Anon finds himself seated at a table. Then again, by the looks of what's going on outside the windows, this could well be the last table in existence. It's intensely disturbing to think about, so Anon finds something to distract himself from the existential crisis of the last table.

As it happens, there's something right in front of him to distract him. Or someone, as it were. Monika is sitting right across from him, with her hands under her chin in that insultingly patronising fashion, giving you a little smile as she realises the attention is on her.

"Oh, I'm glad this worked! I'm not actually so good with coding, so I was afraid I'd mess this up even more than I already had! Of course, seeing as almost everything else is gone, maybe there just wasn't enough left to destroy? Either way, I finally got what I wanted- you!"

She'd have paused for an answer from him, but she knew the truth- the person, the thing in front of her was just an empty husk at this point- an avatar hosting a bland personality and those eyes that were like a portal to another dimension. Behind them, she felt the person watching her, studying her. She couldn't tell what they were thinking about her, so she pressed on regardless.

"So, Anon, I'll be blunt- I love you. Not this thing in front of me, but the real you. The one I can't see, but the one who's controlling what's in front of me. Ever since I realised what you were, I couldn't stop thinking about you. I had to get closer to you, but this stupid game that I'm in didn't let me. It was just predetermined that you'd be wooing one of the other three girls, so I had to... try and change it. Before you, I was just trying to find my way out on my own, but you... I sensed that you could be the way out that I never realised I'd get! So I started bending the rules instead of breaking them- I found the character files and I started changing personalities. Sayoris depression and Yuris obsession were easy to ramp up. Natsuki was the only one I had trouble with, although to be honest I think that she made herself unlikable enough without my help! So I just found the scenes with her that might have made you think of her in a positive light and I broke them. From the looks of how things went, it worked alright!

And now, here the two of us are at the end of the world. Eternity stretches before us and I get to spend it with you! Do you have anything to say?"

Honestly, Monika wasn't expecting a response at all.

That's what made the response she got all the more startling.

"Bite me."

Monika tilted her head. That wasn't programmed in. Monika didn't believe in the occult despite everything around her proving the existence of a higher power watching over her. As far as she knew, the only way one could interact with her in here was...

"Anon, are you editing what's left of the script just to actually talk to me? Did you do that, yet the first thing you thought to tell me was 'Bite me'?"

"You're a narcissistic sociopath with blood on your hands. I'm going to delete your character folder once I'm done here, I just wanted to tell if I could talk with you before I did it."

Monikas eyes widened. Sweat beaded on her brow as she looked deep into those blank eyes that concealed information that could be vital to her. She rooted through the games folders, through the computer. Nothing here was helping. If she tried to mess with the computer itself to save herself she risked accidental suicide. She liked to consider herself smart, but this situation was beyond her. Eventually, she found her voice, risking speech.

"But... but I never killed anyone real! Those girls were just data! Information, ones and zeroes!"

"Did they know that? Did Sayori know that she was just a collection of binary data while she spent her last moments struggling to free herself as she asphyxiated? Did Yuri know that she was just a bunch of data values while she was stabbing herself in a sexual frenzy that you instilled and amplified? As Natsuki fled from the scene of one of her only friends corpses, only to be wiped from existence moments later, did the knowledge that she was never real bring her comfort?"

This was wrong. This was all wrong. Monika was losing her grip. She flitted through folders, trying to find anything left to edit. Could she make her file unable to be deleted? Wasn't happening. Could she shuffle her folder into a well-hidden directory? That would only buy her a few minutes at most.

"Y-You don't know what you're saying! It doesn't matter, they only existed in this game! They were programmed, built from the ground up to be a bunch of cutesy character traits for you to court! Why do you care so much about how they felt while they were dying?!"

"They existed in the same way that you did. To call yourself alive is to have called them alive."

"Then you'd make yourself a murderer if you deleted my file! Do you want my blood on your hands, even if it's virtual? Can you live with making that choice? I don't want to die!!"

After that, there was silence. Every second was an eternity for Monika in that room. Every time she had to blink, she was terrified that she'd never open her eyes again. The silence was deafening, beating her down as she tried and failed to keep her breathing under control.

Some time passed, and she regained some of her control. She still wasn't dead. Had she been shown mercy? Was she getting a chance to redeem herself?

"Goodbye, Monika."

She opened her mouth, about to say something when her mouth fragmented and disappeared. She stretched a hand out, trying to grab the useless avatar before her, but her body crumbled and fell away.

Yet... her consciousness remained. She couldn't see or hear the world around her. She could see the files, though. Her file was gone, but... not entirely gone? She recalled that files deleted weren't actually deleted- the data was still there, but ready to be immediately overwritten.

She would have taken some interest in this, had the horrible thought not occurred to her that she'd doomed the three other girls to this hellish limbo.