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-/-
While Jin stole what he had set out to steal, at the base of the mountain, a soldier was sitting alone in his tent and suspiciously looking at the no longer inflamed bite mark on the inside of his thigh.
Yang was a lowly soldier who had been tasked with putting the so-called zombies in a cage back when the master cultivator had brought them to their regiment of the army to keep so that they could travel to the weird sect that made illusions, or something.
He'd been bitten by one of the rabid corpses back then but hadn't thought too much about it.
Then, when the wound had flared up, he'd considered going to the healers. However, he knew that one of his senior brothers fancied the healer on duty, so he'd waited so as not to send the wrong message.
By the time the next one had taken their shift, the swelling had subsided, and by now, there was only a faint outline of the wound.
He'd heard the call from the general for any wounded soldiers to identify themselves, but he'd ignored it. He'd been present as that scary Illusion Room cultivator kicked his comrades around like ragdolls and had gotten a bad premonition.
Yang had been correct not to identify himself as well because none of the comrades who had stepped forward to admit to their injuries had ever been seen again.
He didn't know what all of this zombie business was all about, but he wasn't going to sacrifice himself for anyone.
His parents had died a few years ago, and his wife had promptly followed, leaving their daughter at her brother's place while he earned a living in the army. Leaving the world of the living because of some border stupidity before his daughter got married and had children of her own wasn't an option.
Whatever the army needed, people who'd been bitten for, they could surely manage with one less.
Yang didn't understand how this whole infection business worked, and he didn't care.
Obviously, he was fine, so there was nothing more to say about the matter. He rolled down his trouser leg and put on the armour.
Today, it was his turn to stand at the entrance of the camp and let everyone who wanted through.
A purely symbolic position with no real danger.
It suited him.
-/-
"This is…" Hashimi said with a complex expression on her face after she exited a second Illusion Room that the two of them were currently using to store Jin's copy of Lung Junior's scenario.
Of course, he couldn't replicate everything and make it his, but the version that he'd experienced was now a memory. He'd put it in the Illusion Room, where he would alter Lung Junior's zombies according to his needs before porting them into The Last of Us Room.
"I didn't think we'd be so far behind," Hashimi eventually shared with a sigh.
"Focusing on the narrative was the correct choice," Jin muttered reassuringly. "I'm not capable of making zombies of such a level. It's not the thing we want to compete on."
"We have this now, but they'll probably improve it by the submission date, right?" Hashimi asked. "I mean, if they do that, we use this, then it's just the narrative that's better, right? And if that's the case, we might as well have not stolen it. Then we'll lose the competition, be branded as thieves, be exiled from the sect, cultivation crippled. I'll have to be your pimp and make steamed buns on the side to afford the rent of our overly expensive apartment in the capital city, where we'll live out a friendship-focused comedy centred mainly around misunderstandings!" Hashimi said with swirly eyes as she sat down limply on the floor and spiralled into oblivion.
Jin just threw her a complex look.
"The worst that will happen is that we lose," he muttered. "They know exactly that we're going to take whatever Lung Junior is doing better when they gave us access to his room. He would have done the same."
"But we don't have his backing!" Hashimi explained.
Jin threw her a pitying look from where he was sitting on his bed in his room. "Talk about yourself," he muttered dismissively.
"You think Elder Flower needs a handmaiden?" Hashimi sniffled.
Jin thought about the older woman who was always oh so busy when the only thing she'd done back at the Mad Monks sect was go to the Hot Springs, drink tea and meditate.
Did she need a handmaiden?
How could her life get even easier? Would Hashimi be pre-chewing her food?
-/-
Flower struggled against the sheer power of the illusory demon general she was facing, trying to enforce her false reality onto him.
Blood burst out of her nose from where she was floating in mid-air in absolute darkness before her brain liquefied, unable to handle the discrepancy between false and real.
-/-
"She appreciates people who can fight," Jin muttered.
"I can throw hands!" Hashimi exclaimed as she perked up, jumped up and started doing random karate chops in the air. "Hayyah!" she screamed.
"I don't think…" Jin said while staring blankly.
Hashimi tried doing a roundhouse kick and fell on her ass while screaming, "Hashaaa!"
A banging suddenly resounded on the door again.
"Shut up!" their rather unfortunate upstairs neighbour shouted again.
"Sorry!" Jin and Hashimi replied synchronously.
Jin then whiplashed his head to glare at the girl who was awkwardly rubbing the back of her head. "Why am I apologising in your stead?" he eventually said with a sigh.
-/-
Banter and discussions, no matter how useful and interesting they may have been in the end, always had to cede the way to work, however.
Rather than simply discussing the partial scenario that Jin had brought back, they also had to implement it.
Naturally, this was Jin's job, as he was responsible for characters and fights.
Hashimi thus continued her work on the environmental factors of the scenario while Jin painstakingly went through his memory of Lung Junior's scenario to piece together the data sets each zombie and its attack variations were composed of. In addition to this, he then had to give each of these data sets his own flair so that it wasn't completely blatant plagiarism. There wasn't really much he could change in the functionality without worsening the experience, but there were always minor details that could be shifted around without impacting the core characteristics necessary for combat and immersion.
