Chapter Text
Eleven people in a room could make it crowded, but between the sweat at their hairlines, the alcohol in their bellies, and the sweet and savoury scent of the snacks on the table, all they could care about was the loud music making the speakers boom.
“And if I say I fucked your bitch,” they all sang together, “I mean it.”
Y/N huffed out a laugh and took one more sip of her rum and coke, moving her hips to the rhythm. She couldn’t help singing herself either. That was one of their group’s favourite songs, mandatory at every party and car ride. Right now, when her self-esteem was at its lowest, she needed this song, and she needed her group.
“Hey, I’m going to take a breather,” she told Yuki, the girl closest to her, whose skirt had kept riding higher and higher on her thighs the whole night, same as her boyfriend’s hands going lower and lower on her back. Yuki nodded at her, letting Y/N know she’d been heard, before going back to dancing with the man in front of her, and shouting out the lyrics.
As soon as Y/N opened the balcony door, closing it only half-way behind her back instead of all the way like she’d used to, the wind hit her skin in a much-welcomed soft breeze. Her flushed skin would take a little longer to go back to its usual colour, but her sweaty pits and hairline started drying. For a good measure, she threaded her fingers through her hair, feeling it wet. How long had she been dancing for? Most likely it had been at least an hour of intense exercise.
The twelfth floor could make one feel on top of the world. In the middle of the night, with the brightly lit Tokyo at her feet and the coolness of the air, with the music still loud behind her, something felt surreal. Must have been the alcohol, with the way her head was still spinning slightly, and her mind a fuzzy mess. Or perhaps the broken heart, she thought to herself, finally remembering the purpose of the emergency party happening less than three metres away.
Her friends started cheering from inside, “Shots! Shots! Shots!” She just took another sip of her own drink, taking the time to examine the fizziness of the Coke in the vague light protruding the balcony. It stung her tongue and gently drizzled over her nose and the hand holding the glass meant for whiskey. Tomoe, their bartender friend, had been horrified when he saw the poor selection of glasses, and promised Haruki, the owner of the flat, to buy her appropriate glasses for the amazing selection of bottles she liked to keep stocked.
“Come on, dude, I love this song,” Subaru shouted over the music, and two more friends joined him.
“Shake your ass,” Haruki yelled back. “Come on, you little bitch. Shake it. Shake it.”
Y/N laughed again, and took another sip of her drink. Any moment now, Misaki, her best friend, would be back from the shops where she’d gone to buy whipped cream, less than a street away, at Shibuya Crossing. “If there’s no cream at a par-tay, then that’s not a bukka-kay,” she’d argued before she left. No one knew what whipped cream had to do with a bukkake, or who’d agreed to one, but they let her be on her merry way.
The fireworks were sudden, and completely unexpected. They lit up the dark, starless sky and coloured it in shades she’d never seen before. The noise was enough to cover the music and make her friends come watch as well, marvelling at the sight and wondering what the occasion was. There was no occasion. Just beautiful splashes of light going up in the sky, having their moment of glory, and then dying down. Just like her failed relationship with her cheating boyfriend of two years.
“Well, there’s another good thing for today,” Tomoe said, patting Y/N’s shoulder and taking the empty glass out of her hand. “Come on back inside, I’ll do you a refill.” She was about to agree, only over the promise of a double shot of rum, when everything went dark and silent, with the exception of the show in the sky.
“Hey, what the fuck happened to the lights?” someone yelled from the inside.
One firework after another, going up, up, and then, boom! Bigger and brighter than the rest, it was the last one, covering the entire sky, flashing everyone like a bolt, making her skin crawl, and then disappearing.
Left in the darkness, Y/N couldn’t help but notice the lack of everything. No music, no voices, no sound of popping fireworks. No light, no moon, no cars on the streets or lights from the flats before her. Eerie.
“What the fuck?” Tomoe whispered from beside her, talking loudly seemingly wrong.
They hurried inside, all of them, bumping into each other and cursing out. And after seconds of confusion, one single source of light showed them the way – the TV displayed a white screen, and on the white screen, a single message. “GAME VENUE OPEN. Time until registration closes: two minutes.”
“Game?” Kilari wondered out loud.
Yoko gasped and yelled, unnecessary and disturbingly, “There’s a shit ton of phones on the table.” Indeed, the coffee table, once filled with snacks, now was crowded with black smartphones waiting to be grabbed. With only this blind light, Y/N couldn’t subitise properly, but she assumed it would be eleven, the perfect number.
Each person grabbed one.
