.
---
The ceiling fan wobbled dangerously with each sluggish rotation, doing the absolute bare minimum to fight off the thick, humid air that clung to every corner of Damian's cramped apartment. The blades groaned with every pass, a sound he had long since stopped noticing—just another part of the background noise that made up his life. He lay sprawled across the worn-out couch, one leg dangling off the side, his phone resting against his chest, its glow casting pale shadows across the cracked ceiling above.
The screen lit up with another notification, buzzing insistently against his ribs.
[Rent is due. No extensions.]
"Tch." Damian exhaled sharply, dragging a hand down his face. That was the third message today. His landlord had never been the patient type, and with each passing hour, the threats in the texts grew less subtle and more creative.
He hesitated for a moment, then thumbed open his banking app. The number loaded slowly, as if even the application was embarrassed to show it.
₦1,573.
His soul nearly left his body.
He closed the app before he could sink into an existential crisis, tossing the phone onto the cushion beside him. "Damn," he muttered to the empty room. "I'm actually living on DLC trial mode. No subscription. No extras. Just the base game and a whole lot of suffering."
The fridge whined as he pulled it open, the sound stretching into a low, mechanical groan that felt almost pitying. He stared into the dim interior, illuminated by a single struggling bulb, and was greeted by the saddest collection of food imaginable. A half-empty bottle of water. A single slice of bread that had seen better days, its edges curling slightly. An expired pack of instant noodles he wasn't brave enough to touch—he'd learned that lesson the hard way last month.
He grabbed the last can of soda, the aluminum cool and damp in his grip, and leaned against the counter, taking a slow look around his apartment. The peeling wallpaper curled at the edges like dead skin. The single, flickering bulb above cast erratic shadows across the room, making everything feel slightly unstable. The cracked mirror near the door reflected a distorted version of himself—tired eyes, unkempt hair, clothes that had been washed one too many times.
His entire existence felt like a tragic backstory waiting to happen. The kind they showed in hero documentaries right before the dramatic power awakening. Except his awakening never came.
Outside, the world was thriving.
Through the thin walls, Damian could hear the distant hum of the city—a constant, living thing that never truly slept. Billboards and holograms projected larger-than-life images of S-rank heroes into the night sky, their faces beaming down from every corner of the district. Men and women with ridiculous abilities, flawless looks, and even better marketing teams.
One ad displayed Ares, the Unbreakable, a top-tier Knight posed mid-swing with his latest signature energy blade. The hologram cycled through angles, showing off every gleaming curve of his armor while a deep, cinematic voice narrated his recent exploits. Another showed Elysia, Queen of Storms, the strongest elemental mage in the country, casually generating lightning in her palm while smiling for a luxury brand endorsement. Her eyes seemed to follow pedestrians as they walked past, a design choice that was either brilliant marketing or a subtle power play.
Meanwhile, regular people like him? Just background characters in their story. The faceless crowd that filled the streets, worked the jobs, paid the taxes, and existed solely to populate the world the real players moved through.
Damian had tried. Years ago, when he was younger and still foolish enough to believe in things like fairness, he'd trained relentlessly, hoping to unlock something—anything—that would let him stand among them. He had fought through exhaustion, studied different combat techniques until his hands blistered, and even managed to earn a spot in a Knight's training program for a while. For six months, he had believed. He had pushed his body past every limit he thought he had, convinced that raw determination would be enough.
But in the end? Nothing. No supernatural talent. No bloodline blessings. No dramatic awakening on a rooftop as lightning split the sky. Just Damian Sebastian, a guy who had reached his limit before he even got started.
He sighed and sank back onto the couch, cracking open the soda and sipping it slowly, making each swallow last. The carbonation fizzed against his tongue, one of the few small pleasures he could still afford.
Then—darkness.
Not the usual flicker. Not the momentary blink that came with the city's overtaxed power grid. This was absolute. Complete. Every light in his apartment died at once, plunging the room into a darkness so thick it felt physical.
He stood and moved to the window, and his stomach tightened.
The entire street outside was blacked out. Every building, every shop, every streetlamp—all of them dead. Even the massive billboards and neon signs that never turned off, the ones that burned through storms and blackouts with their backup generators, had flickered and died, leaving only an eerie, unnatural silence in their wake.
Damian frowned, pressing his palm against the cool glass. "Huh… NEPA didn't even give us the usual warning flicker." The city's power authority was infamous for its predictable patterns—the three-flicker warning before a blackout was as reliable as gravity. But this? This was wrong.
Then, something changed.
The air thickened, like the atmosphere had just doubled in weight. Damian felt it press against his skin, heavy and suffocating, making each breath feel like he was pulling it through water. A deep, bone-chilling hum resonated through the streets, low enough that he felt it in his chest rather than heard it with his ears. The hairs on the back of his neck stood straight up.
He looked down at the street below. People had stopped moving—frozen mid-step, heads tilted, as if sensing the same unnatural shift. A woman with shopping bags had paused with one foot in the air. A man on his phone had lowered it slowly, his expression shifting from confusion to something closer to fear.
Then came the static.
It started as a soft crackle in the air, like an old television struggling to tune in to a distant station. Then it intensified—sharp, electric arcs dancing across the dead streetlights, skittering along the pavement like living things, crawling up the sides of buildings in branching veins of white-blue light.
Damian barely had time to process it before his body seized up.
A crushing force pressed down on him from all directions, locking his muscles in place. His vision blurred, the edges of his sight dissolving into streaks of color and light. Reality itself seemed to flicker, stuttering between the familiar walls of his apartment and something else—something vast and incomprehensible that existed just beyond the edges of human perception.
A screen—glitched and unstable, its edges jagged like torn paper—appeared in his vision. The text was broken, fragmented, a corrupted file desperately trying to assemble itself.
[SYSTEM INITIALIZING… ERROR. OVERRIDE ENGAGED.]
His breath hitched. "What the hell is this—?"
He didn't finish the thought.
A rush of information slammed into his brain—not words, not images, but raw data that bypassed language entirely and seared itself directly into his consciousness. His nerves burned, every synapse firing at once as something—no, something else—forced its way into his very being. He felt it carve out space inside him, rewriting pathways that had never been used, installing itself into the core of who he was.
It wasn't painful, but it wasn't pleasant either. It was invasive. Absolute. The feeling of being rewritten from the inside out, of having some fundamental part of his existence altered without consent.
And then, just as suddenly as it began, the text on the screen solidified. The jagged edges smoothed. The corruption cleared.
[WELCOME, PLAYER.]
Everything snapped back to normal.
The power returned to the city as if nothing had happened—lights flickering on in seamless sequence, billboards blazing back to life with their endless advertising cycles, the familiar hum of the city resuming its eternal rhythm. Outside, people shook their heads, muttered about faulty transformers, and continued on their way.
But Damian knew something was different.
He stood frozen in the middle of his apartment, his hands trembling at his sides, his breathing uneven and shallow. His ears still rang with the echo of that static. His mind still throbbed with the memory of being rewritten.
[WELCOME, PLAYER.]
The words lingered in his thoughts, refusing to fade.
That wasn't normal. That wasn't some random hallucination triggered by stress or hunger. Something had changed inside him—something fundamental. He could feel it now, a presence at the edge of his awareness, like a new organ he hadn't known he possessed but suddenly couldn't ignore.
And then—another screen popped up.
---
[SYSTEM ALERT]
New Quest Assigned!
Objective: Survive the next 24 hours.
Reward: ???
Penalty: Death.
---
Damian stared at the message. The words were clear, crisp, and utterly devoid of humor.
His mouth went dry.
"What the hell did I just get myself into?"