still. But the text box wasn’t done. It filled anyway. One word. Then another. Then another. Typed out slowly, painfully deliberate:
“Don’t. Touch. Me.”
The voice acting… God, the voice acting… it just wasn’t right. Jeremy’s normal voice was still there, but it was crushed, broken, distorted like it had been fed through a shredded speaker. Beneath it, layered just slightly out of sync, was another voice. Something deeper. Too deep to belong to a human throat.
And then, just like that, the scene moved on as though nothing had happened. Aside from Jeremy’s twisted appearance and that terrifying moment with Natsuki, everything played out normally… until she handed me her usual note.
Only this time, it wasn’t the same. The handwriting was hers. The voice acting even read it aloud in Natsuki’s voice. But the words… these weren’t in the original game.
Natsuki’s Note (Day 4)[]
“I don't know how else to bring this up. But there's been something I've been worried about. Yuri has been acting kind of strange lately. You've only been here a few days, so you may not know what I mean. But she's not normally like this. She's always been quiet and polite and attentive… things like that.
Okay… this is really embarrassing, but I'm forcing myself to suck it up. The truth is, I'm REALLY worried about her. But if I try talking to her, she'll just get mad at me again. I don't know what to do. I think you're the only person that she'll listen to. I don't know why. But please try to do something. Maybe you can convince her to talk to a therapist.
But it’s not just Yuri anymore. It’s Jeremy, too. I know that sounds weird. I know he’s supposed to be just another club member. But something’s wrong. He doesn’t blink. He doesn’t smile. His eyes look… wrong. And Yuri’s been spending more time with him. She’s not just obsessed with her books anymore. She’s obsessed with him. And I don’t think it’s healthy. I don’t think it’s safe. I’ve seen her talking to him when no one else is around. I’ve seen her hands shaking. I swear I saw blood on her sleeve yesterday. I don’t know if it was hers.
And Monika… she’s been acting weird too. Not just bossy—weird. She keeps checking the computer files like she’s afraid they’ll change. She told me Jeremy was ‘unstable code.’ She said he wasn’t supposed to be here. But then she told me to ignore it. Like she’s scared to even say his name. She’s paranoid. She’s watching us. Watching him. I think she knows something, but she won’t tell me. And that scares me even more.
I’ve always wanted to try being better friends with Yuri, and it really hurts me to see this happening. I know I'm going to hate myself later for admitting that, but right now I don't care. I just feel so helpless. So please see if you can do something to help. I don't want anything bad to happen to her. Or to any of us. I'll make you cupcakes if I have to. Just please try to do something.
DON'T LET ANYONE KNOW I WROTE THIS!!!! Just pretend like I gave you a really good poem, okay? I'm counting on you. Thanks for reading.”
Act 2 (Continued)[]
I sat there staring at the screen long after the text faded. In the original game, Natsuki was never aware of anything beyond her own world—just another puppet in Monika’s script. But here, she knew more. Too much. She wasn’t just afraid of Yuri’s obsession. She was afraid of Jeremy. And honestly? So was I.
The rest of Day 4 played out the way I remembered. Until Yuri’s final poem. When she handed it to me, my blood ran cold.
It was still written in that jagged, obsessive scrawl I remembered from the original… but there weren’t any actual words. The paper itself was stained—sickly patches of yellow and brown soaking into the fibers, streaks of dried blood smeared across the page like it had been pulled out of something rotting. Nothing new there.