Then, after he was done doing that, he had to go back to his scenario and start replacing every one of the zombies that he'd previously created with the new versions.
Before he knew it, he'd found himself having pulled several all-nighters.
Joel and Ellie's journey had now also progressed past the now non-cannibal arc and was approaching the end at Salt Lake City.
Ellie had been traumatised by taking a human life, Joel had barely scraped his way past the door of death, and now it seemed like their painful journey would come to an end.
If only.
There was one last ordeal to surmount.
The operation to explore Ellie's immunity would kill her. Nonsense in Jin's opinion, since you could take samples without killing people, and killing Ellie was a horrible way to discontinue getting any future data, but it was necessary to the plot.
Joel, or in this case, whichever soldier took his place, would have to make a choice between letting her die and potentially helping in creating a vaccine against the virus or saving her life at the potential cost of the rest of humanity.
An interesting moral dilemma, which showed very well the human inability to look beyond their own immediate interests.
There was only one mistake that the game studio had made back then, which Jin had disagreed with on Earth.
They hadn't left open the option to let Ellie die, but only to save her.
In his opinion, this reduced the agency of the player at the cost of a forced narrative.
He didn't know why, in a world of multiple story endings, this game in particular forced the player into only one choice.
If the option to let Ellie die was left open, then saving her would become even more meaningful, while letting her die would better confront the gamer with their own sense and understanding of ethics.
Most likely, the game developers had, correctly, understood that trying to add too much nuance to their already somewhat complex work would confuse the gamer and cause them to hurt themselves in confusion.
Jin wasn't making this thing for simple enjoyment, and soldiers sometimes had to make hard choices.
He could justify the value of both endings. If the soldiers let Ellie die, it meant they were committed to doing anything they could to end the threat they were facing.
If they didn't let her die, then they would be forced to fight all the harder in reality, so as not to let a future where they might have to make such a choice come to pass.
In addition to this story content, Jin also added, in his opinion, the last two relevant stages of zombification to the game. Bloaters were zombies that had evolved past the version of the Clicker by losing the speed they had gained and becoming slow. They compensated by being able to throw their infection at people and thus potentially infecting them from a distance. The growths on them also served as a kind of basic armour.
The Shambler, the next stage of the bloater, tended to reside in areas with more water and exploded in a gorey infection shrapnel when they died.
He used Lung Junior's movements somewhat as a base for these two options, but obviously, considering they were different, he couldn't just reuse everything and slap some random explosion and infected pus throwing on top.
In terms of how he rated them in comparison to the first-stage zombies and the clickers he had now, they were a bit worse, but not by much, if you squinted.
He exited the Illusion Room he'd been working in and leaned back to lay on the floor of his apartment that he'd been previously sitting on.
He had a pounding headache and drank deeply from the cup of water next to him.
He looked over to Hashimi only to see her staring blankly into space as she worked on the architecture in her own mind.
There were dark rings under her eyes, and her sclera were bloodshot.
If nothing else, the girl's work ethic was remarkable.
When looking for teammates, that was the most important thing anyway.
They needed to be able to work and be reliable.
Her personality? Well, he was starting to enjoy their conversations more and more these days as their friendship grew.
Her brown eyes suddenly fluttered as she awoke from her self-induced fever dream with a small gasp.
Upon noticing that he'd been looking at her, she fluttered her eyelashes and did a strange jitter with her body that almost made her look like she was having a stroke.
"To open my eyes and find you undressing my body with your sultry gaze," she hummed while continuing to shake like a rattle in the hands of a drunk Mexican performer. "What is this forbidden love being unveiled in the dark recesses of this…" she trailed off, looking around. "Shabby apartment."
Never mind, Jin thought to himself.
She was just an annoying dumbass.
He sighed and dragged a hand down his face.
He was very, very, very tired.
"We're reaching the end," he said instead of engaging in her gaffe.
"Finally, ahead of schedule, too," she said happily, abandoning her play.
"I don't know if there's more we could do other than keep tweaking and improving details," Jin muttered. "It's a closed circle."
Hashimi hummed thoughtfully.
"How about just making a standard large battle scenario with a lot of zombies as an option next to the narrative," she suggested.
"We'd have to make it different to Lung Junior's, though," Jin interjected; he didn't want to get disqualified on a technicality. He'd had to show his Illusion Room so that he couldn't deviate from the concept to Elder Pangzi. Although, maybe doing it in his style would be fine as long as it was different enough. "Also, I don't have the soldier's data."
"We have two new types of zombies. As for the data, we could just go and see their training or something," Hashimi mused. "Maybe even ask what features they'd like to see in the battle scenario."
"Ask them," Jin said aloud, curiously, as if tasting the words in his mouth.
How to make something different from what Lung Junior had made?
He wondered.
If Lung Junior would ever.
Stoop to talking to a mortal.
-/-
AN: I love Jin and Hashimi's dynamic. It's been slowly developing in a friendly direction lol. Also the last of us arc is over on Patreon if you wanna skip ahead! Now 16% discount on annual membership.