It was a photograph. Grainy, old, shot on film. A family standing in front of a ranch house: a man, a woman, two little girls, and a boy of about seven. The boy’s face had been scratched out with a knife.

His face was wrong. Not deformed—just empty . Where eyes should have been, there were only dark, polished ovals, like obsidian. He smiled. It was the smile of a man who had already killed everyone he loved and felt nothing about it.

The image was too sharp—sharper than 4K, sharper than reality. Eli could count the grains of sand, see the heat shimmer like a living thing. In the foreground stood a man in a duster coat, hat low, revolver holstered on a gunfighter’s rig. The camera held on him for a long, uncomfortable moment.

It was Eli’s face.

Eli should have turned it off. He didn’t.

It happened in a frame-skip. One moment, holsters were full. The next, six men were on the ground, each with a single bullet hole in the exact center of the forehead. The Man’s revolver smoked. He didn’t reload.

The PS4’s fan screamed. Eli’s blood went cold. The character wasn’t supposed to break the fourth wall. But The Gunslingers BDMV had no script, no director, no production company. It was just… there.