Chapter 4: The Mimic's Gambit

Chapter 4: The Mimic's Gambit

Pain was the only thing that felt real. It was a sun-hot, blinding nova that had replaced his arm, his ribs, his entire left side. Leo lay in the damp mulch, the sickly sweet smell of decay filling his nostrils. The cheerful jingle was playing again, a merry tune for a one-man funeral procession. In the distance, he could hear the indifferent whoosh-whoosh-whoosh of the windmill blades, now clean, slicing through the air as if they hadn't just torn him apart.

Kate’s final scream was a phantom echo in his ears, a sound that would live behind his eyes forever. He was alone. The thought wasn't just terrifying; it was a vast, empty void. Jon, the protector. Lissa, the light. Aaron, the intellect. Kate, the complicated, fiery future he’d thought he wanted. All of them were just… gone. Consumed by the course. And he was next.

Despair was a heavy blanket, urging him to just lie still, to let the bleeding and the brokenness take him. It would be easier. Just close his eyes and let the game end.

But then he heard the voice.

“Well, this is a bit of a pickle!” Putt Head’s voice chirped, impossibly loud. “Our final contestant seems to be taking a little nap. That’s against the rules! No dawdling!”

A harsh spotlight blazed to life, pinning him to the ground. Another light illuminated the next hole, Hole 4. It was a bizarre, industrial-looking contraption. A narrow green path was flanked by two massive, slowly grinding metal plates that threatened to crush anything between them. The hole itself was on a small platform that periodically tilted, threatening to spill any ball that landed on it into a vat of bubbling, viscous green liquid.

The sheer, cartoonish lethality of it all was almost funny. He was supposed to get up, with a broken arm and shattered ribs, and play that?

Leo laughed. It was a dry, rattling, bloody sound. “No,” he rasped to the empty night. “No. I’m done.”

“Done?” the voice echoed, a mocking lilt in its tone. “Oh, but you can’t be done! We haven’t even gotten to the back nine! Quitting isn’t winning. And if you don’t play, you forfeit. You already know what happens then.”

The wet, slithering sound started up from the darkness just behind him. It was close. Hungry.

Primal terror, colder and sharper than any grief, cut through the pain. He wasn’t ready to be dragged into that suffocating black. Not like Lissa. With a groan that was half-animal, Leo used his good arm to push himself up. The world swam in a nauseating haze of agony. He staggered forward, clutching his ruined left arm to his chest, his rusty putter dragging behind him like a broken limb. He limped into the light of Hole 4, a pathetic, broken creature.

“That’s the spirit!” the voice cheered.

He stood at the starting mat, swaying on his feet. He could never make this shot. It required a perfect combination of power and timing that he, in his current state, could not possibly manage. This was it. The end.

He slumped against a concrete barrier, ready to accept the inevitable. And that’s when he saw it.

The Putt Head mascot simply materialized beside the starting mat. It hadn’t walked there; it just was. In front of it, a pristine white ball appeared.

“It seems our last player needs a little… demonstration,” the voice said, its tone dripping with condescending pride. “When in doubt, watch a pro! It’s all in the wrist.”

The mascot took a stance. It was a perfect, fluid motion, an economy of movement that was jarringly graceful for the stiff, cartoonish figure. It drew back its yellow putter. Leo watched, his gaze hazy with pain.

Then, it swung.

The shot was impossible. The mascot didn't just hit the ball straight. It struck the ball with precisely enough force to ricochet off the left-hand grinding wall at the exact moment it reached its innermost point. The ball zipped across the green, bounced off the right-hand wall, then caromed off a small, almost invisible metal nub on the back curb. This final bounce killed its momentum just enough for it to roll gently onto the tilting platform and into the cup, a mere half-second before the platform would have emptied it into the bubbling sludge.

Plink. The sound was crisp, clean, and final.

Leo stared, his exhausted mind struggling to process what he’d just seen. It wasn’t a golf shot. It was a sequence. A calculation. A perfect solution to an impossible problem. The entity wasn’t just a monster; it was a show-off. Its ego was so immense that it couldn't resist displaying its own perfect mastery of the game.

And in that moment, something inside Leo shifted. The years spent in front of a screen, mastering fighting game combos, memorizing the perfect lines for a speedrun, charting the attack patterns of digital bosses—it all coalesced. His exceptional memory, his ‘cheat code’ for patterns and physical movements, flickered to life.

He wasn't seeing a death trap anymore. He was seeing a level. The mascot's demonstration wasn't a taunt; it was the developer's playthrough, showing the one and only way to win.

The all-consuming fear, the crippling grief, the searing pain—they didn't vanish. Instead, Leo took them and locked them away in a cold, dark box in the back of his mind. He couldn’t afford them right now. What was left was a pure, crystalline focus. A ruthless pragmatism born of utter desperation. His tired, haunted eyes sharpened, the cynical humor replaced by an intense, unwavering stare.

He pushed himself off the wall. He limped to the mat, ignoring the fire in his ribs. He placed his own scuffed ball down. He closed his eyes, replaying the mascot’s movements in his mind. The angle of the feet. The slight rotation of the shoulders. The precise 47-degree angle of the putter head. The exact amount of force, a sharp tap that was more of a precise push.

He opened his eyes. He mirrored the stance, his broken body screaming in protest. He drew back his rusty putter. And he swung.

The ball shot forward. It hit the left wall. The right. The metal nub. It rolled onto the platform. And just before the tilt, it dropped into the hole.

Plink.

Silence. Even the cheerful jingle seemed to pause for a beat. Leo stood there, breathing heavily, the world swaying. He had done it.

The lights of Hole 4 died, and the next hole lit up. It was the giant clown with the leering smile, its mouth opening and closing to reveal rows of sharpened steel teeth. The mascot was already there, demonstrating another impossible shot, this one timed to the fraction of a second to pass through the snapping jaws.

Leo watched. He memorized. He limped to the mat. And he mimicked.

Plink.

Hole 6. A pirate ship in a moat of grasping, muddy hands. Another perfect, theatrical demonstration. Another flawless mimicry. Plink.

Hole 7. A twisted, nightmarish replica of his childhood bedroom. The hole was a gaping maw in the closet. Whispering, ghostly shapes of his parents swirled around the green, murmuring every failure and disappointment of his life. Putt Head’s demonstration shot passed through them as if they weren’t there. Leo gritted his teeth, locked his heart in its icy box, and did the same. Plink.

One hole after another, a macabre montage of survival. His clothes, already torn, were shredded and stained dark with his own blood. The pain in his arm and ribs was a dull, constant fire. He was gaunt, pale, his face a mask of cold, grim focus. He was no longer playing to escape. He wasn't playing for his friends. He was playing out of a cold, mechanical necessity. He was a machine executing a program.

He was surviving.

And as he limped toward the light of the thirteenth hole, he noticed something new in the silence between the jingle’s loops. An undercurrent of static in the speakers. A low, frustrated hum. The whimsical, playful cruelty was gone.

In its place was the first flicker of genuine annoyance. The god was getting bored. Worse, it was being matched. The prey had learned the predator's movements. And now, the hunt was a dance.