Chapter 62 - #62: Badeline

Chapter 62: Chapter #62: Badeline

[1 Bonus Chapter for meeting the 300+ power stones!!! Also, you can check out my Patreon to see the image of the MC, Yor, MC’s parents, Yor’s dad, and Marcus.]

"I swear, launching this game immediately after Hollow Knight is the absolute peak of the sadist’s malice!" Silver yelled, fighting the sudden, violent urge to smash his keyboard.

He had literally just finished conquering the Path of Pain on his last stream.

His entire body was still wired, his nerves fried and tingling from the sheer mechanical stress of Hallownest.

The stream chat was echoing his exact sentiments.

The moment he booted up Celeste and took control of Madeline, his brain’s hardwired muscle memory started screaming at his hands. ’Shadow Dash! Monarch Wings! Crystal Dash! Downslash! Downslash! Downslash!’

Whenever he approached a vertical surface, his fingers instinctively tried to hook onto it with the Mantis Claw.

But Celeste operated on a strict stamina system.

If Madeline clung to a wall for too long, she would visibly sweat, tire out, and plummet to her death. Even wall jumping burned her limited stamina.

Violently forcing his brain to overwrite its deeply ingrained muscle memory was pure, agonizing torture.

"Ah...?" Yor Forger looked at Ethan Vale in complete bewilderment. "Is the control scheme and pacing for this game really that conflicting with Hollow Knight?"

She was sitting beside Ethan in the office, watching Silver’s live broadcast.

The streamer’s chat was moving at lightning speed, and Silver himself physically flinched every time his character brushed against a spike.

"Did you do that on purpose, or was it just a coincidence?" Yor couldn’t help but laugh as she watched the sheer agony contorting the streamer’s face.

She had even seen another content creator die in Celeste, stare blankly at the screen, and genuinely ask their chat, "Wait, where is my Shade? Where’s my Geo?"

In Hollow Knight, dying meant trekking back to the site of your death to hunt down a hostile, floating black Shade to recover your lost currency and repair your Soul meter.

Players were so traumatized by brutal death penalties that Celeste’s instant, penalty-free respawns were actually making them profoundly uncomfortable.

"Where’s my Mantis Claw?! Where’s my nail?! Where’s my dash?!" Silver complained loudly, his fingers fumbling over the keyboard as he tried to adjust.

"It was entirely on purpose," Ethan answered Yor, leaning back in his chair with complete, unrepentant confidence.

The death penalty in Celeste was practically non-existent, and the screen layouts were bite-sized rooms.

The moment a player died, they instantly respawned at the entrance of that specific screen.

Once players adapted to the new physics, the sheer speed of the resurrection cycle felt almost surreal.

[

ConsolePeasant: Bro without a bench miles away, my brain doesn’t know how to act]

LoreMaster: wait is the sadist actually showing us MERCY?!

GamerDad88: I tried playing both at once. In Celeste I can only dash sideways, in Hollow Knight I keep trying to diagonal dash into spikes ??

]

It was only the first Chapter of the game, but Silver was already roaring into his microphone.

"Nova called this a precision platformer?! WHERE ARE THE PLATFORMS?!" Silver slammed his fist down onto his desk, rattling his webcam.

Every single surface was coated in lethal spikes.

There was nowhere safe to stand. It was taking every ounce of his willpower to suppress the urge to downslash off the hazards.

The store page had promised a platforming game, but Silver quickly realized that most of these rooms barely had any solid ground at all.

Surviving meant chaining mid-air dashes, wall-bounces, and frantic leaps over bottomless pits.

Through his cycle of rage-inducing deaths, the actual narrative of the game slowly began to unfold.

The red-haired protagonist, Madeline, had come to Celeste Mountain to cope with her crushing depression, hoping to heal herself by conquering the peak.

At the base of the mountain, she had met that strange, cackling old woman who warned her that Celeste Mountain had a way of showing people their true selves.

