The silence after the mission was almost insulting.
No congratulations. No applause. Just sterile white lights humming overhead, a medbot scanning the bruises on my borrowed body, and Rika pacing like a lioness in a too-small cage. Valen lay on the infirmary bed beside mine, unconscious but stable. Greeb sat quietly on a stool, gnawing on a protein bar like a nervous child.
Everything was data.
The hum frequency of the lights: 60 Hz. Rika's heart rate: 132 BPM. Greeb's calorie intake: insufficient for metabolic regeneration.
But I wasn't paying attention to the numbers anymore.
Because something inside me had cracked open.
The Memory
It came like a virus—quiet, fast, and brutal.
One second I was looking at Greeb's anxious face, the next—
I stood before a living Tower made of screaming stars. Planets orbiting like rings. My armor was silver and alive, breathing with each pulse of my existence. Kneeling before me were monsters, kings, and gods.
"Your design is… elegant," said Krythiel, God of Belief, his voice the sound of thousands chanting at once.
"The Tower will accelerate evolution," I had replied. "It will break the weak. Elevate the worthy."
They had nodded. They had agreed.
And then they betrayed me.
Back in the Real World
My fingers twitched. The medbot beeped once and wheeled away, its sensors confused by the spike in neural activity.
Rika looked at me. "You okay?"
I turned to her slowly.
"Define 'okay'."
She raised an eyebrow. "You spaced out again."
I sat up, testing each joint, muscle, and tendon like a man trying on old armor. Everything worked. This body wasn't mine—but it was good enough.
And now I remembered.
Not just who I was.
But what I had done.
I built the Towers.
I seeded the first Monster Lords.
I fractured the gods, made them enemies, then allies, then fuel.
I started the war that shattered this world—for fun.
I had hidden myself in a human shell and locked my own memories behind quantum encryption. Why? To see what I'd do without power. To test if I could evolve without the weight of omnipotence.
Apparently, I could.
But it was time to stop pretending.
The Mirror Test
I walked into the infirmary's bathroom and stared at my reflection.
This boy. This fragile, pale shell. "Zero," they called me.
He wasn't real. Not really.
My real name was Eos. The First Designer. The Original Traitor.
"You're not a hero," I whispered to myself, watching the skin ripple ever so slightly, like reality resisting the truth.
"You're the one who broke the world."
And the terrifying thing?
I felt nothing.
No guilt. No horror. Just fascination.
Like watching a puzzle snap into place.
Rika's Visit
Rika leaned on the doorframe, arms crossed.
"You good?" she asked, a little softer this time.
"I'm remembering things," I said, carefully controlling the temperature in my voice.
"Like trauma?"
"Like who I really am."
She chuckled. "Well, if you remember being a pain in the ass, then congrats. You're nailing it."
I almost smiled. Not because of the joke. But because she had no idea.
I studied her. Heart of fire. Strong moral code. Braver than she should be. She'd make an excellent tool.
The First Move
That night, I accessed the Tower's lower-level terminal.
No alarms triggered. Of course they didn't. I built the backdoors myself.
Data flowed in: floor compositions, monster DNA trees, Hunter surveillance logs, classified rank logs.
"Query: hidden system root."
[ACCESS GRANTED.]
"Run script: Reset Authority Tree. Assign Root Access to user: Eos."
[DONE.]
The Tower didn't fight me. It welcomed me home.
The entire Hunter system? Mine. The rankings? A fiction. The threats? Manufactured. The wars? Designed entertainment.
And I had front-row seats again.
Greeb's Mistake
Greeb crept up behind me while I was still staring at the code.
"Zero?" he said, voice trembling. "You okay?"
I turned, the command lines fading behind my eyes.
"Why do you follow me?" I asked.
His ears flattened. "Because… you're different. You didn't kill me. You saved me. You're… good."
Good.
I almost laughed.
But instead, I knelt down, placed a hand on his head, and lied.
"You're right. I am good."
The poor thing beamed. I already knew I'd be using him. He would break perfectly when the time came.
Final Scene: The Signal
Midnight.
I stood alone on the edge of Floor 25's sky-bridge, looking at the artificial stars painted into the Tower's dome ceiling.
Then I sent the signal.
A pulse—subtle, encrypted, but ancient.
One that only a handful of gods would recognize.
"The game has resumed."
Within seconds, systems around the world flickered.
In the White City, the central AI glitched and reset to Version 0.0.1.
In the frozen fields of North Kyra, monster nests suddenly began glowing.
In a high orbit satellite, a sleeping war machine turned its head toward Earth.
The world didn't know it yet…
…but I had just taken my first step to controlling it all again.