But the writing? It wasn’t handwriting at all. The entire page was filled with Base64. A dense block of encoded letters stretched across the text box like a wall of gibberish:
Vm0wd2VHUXhTWGxTYmxKV1YwZDRXRmxVU2xOV1ZsbDNXa1pPVlUxV2NIcFhhMk0xVmpKS1IySkVUbHBXVmxwUVZqQmFTMlJIVmtWUmJVWlRWakpvZVZkV1dsWmxSbGw1Vkd0c2FGSnNjRmhhVjNoaFpWWmtXR1JIZEZSTlZUVklWbTAxVjJGc1NuUmhSemxWVm0xb1JGcFdXbXRXTVZwelYyMTRVMkY2VmxwV1Z6RXdWakZXZEZOclpGaGlSMmhoV1d0a1UyUnNjRmRYYlVacVlrWmFlVmRyV2s5VWJGcDFVV3hvVjFKc2NGaFdha3BIVTBaYWRWSnNTbGRTTTAwMQ==
At first, I thought it was just nonsense. A glitch. But then I recognized the pattern. It was encoded. I copied the string and ran it through a Base64 decoder. What I got wasn’t an answer. It was another block of Base64.
So I decoded it again. And again. Ten layers deep. Each time, peeling back another scrambled mask.
Until finally, the last string resolved into plain text. A single filename:
natsukibleed.mp4
I quickly saved my game and went digging through the files again. My search led me back to the “deaddokis” folder. This time, Natsuki’s folder was unlocked. Inside were three files:
- Her normal neck-snap sprites
- A video called natsukibleed.mp4
- A deadnatsuki.png image
Like the deadsayori file earlier, the PNG was locked. Empty. Which meant I had to watch the video.
It opened in Natsuki’s kitchen. She was humming, flipping through a manga at the counter. For a fleeting moment, it felt… cozy. Almost normal.
Then the shadows stretched. Jeremy appeared behind her. Monstrous, half-formed, his grin wider than her entire face. Natsuki startled, but instead of cowering, she swung at him—a desperate left hook. Brave, yet futile.
Jeremy caught her wrist immediately. CRACK.
The sound design was sharp, surgical. Her hand didn’t just break. The entire hand tore away. Not in gritty gore, but in grotesque cartoon exaggeration. Arcs of crimson sprayed across the pastel kitchen, the color clashing violently with the soft tones of the background.
Natsuki screamed; a shrill, piercing cry that didn’t sound scripted anymore. She stumbled back, tripped, and collapsed to the floor. Jeremy grabbed a chair and slammed it down on her torso. Wood splintered. Her sprite convulsed. The screen flickered static-red with every impact. Each scream distorted—clipping, doubling, echoing, like the game itself couldn’t contain the sound.
And then came the worst part. Jeremy lifted her by the throat. The text box appeared:
don’t scream
But she did. His claw lashed across her face. For a single frozen frame, the game showed her skin peeling away like torn paper. One eye missing. Her mouth gaping in a silent scream. A spray of crimson pixels plastered the wall before the video cut to black.
When my desktop reappeared, the deadnatsuki.png file was unlocked. I opened it. I instantly wished I hadn’t.
Natsuki’s body slumped on the cartoon kitchen floor, exactly where the video left her. A pool of crimson spread beneath her, seeping into jagged, pixelated blotches that almost seemed to pulse against the pastel tiles. Her face was ruined. Torn away like paper. One wide, glassy eye stared upward, blank, while the other socket was a hollow abyss. Jammed into her torso, the broken wooden chair.
The stump of her hand hadn’t been left empty. A sharp wheel from a roller chair had been jammed crudely into the wound, sticking out of the flesh like some grotesque prosthetic.
It wasn’t hyper-realistic. The shading was clean. The outlines bright. The colors deceptively cheerful. But that almost made it worse. The cartoon gore clashed violently with the brutality of what I was seeing.
And in that moment, I realized—
The game wasn’t just trying to shock me. It was mocking me.
I loaded my last save. Yuri greeted me with that same trembling smile, clutching her poem.
“Do you… like it?” she asked.
Two options popped up: Yes or No.
I already knew it didn’t matter. I clicked Yes. This time, the scene didn’t glitch into still frames. It moved. Smooth. Fluid. Fully animated.
Yuri’s face twisted, deranged. Her laughter erupted—high, sharp, manic—scraping across my ears like metal on glass. Then she pulled out the kitchen knife. Without hesitation, she drove it into her stomach. Once. Twice. Again. Into her chest. Her laughter never stopped.
