Malicious Compliance: The Necromancer Who Hated His Script [LitRPG / Progression Fantasy / Satire / Comedy / Villain / Revenge]

The long, damp corridor leading toward the executive depths of the Northern Dungeon was choked with a heavy, suffocating silence.

Nick walked with slow, heavy steps, his legendary silver plate armor emitting a sharp, wet, and highly rhythmic PFFFFRT with every single shift of his weight. Egel didn't even laugh anymore, because laughing would've meant that there was something remaining inside her.

The Virgin Shonen Protagonist Ego Boost had (officially) completely shattered, leaving him physically and mentally broken.

To make matters worse, a thick, visible purple miasma of 'Severe Stench' rose continuously from his pauldrons and greaves—a lingering testament to the swamp toad wax and Seraphina's projectile vomit.

Egel walked precisely five steps behind him. Her distance clearly was a desperate attempt to protect her olfactory senses from the biological weapon that was the Chosen Hero.

Her muscular, heavily built frame—defined by practical, scarred leather wraps, a tight white bandage across her chest, and a mass of wild, spiky hair that seemed to defy the very laws of gravity—was tense.

Her sharp, chiseled face was set in a deep, permanent scowl, and her jaw was clenched as she kept her hands resting at her sides.

Nick stopped, his shoulders slumping as he slowly turned his head back, his voice launching into an incredibly high-pitched, asthmatic squirrel squeak due to the lingering effects of the helium elixir.

"Egel... pwease," Nick squeaked, his ruby eyes welling up with pathetic tears behind his visor. "Do you... do you still believe in me? The path of light is difficult, but as long as wue stwand together—"

"Don't speak. Please. It will be worse," Egel interrupted, her voice dangerously flat and dripping with profound, icy exhaustion.

Nick’s brain, entirely governed by pure narrative delusion, immediately processed her words through a toxic filter of generic shonen romance. ‘She... she’s worried about me!’ he thought, his heart fluttering. ‘She’s trying to protect my dignity! Oh, the beautiful, hidden affection of a warrior maiden!’

Blushing a violent shade of crimson, Nick took a clumsy, eager step toward her, extending a gauntleted hand. "Oh, Egel! Twhank you! Your compwassion warms my holy heart! I knew you wouldn't abandon your leader—"

"Get back!" Egel barked, her eyes widening in genuine horror as she instantly took three rapid, defensive steps backward, slamming her palm over her nose and mouth to block out the approaching wave of fecal odor. "Do not step any closer to me, Nick! I am serious!"

At his hip, the mythic [Sword of the Righteous Echo] vibrated violently inside its scabbard, its magical runes flashing with an aggressive, neon-pink glow.

"Oh wow," the sword mocked, its nasal, middle-school-bully voice echoing perfectly off the damp stone walls. "He thought it was a romantic moment! Look at him, he’s blushing! He smells like a broken sewer pipe, and he’s trying to score a date with the hot muscle mommy. What an absolute, unmitigated loser. Squeak again, squirrel boy, maybe she’ll smell your passion."

[NOTIFICATION FROM THE HIGHER REALMS]

[USER MICROSHOCK HAS DONATED 300 SOUL COINS]

[Message: Oh Hero Squeaky Fart-Boy, Larry will see you now. Scrik, Scrik, Scrik.

Nick froze, his hand hanging limply in the air, his face burning with a heat hotter than a volcanic sector. He wanted to drop the sword, but the system had bound it to his inventory and to his soul.

Egel lowered her hand from her face, her chest heaving with a deep, weary sigh as she looked at the pathetic teenager before her. The absolute lack of respect she felt for him now was a physical weight in her chest.

"Nick," Egel said, her voice dropping into a heavy, solemn tone. "Before all of this... before we went for the expedition to hunt Kaitoyama... I respected you. I genuinely did. I respected you because you helped me get through the trauma of losing my little sister. You gave me a purpose, and fighting alongside you made me recover from the pain. But now... looking at you like this... I just can't. I thank you for what you did back then, but I can't respect a man who buys followers, lies, farts like a broken tuba, and squeaks like a stepped-on pet toy. I just can't." Egel sighed, "I was planning to be part of your... empire. To serve you as my first and last man... but... just no. I can't, not anymore."

