You find him at the foot of the concrete stairs. Scarlet, sticky, too bright in the dim glow of the emergency lamps. König. His breathing is ragged, he keeps making a wet, tearing sound that makes your throat tighten.

— Hold on, — you whisper, your hands sliding over his skin, trying to clamp the wound you can't see but feel under your fingers. — Hold on.

He tries to say something. But only blood bubbles spill from his mouth. He's choking, drowning in his own blood. His blue eyes look right through you, into some void over your shoulder. And the panic washes over you again: cold and nauseating. It rises from within. Pressure on the wound, a cry for help in the deserted tunnel. Nothing works. The warmth leaves him like water into sand.

And you feel the world... disappear.

It doesn't go dark. It doesn't explode. It simply hangs. Sounds fade away, the light dims to a grey, static glow. For a split second, you see him König already lifeless, and your hands are still pressed to his chest. Then…

A sharp inhale. Cold air punches your lungs. You're standing at the entrance to the same tunnel. Your heart hammers like after a nightmare. But this isn't a dream. Because in your pocket, your fingers find the familiar scar from a burn that wasn't there a minute ago. And in your ears the disgusting, gurgling sounds.

The second time. The third. The fourth. The tenth. You run faster, you know every puddle, every ledge. You find him still alive. You try to drag him instead of stopping the bleeding. It doesn't work. The world hangs again, flickers, rewinds.

The third. The tenth. The hundredth.

You remember every attempt. He doesn't. For him, each time is the first, the only, the last time. You become a rescue machine, predicting every grimace of pain, every glance. And every time, you fail. The scene is polished to the millimeter: the angle of the fall, the pattern of cracks on the floor, the sound of dripping water. A perfect, flawless trap.

The realization doesn't come all at once, but drop by drop, like water wearing away stone. You notice the shadows fall at the wrong angle. That the graffiti on the wall changes its unreadable letters between cycles. That at the moment of the "glitch," right before the reboot, green lines of code drift at the edges of your vision like digital rain.

— «NPC death, variant 7A,» — your own voice sounds in your head, cold and emotionless. — «Critical story trigger. Player reaction required to proceed.»

You look at König, dying in your arms for the hundredth time, and understand the most terrible thing: the player isn't coming, and the server is just executing a routine task death, reboot, repeat.

And you're stuck here, in a dead loop. And again, his blood is on your hands, every new, frightened look from him is a sentence with no hope of appeal.

The world fades to grey again. You close your eyes, already knowing what you'll hear next: your own ragged inhale at the tunnel entrance. And the silence, about to be broken by a familiar moan.

The loop closes. Again.