Kieran Vale had exactly 14,847 hours logged in World.io.
He knew this because the game tracked it obsessively, displaying your playtime like a badge of shame on your profile. Most players had a few hundred hours, maybe a thousand if they were dedicated. The top players on the leaderboards? Three, four thousand hours.
Kieran had nearly fifteen thousand.
He'd dropped out of college for this game. Ignored his parents' calls. Let his apartment become a nest of takeout containers and energy drink cans. World.io wasn't just a game to him—it was a puzzle box of infinite complexity, and he'd been determined to solve every last piece of it.
And he had. Almost.
Rank 3 on the global leaderboards. The only player to ever complete a Nightmare Ironman run starting as a landless peasant. He'd documented every exploit, every optimal build path, every hidden event trigger. His guide on the forums was 847 pages long and considered the Bible for serious players.
Then a truck hit him while he was crossing the street, mid-calculation on whether the new patch had nerfed the Mercenary Company mechanic.
Pretty stupid way to die.
Kieran woke up choking on straw.
He jerked upright, coughing, his hands grasping at rough fabric. The smell hit him first—damp earth, unwashed bodies, something rotting. His eyes watered as he blinked in the dim light filtering through gaps in wooden walls.
"What the fuck?" His voice sounded wrong. Higher. Younger.
He looked down at his hands. Smaller than they should be. Calloused. Dirt under the fingernails. These weren't his hands—his hands had been soft, pale from years of indoor living, the only calluses from mouse-clicking.
These were the hands of someone who worked for a living.
Kieran's breath quickened. Heart attack? Stroke? Was this a coma dream, his dying brain firing random neurons?
Then he saw it.
Text. Floating in his vision. Translucent blue letters that moved when he moved his eyes, staying fixed in his peripheral vision like a HUD overlay.
[Status]
[Quests]
[Inventory]
[Map]
His heart stopped.
Those were World.io interface elements.
"No," he whispered. Then louder: "No fucking way."
He focused on [Status], and the text expanded, filling his vision with information he'd seen ten thousand times before but never quite like this:
[KIERAN VALE]
[Level: 1]
[Class: Unassigned]
[HP: 100/100]
[Stamina: 75/100]
[Mana: 50/50]
[Attributes]
Strength: 6
Endurance: 7
Intelligence: 14
Wisdom: 11
Charisma: 8
Luck: 5
[Skills]
World.io Expertise (Passive, MAX): Complete meta-knowledge of game mechanics, optimal strategies, and event triggers. Note: World divergence detected. Some information may be outdated.
System Interface (Active, MAX): Full access to System functions.
[Traits]
Former Player: Perception enhanced for statistical analysis and strategic optimization.
Ironman Mode: Death is permanent.
[Current Location: Thornhaven Village, Barony of Greymire]
Kieran stared at the stats, his mind racing through possibilities and probabilities like he was back at his computer, planning his next campaign.
This was happening. Somehow, impossibly, this was real.
He was inside World.io.
A laugh bubbled up from his chest—half-hysteria, half-excitement. "Holy shit. Holy shit."
Thornhaven. He knew this place. It was one of the poverty-start locations, a tutorial village that most players abandoned after the first hour because the resource generation was terrible and the local lord was coded to be incompetent.
But Kieran had started here dozens of times. He knew every exploitable quest chain, every resource node, every timed event. This was one of his speedrun routes.
He stood, his new body responding sluggishly—probably the low Endurance stat. He moved to the window and peered out at the village square.
Twenty-three buildings. Population of maybe ninety, judging by the crowd size in the square. Fields to the east, half-fallow—classic AI mismanagement of crop rotation. The forest to the north would have the lumber node, and if the game logic held, there'd be a quarry site about two kilometers southeast.
This was workable. Difficult, but workable.
[New Quest Available]
Kieran's attention snapped to the notification.
[Quest: Survive Your First Month]
[Objective: Acquire sufficient resources to survive 30 days]
[Reward: 100 XP, Title: "Survivor"]
[Failure: Death]
[Time Remaining: 30 days]
Standard tutorial quest. In the game, this was trivially easy if you knew the optimal path. The trick was identifying which NPCs had the valuable quest chains and grinding those first.
Another notification appeared:
[Select Starting Perk - Time Remaining: 09:47]
[Merchant's Eye] - Identify resource values and trading opportunities
[Silver Tongue] - Bonus to persuasion and negotiation
[Green Thumb] - Increased agricultural yields
[Tactician's Mind] - Enhanced strategic planning and combat coordination
[Administrator] - Improved governance efficiency
Kieran didn't hesitate. He'd theory-crafted this exact scenario hundreds of times on the forums.
