And standing just before it, waiting, was a rider with a blank helmet.
He tried to hit the home button.
Nothing.
The file was suspiciously small. A single NSP, no weird .exe attached. His heart hammered as he dragged it onto his modded Switch's SD card via a USB adapter. The Nintendo home screen glitched for half a second. Then, a new icon appeared: a stylized rider mid-whip, the word beneath it.
He launched the game.
Huh, Leo thought. That was easy.
Leo looked down the slope. In the distance, far, far below, he could see a finish gate. It wasn't glowing green like the real game. It was red. A deep, arterial red.
His front tire was bent. The left analog stick was slick with something warm and wet. Behind him, the mountain groaned, and the trail began to collapse, pixel by pixel, into the void.