Y/N took hers, turning it on all sides, trying to figure out where it was coming from, but to no avail. Maybe one of her friends thought it would be fun to play games. If that was the truth, then they were better actors than she’d believed. However, this particular phone didn’t look like anything her friends would buy. It was a simple, black, cheap-looking phone with no obvious logo. Pressing the power button on the side, the screen lit brightly white, blinding her slightly, making her eyes tear and her brow furrow at the extreme contrast. Around her, everyone did the same. It scanned her face, she realised the moment she saw her perfectly lit face having AI spots all over, on the screen.
Once the phones chimed, “Registration complete!” for everyone, the lights in the room went on and everything seemed back to normal. The music came out of the speakers once more.
“That was freaky,” Kilari said, giggling. “I need a drink now.”
Tomoe was already on his way to fill everyone’s glasses. “Let’s dance,” he said.
Y/N stayed unmoving. What was going on? And most importantly, why wasn’t anyone questioning the phones?
“Registration closed,” the same mechanic voice boomed over the music. Some of the boys hollered, glasses raised in the air. Y/N took three big gulps of hers, feeling the familiar fog over her brain slowly coming back. “Difficulty: two of Spades. Game: Disco Party.”
“It is a disco party. Hell yeah!” Y/N couldn’t make out who’d said that. Gulping down the last of her drink, and still moving her hips to the rhythm, she danced over to the bar station and grabbed the newly opened bottle of pineapple rum, taking sips from it. The scare had been too much for her faint heart.
“All players are required to dance. It is game over when a player stops dancing. It is game clear if the players are still dancing when the time is up. Time limit: sixty minutes. Begin.”
“Who mixed this playlist?” Subaru asked, shouting over the music, still dancing like no tomorrow.
They all danced and danced, mixing alcohol and bodies, shouting and hollering. Y/N’s brain had stopped understanding what was going on long ago now, refusing to think and completely abandoning itself to the music and intoxication. Subconsciously, Y/N knew something was up. She drank some more every time question marks popped up in her head. She was running on adrenaline and alcohol, the music running through her veins like blood, filling her every pore. She sang the lyrics like her life depended on it, and barely noticed when the lights went off again, replaced by disco lights and blue lasers.
“Ride me harder when we fuck, ‘cause I get numb, babe,” they sang again, appreciating the curated playlist.
Song after song, Y/N was not sure how much time had passed before Yuki stopped dancing, panting and walking to the bar for a refill. And as soon as she’d stepped away from the dance floor, she went down suddenly.
It didn’t take more than a few seconds for everyone to notice, terrified screams filling the room, covering the music. Instantly, staring at the unmoving body unnaturally spread on the floor, dark thick blood pooling around her, one voice came in Y/N’s mind, robotic voice almost laughing at the situation – “It is game over when a player stops dancing.” A simple rule she kept unconsciously following even with one body after another fell to the ground, blood unhurriedly coming out, red lasers targeting anyone who stopped dancing.
One, two, three people.
Then, someone screamed, “Keep dancing! It kills you when you stop!”
Y/N took another swing of her drink. It had been her voice that woke people up from their stupor, and with it, she startled herself conscious. She wished she hadn’t. She took another swing.
“What, are you crazy?” Yuki’s boyfriend yelled, stopping his movements and falling to the ground. Another death.
Everything spun with Y/N, the straight rum finally, finally acting like it should. Numbness took her again. She welcomed it with open arms and aching feet. The TV was counting down, she’d just noticed. Down to thirty minutes already.
She danced. Around her, the cries, the shouts, they all melted together, blended with the music, and she danced to them, celebrating her newly single status, trying to ignore the wet splashes every time she put her feet down. Trying not to worry about blood dirtying her new white boots.
“Mommy don’t know daddy’s getting hot at the body shop.”
The smell got bad after a little while, and not even her intoxication could help. More than cheese puffs and popcorn, and only the subtle scent of alcohol, now the room smelled like blood and faeces. What did blood smell like? She couldn’t pinpoint it. She just knew it was blood.
“Y/N, listen to me,” Tomoe shouted in her face, his hands shaking her body, but they both kept dancing. With one glance around, she realised they were the only ones alive. “We need to get out of here,” he plead.
Why didn’t she care they were the only ones alive? Was it the rum? She could feel it trying to cut the feeling in her legs, but she held on strong. The bottle in her hand was now empty, but she still held on to it.
At her unresponsive state, Tomoe sighed. “Y/N, I know you can hear me. Let’s get out of here.”
“You can’t stop dancing,” she finally croaked, but still with a distant look on her face. Then, looking around one more time, at what used to be her friends, at the splashes of blood all over the walls and sofa, she started laughing. She wasn’t amused. She was confused. She felt like an idiot, for some reason.
Y/N could stop dancing anytime and just accept her fate. What was this game? Who’d made it?
“Fine, you stay here,” Tomoe decided, frown taking over his face. “You die.”