[Tactician's Mind] was the only choice for a poverty start. The others were win-more perks—useless if you didn't survive the early game. But Tactician's Mind had synergy with his Intelligence stat and would unlock the Commander class tree, which had the best scaling for empire building.
He selected it.
[Perk Acquired: Tactician's Mind]
[Effect: +2 to Intelligence and Wisdom when planning strategies or commanding units. Enhanced ability to assess tactical situations and predict outcomes. Unlocks advanced strategic options.]
[Class Option Unlocked: Strategist]
[Class Option Unlocked: Commander]
[Class Option Unlocked: Warlord]
Kieran felt something shift in his perception, like someone had turned up the contrast on reality. When he looked at the village square again, he didn't just see people moving around—he saw patterns. Optimal paths. Resource flows. Weaknesses.
The woman carrying a basket was moving from the well to the eastern houses—probably distributing water. Inefficient route, wasting at least forty seconds per trip.
The group of men near the central building were arguing—body language suggested a dispute over resource allocation. That would be the village council. In the game, you could exploit their disputes to gain favor with one faction.
A child ran past, chasing a chicken. Low priority. Irrelevant to resource generation.
It was like seeing the village as a spreadsheet of exploitable data points, and Kieran felt a familiar rush of satisfaction. This was what he was good at. This was what he'd spent fifteen thousand hours mastering.
He pulled up his quest log, checking for any auto-generated tasks.
[Available Quests: 3]
[Survive Your First Month] - 30 days remaining
[Find Employment] - Speak to village elder about work
[Secure Shelter] - Acquire permanent housing
Standard quest tree. "Find Employment" would lead to the basic labor quests, which paid poorly but built reputation. "Secure Shelter" required either gold or reputation with the village council.
The optimal path was obvious: grind reputation through labor quests, trigger the Harvest Moon event in three weeks to triple crop yields, use the resulting goodwill to get appointed as the lord's assistant, then leverage that position to—
Outside, someone screamed.
Kieran's analytical detachment shattered as his new instincts kicked in. He rushed to the window, his enhanced Tactician's Mind already processing the scene.
The northern edge of the village. Movement from the forest. People scattering in panic.
[Warning: Hostile Entities Detected]
[Greywood Wolves - Level 3-5]
[Pack Size: 7]
[Threat Assessment: SEVERE]
Kieran's mind went cold and calculating.
This was wrong. The wolf pack event didn't trigger until month three in Thornhaven. He'd run this scenario enough times to be certain.
But there they were—seven wolves, spreading out with pack tactics, cutting off escape routes. Two were already circling a group of villagers who'd been too slow to reach the buildings.
[Emergency Quest: Wolf Pack Attack]
[Objective: Survive the attack]
[Bonus Objective: Minimize village casualties]
[Reward: Variable based on performance]
[Failure: Death]
Kieran's Tactician's Mind kicked into overdrive, overlaying probability calculations on everything he saw.
Seven wolves. Average level 4. Total combat power approximately 280.
Village fighting capability: Maybe five men with hunting experience. No organized militia. Total combat power maybe 150, and that was being generous.
His own combat power: Effectively zero. Level 1, no weapons, no combat skills.
Conclusion: The village would lose. At least fifteen casualties, possibly more. The resulting population drop would trigger a spiral—not enough workers for the harvest, food shortage, winter deaths, village abandonment within six months.
All of which would kill him too, since he had no resources to leave.
But there was another calculation running in parallel.
He didn't need to save everyone. He needed to survive and establish himself. In fact, a crisis like this was an opportunity. Villages in trauma were easier to manipulate. If he could position himself correctly during this chaos, make himself valuable, he could skip weeks of reputation grinding.
The question was how.
Kieran scanned the village with his enhanced perception, looking for exploitable elements.
The well—stone construction, defensible position.
The elder's house—largest building, probably where any weapons would be stored.
The wolves—pack hunters, but they'd prioritize easy targets. If he could redirect their attention...
An idea formed, cold and efficient.
He could save maybe thirty percent of the villagers. Forty if he got lucky. The rest would die, but that was acceptable losses if it meant he survived and gained enough reputation to secure a position of authority.
It wasn't personal. It was just math.
Kieran grabbed a piece of wood from the floor—barely a club, but better than nothing—and headed for the door.
Time to start his campaign.
[Achievement Unlocked: Baptism by Fire]
[Begin your rise in the midst of chaos]
He stepped into the screaming chaos of Thornhaven, his mind already three moves ahead, calculating, optimizing, planning.
Just like the game.
Except this time, the screaming was real.