The words hit Nick like a max-level critical strike to his very soul, and the final foundation of his identity crumbled into dust.

He didn't answer, simply because he couldn't. He just slowly turned around, his armor letting out a sad, deflated pffrt, and continued waddling down the narrow corridor, a broken, empty shell of a protagonist.

Then, they walked for another five eternal minutes until the corridor abruptly terminated.

Standing before them was a heavy, weathered gray wooden service door. It didn't feature any ornate carvings or holy wards. Instead, someone had crudely scrawled three words across the wood with generic black paint: [FINAL BOSS ROOM].

But as Egel stepped within three meters of the threshold, her ancient, highly trained Chi perception blazed to life, and her eyes dilated in absolute shock.

A massive, suffocating, and incredibly dark purple-black vortex of raw, abyssal energy was radiating directly from behind the service door.

The weight of the aura plummeted the temperature in the corridor by forty degrees. It was a terrifying, untouchable presence—the exact same crushing, authoritative 'Chi' she had felt at the guild from the entity known as Kaitoyama.

'So... you're here, Kaitoyama...' She muttered to herself, clenching her fists. Not in anger, but in anticipation.

But as she analyzed the spiritual currents, a cold, dizzying sensation washed over her. Beneath the terrifying, corporate darkness of the energy, there was something else. A familiar frequency. A spiritual resonance that felt deeply, unexplainably close to her own soul.

'What the...'

Before she could form a coherent thought, a sharp, upbeat corporate chime echoed through the corridor.

A smooth, perfectly reflective purple communication orb materialized in the air directly in front of the Final Boss Door, pulsing with a gentle, non-threatening office light.

The baritone, unshakably calm voice of CEO Mordecai boomed from the orb, crystal clear.

"Sir Nick," Mordecai said, his tone carrying the polite, slightly bored professional register of a high-level manager addressing an underperforming intern. "You cannot enter the final evaluation suite in that specific aesthetic condition. Our corporate brand guidelines require a minimum baseline of employee hygiene, and frankly, your current odor profile is a structural hazard to the dungeon's ventilation units. I can smell you from three kilometers away, but do not worry. Larry the Janitor is arriving immediately to perform a standard decontamination sequence. He will fully clear your current status debuffs and return your model to normal parameters for the upcoming show."

The purple orb began to flicker, preparing to terminate the connection, when the microphone array unexpectedly picked up a secondary, anxious and adorable female voice from Mordecai's office.

"M-Mordecai-sama... is it my turn now? I think I'm ready."

BEEP.

The audio line instantly cut out, the purple orb snapping out of existence.

Egel’s entire muscular frame went completely rigid.

Her jaw dropped, her heart stopping in her chest as the echoing syllables of that voice replayed in her mind. Her eyes expanded to a catastrophic size, and her spiky hair practically bristled with static shock.

It was a voice she would recognize across a thousand lifetimes. A voice she had wept for during endless, sleepless nights.

"REGEL?!" Egel screamed at the top of her lungs, her voice cracking with raw, visceral, and heart-shattering disbelief as she lunged toward the closed service door. "REGEL?! IS THAT YOU?! THAT'S IMPOSSIBLE! YOU'RE DEAD! THE MONSTERS TOOK YOU!"

Nick’s face instantly drained of all color, turning an ashen, ghostly white beneath his visor.

"No... no, no, no..." Nick whispered pathetically, his squirrel voice trembling with pure terror.

He knew that voice, and he perfectly knew exactly who Regel was. She was Egel’s younger twin sister—the tragic girl he had abandoned in that dungeon because of her 'lack of popularity'.

He had told Egel that her sister had died and used his system-driven skills to manipulate her brain to make her believe that she had sacrificed herself to save them.