But the moment the blade sank into her chest, the screen tore apart with a violent jumpscare: a single, lingering image of a flame flickering against pure black. It seared into my eyes before the game cut to darkness.
Her forehead was smashed open, skull shattered. From the wound poured a black, spiked sludge—bubbling, writhing, alive. The only features still intact were her nose, her long hair, one wide bulging eye, and her mouth… frozen in a psychotic smile. The knife jutted deep into her stomach, crimson spilling down her uniform in pulsing gushes. Her wrists were stained with dried blood, as if she’d done this before, and the game wanted me to remember.
And then I saw him. Jeremy. Or what he had become. His demonic form loomed directly behind her—horns jagged, wings stretched wide, his grin a hollow mask. He didn’t move. He didn’t speak.
After Yuri’s death, I waited for Natsuki to burst into the classroom like she always does. But she never came. The silence lingered far too long. No footsteps. No dialogue. No glitchy interruptions from Monika. Just the slow zoom on Yuri’s broken, twitching corpse. The knife still jutted from her chest.
And that’s when it hit me.
Natsuki wasn’t coming. Because she couldn’t. If the natsukibleed.mp4 file meant anything… she was already gone.
The game didn’t fade out. It didn’t delete Yuri’s sprite like the original. Act 2 ended right there, with her mangled body slumped in the middle of the clubroom.
I was ready to quit, ready to shut the whole thing down, but then I noticed something. When I moved my mouse over Yuri’s corpse, the screen shimmered. Barely—like static crawling across her outline. And faint text flickered at the bottom corner of the screen. A filename:
yuriobsession.mp4
Her folder in “deaddokis” had been locked before. But I knew it would be open now. I closed the game and went back into the folder. Yuri’s folder was no longer locked. Inside were her unused static sprites, a .gif, an audio file of her original death sequence… and two new files:
- deadyuri.png
- yuriobsession.mp4
If I’d learned anything from last time, I knew I had to watch the video first.
It opened in the empty clubroom. The lighting was wrong—dim, sickly, like the sun had given up shining through the windows. Yuri stood alone at a desk, the knife clutched tightly in her hands. She wasn’t panicking. She wasn’t afraid. She was smiling. Her eyes darted down at the blade—fixated, shimmering with a wild awe.
Then the air bent. Shadows stretched across the walls. Jeremy appeared behind her. Not the Jeremy I’d first known—the Jeremy. Horns, wings, jagged smile tearing across his face.
Yuri didn’t scream when he wrenched the knife from her grip. She sighed. Like she’d been waiting for him. The knife plunged into her stomach. Her body jerked, but her eyes never left his. Blood soaked through her uniform as Jeremy slammed her against the wall hard enough to rattle the bookshelves. She tried to raise her arms, but his claws closed around her wrists and crushed them. The muted snap of bone carried, deliberate and final, crimson dripping from her sleeves.
And then—the worst part. Jeremy tore a floorboard loose from beneath her feet. With one brutal swing, he smashed it across her forehead. The crack of bone echoed. Black spiked sludge burst from the wound, spraying the cutesy walls in thick arcs before the screen cut to black.
When the video ended, I realized what it meant. The single-frame jumpscare I’d seen earlier—Yuri’s shattered forehead, the dripping black ooze—hadn’t been random. It had been foreshadowing this moment all along. The deadyuri.png file confirmed it. Yuri’s corpse slumped on the floor, wrists mangled, knife still buried in her chest. Her forehead was split wide open, sludge seeping in thick blotches across her face like tar: the exact same shot of her body at the end of Act 2.
The realization hit me like ice water. The game wasn’t throwing random scares. It was building them. Every flicker. Every glitch. Every fleeting image had been deliberate. It wanted me to see this. It wanted me to remember.
