The Queen of Spades (promise this is good)

Chapter 58-An encounter

Once the game had ended, I was resting my fatigue body on the soft sheets of my bed, left pondering the meaning of life, or the borderlands I was in. I was accustomed to the crude way of survival, which was to kill or be killed. 

No electricity. Not much people. No fixed chance of survival. No way to get out. Just what was I meant to do there?

Behind the invisible walls of the borderlands, lay a pair of eyes that was constantly watching me and tracking my every move. I somehow knew it. Was there some sort of camera that could have been placed to watch every 'player' in this hellish game? Or was I somehow sucked into a video game? Could I have been hallucinating, and making everything up?

As the moon rose up into the night sky, the many stars represented the amount of people who died in the borderlands, floating in an atmosphere of absolutely nowhere. Was I to find any allies? It did not seem like there could be anybody there that I could trust.

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"Once you go in, there's no way out, unless you clear the game. Now, you might be my enemy, or even my teammate, so I suggest that you don't talk to me anymore for now."

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The old man's words rung in my head, causing me to think further into the concept of the borderlands. My face still stained with the blood of my enemies, my muscles contracted with confusion. I was still in one piece, and nothing about my physical body had changed. However, the whole world around me seemed to be falling apart. 

Removing my glasses and resting them on my bedside table, I laid back on my bed, placing my arms underneath my pillow and staring into a blank ceiling of nothing. Tossing and turning my body around the bed, I tried to fall asleep in an attempt to wake up into the real world again. "T-This could all b-be a d-dream, right?" I said, forcing out a grimace.

However, my efforts were in vain. Could what the old man had said been right? That the moment I entered the borderlands, there was no way out? 

I shot up out of my bed upon hearing a light breeze caress my face. It was just the night wind. "When I finished the game, I recall receiving this card," I held the three of diamonds in my hand, holding it shakily. 

"In a normal deck of cards, there are 52 cards in total. Does this mean that I had to collect all these cards from games in order to leave? That could be it!" I thought, a beam of hope shining in my eyes red from crying. Maybe...there was a way out! But, how would I be able to complete 52 games, with an increasing level of difficulty? 

The game I had previously cleared was merely but a three of diamonds, and if the difficulty of that was only 'level' 3, could that mean that the higher the number on the card, the harder it is to clear the game? There was no possible way for me to clear every game like that! I would need to push my luck to the limit! 

I was merely a high schooler who was relatively weak and learnt engineering in school. The only hope I had in protecting myself was from the taekwondo lessons I had taken as a school co-curricular activity. I would be what people would call an 'average student'. How was I supposed to solve all the games in here?

Not everybody was dealt an ace of spades in their lives. (Not everybody was very fortunate.) some people had the privilege of being born into a wealthy and prosperous family, and some people were born without any family. Meanwhile, I was not only stuck with an extremely ill mother, but was also trying to take care of my grades at the same time. 

I had no friends, nobody I could lean on. I was definitely one of the less fortunate people in the world. But still, I was clinging onto life tightly. Though my life probably had less worth than other people who died in my hands, I still had the fire of will in me that caused my survival instincts to take over and fight solely for my life itself.