But if Regel was alive... if she was currently under that Dark Lord's influence... then Egel would realize that his entire 'Hero of the Light' narrative was a manufactured lie. She would officially realize the Church had used her trauma as free labor. If she found out the truth, her wrath would be absolute. She would split his skull in half before they even crossed the threshold.

Before Egel could smash her fists against the wooden door, a heavy security hatch in the wall slid open with a smooth, mechanical hiss, and Larry strolled out into the corridor with a relaxed, cheerful stride.

The skeleton janitor was wearing his pristine blue coveralls, his bright yellow rubber gloves catching the torchlight, and a crisp, now white corporate cap sitting neatly on his bald, bone-white cranium.

Behind him, he rolled a standardized janitor’s cart fully stocked with glowing void-cleaning fluids, specialized scrub brushes, and high-absorbent rags.

Larry came to a halt right between the two adventurers, looked at Nick's stained silver armor, and delivered a crisp, energetic thumbs-up 👍.

A floating holographic notification window instantly blared into the air above Nick's head, flashing a bright green checkmark:

[ADMINISTRATIVE CLEANUP ROUTINE INITIATED]

[TARGET: 'PIOLLO' NICK]

[STATUS: ALL BIOLOGICAL DEBUFFS WILL BE FORCEFULLY EXPUNGED BY EXECUTIVE ORDER]

Before Nick could utter a single squeak, Larry moved with the blurred, terrifying velocity of a high-density industrial cleaning machine.

He unleashed a massive, pressurized [SSS ORDINARY SPRAY] of [SSSS Soap: Lemon and Pine] directly into Nick’s visor.

The intense, chemically optimized scent of fresh pine and high-grade bleaching lemon exploded through the corridor, completely obliterating the odor of feces within a fraction of a second.

Larry then grabbed a specialized wire-bristled brush from his cart, his yellow rubber gloves turning into a white blur as he ruthlessly and aggressively polished the silver plate armor.

He scrubbed the greaves, he wiped down the pauldrons, and he scrubbed until every single drop of dried vomit, toad wax, and dungeon grime vanished into the void.

Nick stood perfectly frozen, his heart hammering against his ribs in pure, unadulterated terror. Because the moment the skeleton had stepped within a two-meter radius, the LitRPG System had completely overridden his vision with a massive, flashing neon-red warning perimeter that filled his entire interface with static.

[⚠️ WARNING: CRITICAL LEVEL ANOMALY DETECTED]

[NAME: LARRY (CUSTODIAL LEAD / DESTRUCTIVE VARIANT)]

[DAMAGE READING: UNQUANTIFIABLE COSMIC CONSTANT]

[POWER LAYER: EQUIVALENT TO 900 COMBINED SUPREME DEITIES OF THE HIGHER REALMS]

[SYSTEM ADVICE: DO NOT MAKE EYE CONTACT. DO NOT MAKE SUDDEN MOVEMENTS. DO NOT ACCIDENTALLY TRACK MUD ONTO HIS COMPLETED QUADRANTS. SURRENDER ALL YOUR REVENUE INVOICES. IF HE LOOKS ANGRY, IMITATE A STATIC OBJECT MATRIX (PLAY DEAD). YOUR NARRATIVE STATUS IS CURRENTLY EXPEDIENTLY OPTIMIZABLE.]

Then, Larry finalized the wipe with a flawless flourish of a microfiber cloth, polished Nick’s gauntlets until they shone like a high-budget M*PPA illustration, and stepped back.

In that moment, Nick was completely transformed.

The visible purple miasma was gone, and the floating 'Severe Stench' debuff icon dissolved into green pixels.

He was perfectly clean, smelling intensely of laboratory-pure pine needles, and his silver filigree gleamed brilliantly under the torchlight. His stats returned to their baseline; his throat cleared, and his posture was temporarily corrected by the sheer physical impact of the decontamination.

Larry let out a satisfied, clicking scrik of his bony jaw, proud of his workplace efficiency, and delivered another cheerful thumbs-up 👍 to the freshly polished Hero.