And now, just like Sayori and Natsuki before her, Yuri had been catalogued. Archived. Reduced to another dead file in the folder. Only this time, it felt different. Like the game wasn’t mocking me anymore. Like it was keeping score.
Act 3[]
Act 3 didn’t start the way I expected. There was no glitched transition. No cheery music warped into static. The screen simply faded in. Monika was already there—center stage, lit by the sterile glow of the clubroom background. But she wasn’t smiling. Her face was pale, pupils wide and darting like she was being hunted.
For once, the “all-knowing AI” didn’t look in control. Her voice broke the silence.
“I… I don’t know how to explain this. Something’s wrong. More wrong than usual. The RealDeal.CHR file… it’s gone berserk. I—I can’t delete it, I can’t isolate it. It’s spreading through everything. I don’t know how much longer I have.”
The screen glitched hard—sharp green and crimson tears ripping across her body like claw marks. A faint distortion hummed beneath her voice, like something else was trying to speak over her. For the first time in the entire game, Monika didn’t feel like the one pulling the strings. She felt trapped. And that terrified me more than anything else so far.
Her voice steadied for just a second, like she had finally pieced something together.
“Wait… no, I think I know what’s causing thi—”
The door behind her slammed open. The screen convulsed. A blur of horns, wings, and jagged shadows tore into the frame. Jeremy—monstrous, towering, sockets glowing like burning coals—lurched forward.
Monika barely had time to flinch. His claws wrapped around her throat. Her voice cracked into static.
“No—stop, please, I—”
Jeremy’s second hand snapped around her arm. In one violent jerk, he yanked her sideways. The floor screeched beneath her as she was dragged. Her desperate shrieks glitched, warped, cut in and out like a corrupted audio file.
“Stop—! Please, stop—!”
Her cries vanished the moment his massive frame blotted her out completely. Then, with one final, sickening tug, Jeremy pulled her off-screen. The sound design didn’t match the visuals. It was wrong—scraping, tearing, something heavy dragged across metal. The very code of the game groaned under the weight of it.
And then—silence. Monika was gone. The screen lingered on the empty clubroom just long enough for the dread to settle in.
Then it snapped back. Jeremy filled the frame. Both of his eyes were gone—nothing but twin black voids staring into me. And yet, somehow, I felt them burn. His grin split too wide across his face, teeth jagged razors catching the light like knives. The wings, once torn, were whole now. Vast, leathery, veins pulsing faintly beneath the skin. His horns curled upward, sharp and symmetrical, a crown twisted from bone.
He didn’t move. He only breathed. If you could call it breathing. The audio buzzed with a low, stomach-deep hum I felt more than heard.
Then came his voice. Not in any human register—layered, bitcrushed distortion above, with something deeper, ancient, predatory beneath. Every word vibrated like a blade dragged across bone.
“You see her, don’t you? Still clinging to life. Still pretending she’s in control.
She played god once. Toyed with hearts. Bent reality to her will. But now? She’s just another broken thing in a broken game.
Do you feel sorry for her? After everything? After what she let happen to the others?
Sayori’s lungs filled with blood. Natsuki screamed until her throat tore. Yuri’s mind cracked before her body did. And Monika… watched.
She thought she could erase pain. Rewrite guilt. But you can’t delete what you refuse to understand.
She begged me to stop. Begged me to spare you. But mercy isn’t part of this code anymore.
Every smile she gave you was a lie. Every poem, a trap. She wanted you to love her… while she tore the others apart.
She’s not the victim. She’s the architect.
And now, she’s broken. Just like the rest.”
The text box appeared, typing out one letter at a time:
“Go on. Put her out of her misery. It’s the only way to continue.”
The game cut back. Monika lay on the floor, convulsing. Her sprite stuttered between frames, eyes flickering in and out of their sockets. Glitched fragments of missing textures and computer data bled from her mouth and across her body, pooling beneath her chin like corrupted pixels turned liquid.
She tried to speak, but only static came through—garbled syllables struggling to form words the game refused to render. No dialogue box. No options. Just Monika—glitching, broken, victimized.