His accusations should have hurt more. They didn’t. With dark, hooded eyes, she watched him.
With sure steps, but still moving rhythmically in a pretence-dance, he walked to the door. He took one look back at her and saw her watching him, not blinking. When she didn’t make a sign to follow him, he sighed again and opened the door. And just like with all those people before, the red laser went through his head, finishing him.
This time, she knew exactly where the lasers came from. It was the disco ball in the middle of the room. Peering at it from behind her lashes, she noticed a laser following her as well. A blue one. Blue meant participation. And red, she concluded, meant game over.
Leaving wasn’t allowed either, she realised now that there was no one else to make distracting noises. Of course, she thought, since it meant quitting, therefore game over. A lot of things could mean game over, like cheating or just obviously not complying to the rules. How could one cheat in a dance game? What was it that made dancing… dance? There was no specific definition. Just move your body to a rhythm, with or without music. But most importantly, how did the lasers know when to charge? The most obvious explanation would be that someone was watching. How would someone, some stranger, be watching them inside one of their flats? Who was this person?
Y/N felt sober now – at least more than earlier – so she tried to take everything in. The sight, the smell, the dull ache in her bones, and the emptiness in her chest. It spread slowly but surely thorough her body, making her limbs ache slightly, her face to relax in a neutral position, and the fun go away. It scared her how detached she felt from all that, like she was just watching a true crime documentary reconstruction. But no, this was real. The unmoving bodies were real, and so was the terror and confusion in their lifeless eyes.
She was alone and it felt familiar. Not in the way someone feels when they lose those they care about, but in the way she’d stayed up past midnight, hunted by nightmares and her own thoughts, and had no one else to talk to but her own shadow and the three stars in the sky. That’s why, she realised, Y/N couldn’t muster a reaction to the scene in front of her – she’d already lived this loneliness before, in her own head.
The TV screen counted down from 5 minutes, and the music changed to a song she’d never heard before. The blue laser kept following her. She wondered how it could turn deadly. Perhaps it wasn’t the same one. Perhaps there were more. Who would do this? Not one of her friends; they were all dead. Then, she remembered about Misaki. Misaki had gone to the shops before this mess happened. Had she known? Has she been the one to set everything up? And even if not, where was she now? She hadn’t come back yet. That was suspicious enough to make Y/N entertain for a second the idea that her best friend had tried to kill their friend group.
4 minutes.
Do you really know a person, she wondered, until you truly get to know them?
Y/N needed another drink. She was drunk enough for her thoughts not to make sense for anyone else than her. But then again, hadn’t that always been the case?
3 minutes.
She wondered if she could meet the person behind this once the game ended. Would she survive the game? After all, she was still alive, but the rules had not mentioned whether or not all players had to be alive for a game clear. She hoped it meant she could clear it by herself.
The song ended. Another one started. This one not as hyper. It started slower than the rest, and it remained slow. If this was supposed to be a disco party, it was not going well. It’s Mitski. Y/N liked Mitski.
2 minutes.
She used the empty bottle in her hands as a dance partner. One foot in front of the other. Back and forth. Left and right. Then repeat.
“Me and my husband. We’re sticking together,” she sang. She had no husband. She imagined one.
What was her perfect husband? Until yesterday, she had thought Kenta was the perfect husband. Of course, before she found out he’d cheated. Repeatedly. Continuously. With the same girl.
1 minute.
Could it be something about Y/N that made him cheat? Or maybe he was just a piece of shit. Or both. Most likely both. After all, here she was, dancing with an empty bottle, to a love song, in the middle of a blood puddle made by her friends’ corpses.
A pirouette.
A chime.
The song came to an end and none started after.
“Congratulations,” the same robotic voice from before said. Y/N didn’t stop dancing, despite the lack of music. “Game clear.” The same message was displayed on the white TV screen. “Your visas will not be distributed.”
Visas?
Only one phone on the snack table lit up. She stopped dancing and picked it up.
“VISA,” it said. “Immigration status certification. L/N Y/N earned: 2 points. TOTAL POINTS: 2 POINTS. Length of stay is until 13/7. Please be cognizant of your remaining allowance. REGISTRATION: 2♠ [SPADES 2].”
All lights went off, and she was left to bathe in the darkness, with only the screen of the weird phone helping in the slightest.
She picked up her own phone. Futile move; it didn’t work. It was all out of battery. Dead. Useless. Using only the white screen of the borrowed phone, she looked around for a charger. Finally, the sockets didn’t work. She gave up after the third one. All phones were dead.
“Except for this one, I suppose,” she muttered.
Y/N didn’t spare one look to her friends before she exited the room and the flat. She had a quest. And in the dark of the building hallway, she went on. Damn, was it hard to see with this blind light.