My father's voice was an anchor in the storm of my mind. For an instant, the chaos receded. The garden's cries softened, the city fire's roar became a murmur, and the walls of Valeria's kitchen stopped bleeding. I saw their faces, the faces of my family, floating in the dimness of my shattered perception. I saw the fear in my mother's eyes, the anguish in Akari's, the terror and compassion at war on Valeria's face. I saw my father's contained grief.
They were real. The love and fear emanating from them were too complex, too imperfect to be a construct of purgatory. The levels of hell were precise in their torture, designed with a clarity of purpose. This was a disaster. This was real life.
But the calm lasted only a moment. Because if this was real, then hell had been real too. And if hell had been real, how could I be sure it was over? How could I be sure this wasn't simply a new level, one more sadistic and subtle than the previous ones? A level designed to simulate reality with perfect fidelity, to give me the illusion of rescue just before tearing it away.
Paranoia, an old friend, returned with a sharp, twisted logic.
"Kenji, mijo, can you hear me?" my mother whispered, slowly approaching, as if to a wounded animal.
I nodded, but my mind raced, applying the rules of the game to this new, terrifying situation. Analyze. Observe. Don't trust your senses. The system is a master of deception.
"Son, what happened?" my father asked, his voice a rock of calm in my sea of madness. "Can you tell us what has made you feel this way?"
I looked at his face, searching for a flaw in the simulation. Would his eyes go vacant? Would his smile turn into a porcelain mask? Would his words dissolve into the whispers of my failures? But they didn't. He simply looked at me, his concern etched in the lines around his eyes. It was a perfect performance. Too perfect.
It's a test, a part of my brain concluded. The ultimate test. They want to see if I've learned. They want to see if I can distinguish truth from illusion.
But how? How do you test reality? In my journey, death was not an end, but a mechanism. A reset. A full stop before beginning the same sentence of suffering. Death was the only constant, the only rule I had been able to verify again and again.
A terrible idea, a logic born from the scars of my soul, began to form.
If this is a level, death will return me to the threshold. To the foot of a staircase.
If this is real, death will be... the end.
It was the only way to know. The only experiment that could yield a binary answer, a definitive yes or no.
"I'm... I'm thirsty," I lied, my voice a rough gasp.
I saw relief flood my mother's face. "Of course, my love. Of course. Vale, could you get him a glass of water?"
"Of course," Valeria said, rising immediately.
It was the distraction I needed. The second their gazes left me and turned towards the kitchen, I moved.
Driven by a surge of adrenaline and a demented certainty, I sprang to my feet and lunged towards the kitchen counter.
"Kenji, no!" my father cried out.
He reacted with a speed I would never have attributed to him, his body intercepting mine. But I was smaller, and my desperation made me slippery. I wriggled from his grasp, feeling a tug on my shirt. My hand closed over the cold, heavy handle of the largest chef's knife in the wooden block.
My mother's scream was a sound I will never forget. Akari and Valeria froze, their faces masks of disbelief and horror.
I didn't turn to them. I didn't threaten them. My experiment wasn't with them. It was with me.
In one fluid motion, I turned and placed the icy blade of the knife against the skin of my own throat. The pressure was real. The cold of the steel was real.
"Back!" I shrieked, backing into a corner, pressing my back against the wall. "Don't come any closer!"
My family stopped, forming a semicircle of terror a few meters away.
"Son, please," my father pleaded, his hands raised in a gesture of peace. "Put down the knife. No one's going to hurt you. Let's talk about this."
I shook my head, the cold metal brushing my skin with the movement. A short, joyless laugh escaped my lips. "Talk? How can I talk if I don't know if you're real? How can I know if your voices aren't just another trick?"
"Kenji, it's us," Valeria wept, taking a step forward. "Look at me. Please, look me in the eyes. It's me."
My eyes met hers. I saw her terror, her love, her tears. And for a second, my resolve wavered. It was her. It had to be her. But then, the image of the pulsating garden flashed in my mind, the memory of its ghostly avatars, and doubt returned like a poison.
"I don't know," I whispered, the certainty in my voice fading, replaced by a tremor. "You could be an echo. A very well-made memory. The system is smart."
"What system? What are you talking about?" Akari asked, her voice barely a whisper.
I raised my chin, pressing the knife a little harder. I needed to convince them. I needed to convince myself.
"You don't understand," I told them, my voice now that of a mad professor explaining an irrefutable theory. "There are rules. In the other levels, there were always rules. And the main rule is this: death isn't permanent. It's a reset. If this is another level, you have nothing to worry about."
A look of absolute horror spread across my mother's face as she grasped the logic of my madness.
"If I cut myself," I continued, my voice gaining a feverish certainty, "if I do this, and this place is fake, I'll just wake up again. At the beginning. Probably at the foot of the tenth staircase. I'll be fine. I'll come back to life! I've done it dozens of times."
I paused, my gaze sweeping from one to another of their terrified faces.
"But... if I don't come back..." I added, and my own voice trembled at the enormity of the second possibility. "If this is real, and I do this... then it's over. And I'll finally... finally know for sure."
The silence in the room was so heavy it seemed to have physical form. Only my ragged breathing and my mother's choked sobs could be heard. I was offering them an impossible choice: witness my suicide or be complicit in my eternal torture. For me, it was a logical experiment. For them, it was the end of the world.
I was going to do it. I was going to press down. I was going to find out the truth. I gathered all my will, all my strength, preparing for the final cut.
But my body betrayed me.
The adrenaline that had propelled me, the maniacal energy that had sustained me, drained away in an instant. The effort of holding back the demons of my mind, of fighting off sleep, pain, and trauma, had pushed my nervous system to its absolute limit.
The world began to darken at the edges. My family's faces became blurry smudges. Their pleading voices grew distant, as if coming from the other side of a long tunnel. The knife in my hand suddenly weighed a ton. My arm trembled violently. My legs turned to water.
My eyes rolled back. One last coherent thought passed through my mind: The system won't let me finish the experiment.
And then, I collapsed. Consciousness left me, not in the silent void of purgatory death, but in an abrupt, total blackout. My body crumpled to the kitchen floor, and the knife fell from my hand, clattering with a metallic, profane clang against the tiles.
My last perception before darkness swallowed me completely was the sound of my mother's scream, not of terror, but of heartbreaking relief, and the distant, growing sound of an approaching siren.