Then, the skeleton slowly turned his smooth, bone-white skull toward Egel, who was still standing near the wall, panting heavily from her emotional outburst.

Larry stopped and tilted his skull forty-five degrees to the left. Then forty-five degrees to the right. Then he raised his yellow rubber glove and scratched the side of his temple hard, emitting a hollow tock-tock-tock as his non-existent brain processed her facial structure.

Larry stared at her with his non-existent eyes for a few minutes while occasionally scratching his skull multiple times. He was probably analyzing her aura, rather than her appearance.

Egel braced her feet, her muscular arms tensing as she prepared to scan the entity's spiritual signature. She activated her advanced Chi Reading, her vision shifting to track the soul's elemental colors.

But as her perception locked onto Larry, she gasped.

There were no colors. There was no crimson rage, no black malice, no gray deceit, and no gold ambition.

The entity standing before her was a complete, literal spiritual void—an absolute white canvas of pure, unadulterated domestic cleanliness and professional work ethic. In other words, he was totally PURE, like an angel.

In a dungeon filled with lying heroes, manipulative churches, and corporate overlords, this skeleton was the only truly pure, innocent being she had ever encountered.

Despite her grief and terror, Egel's defensive posture softened. She looked at his crisp white cap and his tiny coveralls, and she found the skeleton... profoundly, undeniably cute.

Larry let out a cheerful scrik, deciding that hospitality was the best policy for a coworker's relative.

Then, he reached deep into the pocket of his blue coveralls and pulled out a magnificent, flawlessly polished stainless-steel soup spoon.

It was completely sterile, radiating a soft, warm golden light that hummed with administrative restoration magic. He extended his yellow glove, offering the shiny spoon directly to the beautiful muscle mommy.

Egel blinked, completely stunned by the gesture. You know, in which other story a skeleton dressed like a janitor would offer a polished spoon to someone? I'll tell you: None.

She slowly reached out, her thick, calloused fingers closing around the cold steel handle.

The moment her skin touched the metal, a surge of high-tier restorative energy flooded through her veins.

The minor cuts across her shoulders instantly knitted together, the bruising from the previous floors vanished, and her deep dungeon fatigue parameters were completely wiped clean.

Before she could utter a single word of thanks, Larry stepped closer, raised his right yellow rubber glove, and gently placed it onto her wild, spiky hair. He delivered three slow, affectionate, and deeply reassuring pats to her head, just like he did with Regel back in that dungeon, probably sensing a feeling of pain inside of her.

Pat. Pat. Pat.

👍

The little skeleton then offered her a supportive thumbs-up and a warm flicker of his starry white eye-flames, as if he wanted to cheer her up.

In that moment, Egel stood absolutely frozen, her brain completely stalling as she stared down at the shiny spoon in her hand.

She had spent her entire life training to fight demons, clearing high-level zones, and hardening her heart against despair. And now, she had just received head-pats and a healing utensil from a domestic housekeeping skeleton who possessed the power weight of nine hundred supreme deities.

The sheer, comedic absurdity of the situation completely short-circuited her emotional breakdown.

Larry then turned back to his cart, reached into a localized void-pocket within his supply canvas, and extracted a heavy-duty, industrial-grade mop.

Moving with fluid, practiced grace, he began to methodically mop the path behind them, erasing their footprints and restoring the corridor to a perfect, spotless dark mirror.

After that, he gave them one final, cheerful corporate salute 👍, rolled his cart into a hidden maintenance panel in the drywall, and vanished from the corridor.

Scrik. Scrik. Scrik. The distant sound of his work echoed softly from behind the walls.

The corridor was silent once more, smelling intensely of pines and Sorrento lemons.

Nick stood up straight, feeling his voice return to its normal pitch as the system cleared his vocal debuffs. He looked down at his gleaming armor, his artificial confidence trying to flare up one final, desperate time. He gripped the hilt of his mythic sword.

"Alright," Nick said, his voice deep and dramatic once more. "My power has returned. The light has cleansed my vessel. Egel, let us breach this chamber and liquidate the Dark Lord's final defensive unit. For the kingdom!"

