The Indieverse

Chapter 20: One Left

Chapter 20: One left

There was an ant on the ground.

That was an odd thought to be thinking, but as the Player stared as his computer screen, he noticed that there was an ant.

He squinted and looked closer. Wait a moment. That wasn't an ant. That was...

"Bendy?!" the Player exclaimed.

Sure enough, it was Bendy, although shrunken so small that you could barely see him.

"You're alive!" the Player yelled in joy.

"Don't act so surprised," Bendy grumbled. "Even if there's only one drop of me, I can still regenerate."

"But there wasn't any-" the Player began.

"Do you really want to question it?" Bendy replied.

The Player looked around the room, where the rest of the team lay in various states of injury.

"Uh, Bendy, I know it's a lot to ask, but..." the Player began.

"Don't even," said Cuphead. "I got this."

Soon enough, everybody was back on their feet, all having drunk some of Cuphead's fluid.

"Kind of a one-time thing," he said. "I need that stuff to survive."

"What is it?" asked Frisk, who now did not look like she was going to collapse at any second.

"It's complicated."

"Sorry to butt in," said Freddy, butting in, "But its time for us to go." A door had appeared behind the Devil's throne, made of worn but decent-looking dark wood.

Before anybody had taken a step, Cuphead's eyes popped in a cartoon fashion. "Wait a second! We're forgetting something!" he blurted.

Everyone's eyes turned to him.

"Does this team that I've joined have a name?"

Everybody looked uncomfortably around at each other.

"Can't say that we do..." said Mama thoughtfully.

"Well, we have to give it one, then, don't we!" Cuphead said enthusiastically. "Here, here, I have some slips of paper. We can all write a name we want and pick it out of... of a..."

Freddy took off his hat. "Here," he said. He looked so different without it.

Within literally three seconds, everyone had scribbled something on Cuphead's slips of paper and put it into Freddy's hat, now sitting innocently on the ground.

"Here, you can pick, bro - Player," he corrected.

The Player guided Mugman forward and into the hat, causing him to somehow pick up a slip of paper.

"Our new team name," said the Player, still confused at the bizarre turn of events that brought him here, "is the Legendary Heroes."

Everyone looked at each other, waiting for someone to take credit for the name.

No one did.

"Well, then," said the Neighbor after several awkward moments. "Let's go,"

And so, the Legendary Heroes made their way to the out-of-place door for the second-to-last-time.

Monika heaved in a few breaths as she stared at the dust pile that she had created as her LOVE hit 79.

No sense of triumph, like she had always felt beforehand. No joy. Just a grim determination remaining.

She raised her hand and pulled up the file directory, searching for the new folder.

She found it. "Well, hello, there," she said calmly. "Let's see just how terrible I can make you."

After a few moments, she closed the directory, stepped over the various piles of dust and clothes that she left behind, out the Judgement Hall, and towards her fate.

The Player watched them file out, one by one.

Cuphead was last. He turned and looked at the Player with his surprisingly lifelike eyes.

"I-I'm kind of scared," he admitted.

"You don't think I am, too?" the Player replied. A realization occurred to him. "You don't think that they all are?"

"But doesn't it ever get easier?" Cuphead asked.

The Player remembered some words that he read in a book somewhere.

"Of course not. The fear is always there. We see it. We recognize it. We carry on, through it, past it. We never stop fighting it. That's what makes us heroes."

Cuphead grinned. It looked maniacal, but the Player got the point.

"Well said, leader." he said in a firmer tone.

"I'm not the-"

"Yeah, yeah, sure. Whatever you say." Cuphead said.

He walked through the door. The Player closed the game.

He heaved a deep breath in, and looked at his wallpaper. Thinking.

So this was it. The Player had this feeling in their gut. The feeling that this long, exciting, stressful adventure was almost over.

He looked at the time. It was almost midnight. Everybody else was probably sleeping peacefully, unburdened with living creatures in their computers.

Was it really only a few hours ago, before dinner, when the Player had decided to put Monika's file into Undertale? It seemed so long ago.

The Player squared his shoulders, straightened in his seat, and prepared to open the only game that ever gave him chills.