Scattered throughout the treacherous levels were glowing red strawberries, hovering maliciously in tight corners and incredibly hard-to-reach spots.

"The placement on these strawberries is actually so toxic," Silver groaned as he miscalculated a jump and plummeted directly into a bed of spikes.

Pop.

The screen wiped black, and Madeline instantly respawned at the start of the room.

The entire death-to-resurrection cycle took less than three seconds.

Fueled by pure, stubborn gamer ego, Silver refused to leave a single strawberry behind.

He threw himself at the same hazards again and again.

The inability to rely on his Hollow Knight reflexes only compounded his frustration, slowly cracking his mental fortitude with every consecutive death.

[

Toxic_Timmy: Bro is literally throwing for a pixel strawberry

NoobSlayer: I’ve been counting. That’s 200 deaths in Chapter 1. RIP Bozo

]

His viewers roasted him mercilessly as they watched him die dozens of times over a single glowing berry.

He was over an hour into the broadcast, and plenty of his fans had already beaten the first Chapter by simply ignoring the collectibles and focusing on survival.

When Silver finally scraped his way into Chapter 2, a warm, helpful tip popped up directly in the center of the screen.

[Strawberries will impress your friends, but that’s about it. Only collect them if you really want to!]

Staring at that specific line of text, Silver felt a violent urge to punch a hole through his monitor.

He had spent the last hour treating them like mandatory progression items, and the game had waited until Chapter 2 to casually inform him that they were entirely useless.

[

WholesomeChungus: Wow the sadist is being so considerate with the tips!

xX_Sniper_Xx: LMAOOOO ALL THAT SUFFERING FOR NOTHING

LoreMaster: Ethan really said "skill issue, shouldn’t have grabbed them"

]

Chapter 2 officially began.

Madeline woke up next to an eerie, cold blue campfire.

Beside it stood a massive, weathered stone monument.

[Celeste Mountain]

[In memory of those who perished on the climb]

The backdrop shifted into a mesmerizing night sky filled with falling, starlit snow.

The synth soundtrack slowed down, taking on a haunting, supernatural rhythm.

Having finally acclimated to the controls, Silver dashed across a series of spiked platforms and entered a room containing a massive, ornate mirror.

Sitting in the studio, Yor watched Silver navigate the scene.

During development, this was the exact moment where she felt the game’s true brilliance had fully crystallized.

Madeline approached the glass, but the reflection staring back wasn’t her.

It was a girl with shifting, purple-black hair and piercing red eyes.

She was a dark, twisted mirror-image of Madeline—the physical manifestation of her deepest anxieties.

The crimson-eyed doppelganger glared maliciously at the protagonist on the other side of the glass.

With a sudden, terrifying crack, the mirror shattered into pieces.

The dark reflection stepped out into the real world.

A deep, sinking feeling settled in Silver’s stomach.

Even as the dark entity floated away off-screen, those glowing red eyes burned into his memory.

As he pressed deeper into the level, Madeline finally cornered her gloomy, hostile counterpart.

[Madeline: Why do I look so creepy?]

[Badeline: Oh, you’ll get over it. You have no idea how nice it is to finally be out of your head.]

[Madeline: I’m climbing this mountain, even if it sounds crazy.]

[Badeline: You can do a lot of things, but you are not a mountain climber.]

The dark reflection closed her eyes, a smug, mocking smile playing on her lips.

[Badeline: You can’t handle this. You need to give up and go home.]

Unwilling to listen to her own self-doubt any longer, Madeline turned and ran.

From that exact moment, the game warped into a living nightmare.

The dark reflection—Badeline—began to relentlessly chase the player.

She mirrored Madeline’s every move, following her exact trajectory, stalking her across the deadly platforms without a single second of hesitation.

( ?° ?? ?°) ( ?° ?? ?°) ( ?° ?? ?°) ( ?° ?? ?°) ( ?° ?? ?°)

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