The Sword of the Righteous Echo instantly thrummed inside its scabbard, its nasal, sarcastic voice cutting through his false majesty.

"Oh, listen to him, he thinks he's a leader again," the sword sighed loudly, its voice dripping with unbearable teenage sass. "Hey, Piollo, you only smell good because a skeleton in rubber gloves literally washed you like a dirty car. Your stats are still trash and overinflated, your followers are still fake, and your armor is still going to leak gas the second you take a hit. But sure, go ahead and deliver your little shonen speech. It’s cute, just don't forget the dramatic Mama flashback that will give you random powerups."

Nick's face flushed red, but he forcefully ignored the weapon. He turned toward the Final Boss Door, planted his polished silver boots against the stone, and threw his entire weight against the weathered wood.

The heavy service door swung inward with a loud, mechanical BANG.

Nick and Egel stepped through the threshold, and the heavy wooden door instantly slammed shut behind them with a thunderous THUD.

A massive, magical purple padlock dropped onto the interior latch from the ceiling, sealing the exit with a definitive, structural click.

The room they had entered was an absolute masterpiece of uninspired, low-budget, and generic bad-anime dungeon architecture.

The lighting was an unpleasant, neon-green hue that radiated from shallow pits filled with radioactive-looking slimes along the perimeter. The walls were constructed from generic gray stone blocks, draped with meaningless iron chains, dark sigils that didn't connect to any actual magic system, and decorative skull torches that leaked black smoke.

It was a textbook, clichéd 'Evil Dark Lord Room' designed by a production studio that had completely run out of asset budget.

But dead center in the green-lit room sat a large, jagged obsidian plinth, and bound tightly to the stone with crude, thick ropes was Princess Pyroetta.

Her appearance perfectly matched her royal status, clad in an elaborate red-and-white gown with a silver-trimmed breastplate. Her vibrant red hair was tied into two massive, iconic twintails that cascaded over her shoulders. She was half-unconscious, her head drooping, her breathing shallow as she struggled against the restraints in the center of the clichéd arena.

Hearing the thunderous slam of the service door, Pyroetta’s long eyelashes fluttered. Her large, brilliant eyes slowly cracked open, blinking against the harsh green glare of the slimes.

She immediately raised her head, her gaze tracking across the gray chamber until she spotted the freshly cleaned, brilliant armor of the Chosen Hero standing at the entrance.

Tears of genuine, high-dramatic shonen relief instantly welled up in her eyes, trickling down her soft cheeks as she let out a desperate, hopeful, and entirely frantic cry that echoed off the gray stone blocks.

"SIR NICK! SAVE ME, I BEG OF YOU!" Pyroetta wailed, her red twintails trembling as she strained against the ropes. "I WAS WRONG! I WAS SO UTTERLY WRONG TO TRUST THAT DISGUSTING, KAITOYAMA! HE BETRAYED THE KINGDOM! PLEASE, SLAY THE MONSTERS AND BRING ME HOME! I'VE BEEN ABUSED IN EVERY WAY POSSIBLE!"

The background of the boss chamber—the glowing slimes, the meaningless chains, and the dark sigils—completely faded into soft focus as her terrified, pleading face dominated the view, creating a massive, cliffhanger horizon that left the entire narrative hanging by a single, fragile thread.

In that moment, Nick's aura began to shine a cringe-gold color.

He dramatically looked at her, his virgin shonen ego overinflating after seeing a way to redeem himself. "I'll save you, Princess Pyroetta. WATASHI GA KITA!"

His sword immediately ruined the moment.

"Oh, go on, big boy. Couldn't you just cut the ropes, save her, and run away instead of recycling a cringeworthy catch phrase?" The sword spoke.

Egel stood five meters from him. The cringe aura was too much for her to bear.

And then...

*Clap, Clap, Clap*

"I was waiting for you, Chosen One..." The deep, baritone voice spoke from the shadows. "I guess that the time has finally arrived, right?"