Among | Us Xgameruntime.dll

The file wasn't part of the original build. No one remembered writing it. No one remembered signing off on it. But there it was, buried in the update pipeline, timestamped the same night lead developer Sofia Tran had worked late.

Cannot delete Xgameruntime.dll: file is currently in use by: SYSTEM

On her desk, her phone still glowed. Open to the Among Us subreddit. A new post, timestamped one minute from now.

“It’s on my machine but I’m not running it,” one user wrote on the forums. “I closed Steam. I unplugged Ethernet. But the Among Us window is open. And there’s a match going on. Four of us. No usernames. Just colors. And one of them keeps following me. Not in the game. In my house . My webcam light is on.” Among Us Xgameruntime.dll

Our build server had been air-gapped for two days.

I closed the laptop. I unplugged everything. I sat in the dark for a long time.

The screen went black. The office lights returned to normal. Sofia’s chair was empty. The file wasn't part of the original build

“Has anyone seen my friend Sofia? She was in my lobby. She was pink. Then she wasn’t.”

Xgameruntime.dll failed to load.

We laughed it off. A hoax. A creepypasta. Then we checked the support ticket metadata. But there it was, buried in the update

Date modified: .

The hex code for that color? #000000 . True black. The kind that, in old display hardware, meant the pixel was off. Or the signal was dead.

She looked at me. “It’s not a DLL,” she whispered. “It’s a passenger. And it’s been here longer than Among Us.”

Not visually. The crewmates still ran tasks. The vent animations still played. But the logic twisted. Players reported that the emergency meeting button would sometimes call itself. The admin map would show two red dots in the same room, but only one player. And the chat log—the chat log started typing on its own.

“Crewmate. You have tasks. Complete them. And do not look for me in the vents.”