And Jeremy’s demand echoed in the silence.
It hit me. This wasn’t about saving her. Or fixing the game. Jeremy wanted me to finish what he started. I had to delete Monika. Not to free her. Not to fix anything. But because the game left me no choice.
So, out of mercy—or maybe just desperation—I deleted her file.
The moment I hit delete, the game convulsed. The screen fractured into shards of static. Monika’s sprite flickered like a dying ember. A piercing shriek ripped through my headphones, louder than anything before—then cut off.
And then… nothing. The game closed itself, dumping me back to my desktop.
Act 4[]
When I reopened the game, I didn’t get the title screen I was expecting. No cheerful tune, no pastel backdrop. Instead, the Ghost Menu stared back at me. Normally, the Ghost Menu is just an Easter egg—a rare 1-in-64 chance where distorted versions of the girls replace the normal roster. But this wasn’t the same hidden gag I’d read about online.
The screen had been stripped of all color, reduced to a flat, lifeless greyscale. The character roster wasn’t distorted or glitched—they were missing entirely. Just empty space where they should have been.
It didn’t feel like I had stumbled on an Easter egg. It felt like I’d triggered a version of the Ghost Menu that wasn’t supposed to exist.
The Load Game, Settings, Help, and Quit options were unclickable. So, with no other choice, I clicked New Game.
The screen faded in, and there he was. Jeremy. But not the demon. Not anymore.
His sprite was muted, drained of color to match the Ghost Menu. His face was burned away, leaving the faint outline of a skull beneath shredded skin. His chest was split open, ribs barely visible through the torn fabric of his uniform. Whole patches of his arms were raw and exposed, the skin stripped like paper.
This wasn’t the monster. This was the aftermath. This was Jeremy’s corpse.
The text box appeared. His words came slow, deliberate—like each one hurt to speak:
“This is all that remains of me… the shell. The part that died screaming.
The good parts—the parts that laughed, dreamed, loved—they’re still here. But they’re trapped. Bound by the monster you saw before.
That monster isn’t me. It’s my pain. My hate. My vengeance. And it doesn’t deserve to move on.
I want to go. I want to rest. But I need your help. You can only free me if you’re willing to let go. Are you ready?”
Two options appeared: Yes / No.
The “No” option looked clickable at first—but the moment I hovered over it, it glitched into grey static, unselectable. There was never really a choice. I clicked Yes.
Jeremy’s corpse exhaled, a sound more like static fading than breath. His sprite began to dissolve, breaking apart into white noise. For just an instant, a second image flickered behind him: Jeremy as he might have been. Whole. Smiling faintly. Almost… peaceful.
And then it was gone. The screen went dark. The game closed itself.
The Aftermath[]
I sat there in silence, staring at my desktop. The game was gone, but its weight lingered, pressing against me like static that refused to fade.
Finally, I shut down the PC and laid back on my bed, eyes fixed on the ceiling. The more I thought about it, the more it sank in. Jeremy’s spirit hadn’t just haunted the files—it had been bound to them. Anchored to the world he’d poured himself into.
The monster that stalked the girls, that shredded every trace of joy from the club… it wasn’t random code. It wasn’t a gimmick. It was Jeremy’s pain. His hatred. His vengeance. All the darkness born the night he was murdered by the one person who was supposed to protect him—his mother.
By deleting Monika’s file, I hadn’t just broken the script. I had severed the monster’s hold. I had given Jeremy what he’d been denied in life.
And when the game offered me that single, unskippable choice—Yes—I understood. It wasn’t about “winning.” It wasn’t about fixing the game. It was about release. About letting him go.
That last click wasn’t just the end of Act 4. It was closure. His. And mine.
I didn’t know whether to cry, or to smile, or both. But I knew one thing: Jeremy had found peace. The monster was gone. And the club… what was left of it… could finally rest.
The game was finished. But I’ll never forget what it showed me.