Max didn't remember the last time he'd slept for more than four hours in a row.
The fluorescent lights of the campus convenience store hummed overhead, painting the cheap tile floor a sickly off-white. It was close to midnight, long after any reasonable student should've been out buying energy drinks and instant noodles, but the bell over the door still jingled every few minutes. Finals week made people do stupid things to their bodies.
Max scanned another can of neon-blue "ThunderCharge" and tried not to yawn directly into the customer's face.
"That'll be six seventy-nine," he said, voice automatically sliding into the bored, polite tone he'd perfected over the past year.
The guy in front of him—hoodie, pajama pants, the wide-eyed look of someone who'd mainlined caffeine instead of water all day—fumbled with his student ID card. Max forced a smile, took the card, swiped, handed back the receipt, said the script.
"Have a good night."
The student shuffled away, clutching his future heart attack in a can, and the store fell quiet again. The humming lights. The low fridge motors. The faint patter of rain on the windows.
Max checked the time on the register screen. 11:42 p.m.
Another eighteen minutes before his shift ended. Then a fifteen-minute walk back to his rented shoebox room. Then an hour of studying for his econometrics midterm. Then, if he was lucky, three hours of sleep before his morning class and his second job at the campus mailroom.
He rubbed at his eyes with the heel of his palm. They burned.
"You look like death, dude," murmured his coworker, Janelle, as she passed behind him with a crate of chips. She didn't say it unkindly. Just… observing.
"Death wishes it had my stamina," Max said. The words came out more bitter than he intended, so he added quickly, "Almost done, anyway."
She snorted. "You said that last week."
Last week, the week before, the month before. Almost done with the semester. Almost done paying off this term's tuition. Almost done with being broke. Almost done with being the guy who never went to parties, who never hung out after class, who slipped out early because he had to clock into one job or another.
Almost done, but never actually done.
Max tapped his fingers against the edge of the counter, letting the rhythm keep him awake. His phone lay hidden under the register, its screen turned down. The tiny buzz against his thigh told him the game had pinged again.
He hesitated, then shifted his weight so Janelle couldn't see and slid the phone out with practiced ease.
The familiar, colorful interface lit up his hand: Idle Dungeon Tycoon. His little army of pixelated skeletons had apparently cleared another floor while he was ringing up snacks. Gold numbers spilled across the screen in satisfying bursts.
He thumbed through the menus quickly: upgrade miner, upgrade click damage, unlock passive bonus, tap tap tap. A dozen tiny changes that would keep the game running slightly more efficiently while he ignored it for several more hours.
Max's brain liked this. Numbers going up. Systems ticking over quietly in the background. The sense that something in his life, however trivial, was progressing even while he stood still.
His actual life? That felt stuck on pause.
"Hey." Janelle's voice snapped him out of it. "Manager does a surprise walk-through and you're dead."
"Yeah, yeah." He shoved the phone back under the counter, cheeks hot. "Just checking the time."
Janelle gave him a look that said she didn't believe him but didn't care enough to argue. She went back to stocking the chip aisle.
Max exhaled slowly and wrapped his fingers around the edge of the counter until the plastic dug into his palms. Just six more months, he reminded himself. Finish this year, survive the next, graduate with a degree that might actually pay. Then maybe he could work one job like a normal person. Maybe he could get more than four hours of sleep and stop feeling like a phone that never got fully charged.
Maybe he could have something resembling a life.
The bell over the door jingled again. A couple stumbled in, laughing too loudly, smelling like beer and wet pavement. They were holding hands, bumping shoulders, leaning into each other like the rest of the world didn't exist.
Must be nice, Max thought.
The next few minutes blurred into routine. Scan, bag, smile. His brain drifted, sliding between thoughts of tomorrow's exam and the optimal upgrade path for his virtual skeleton army.
When midnight finally rolled around, it felt less like the end of a shift and more like reaching the next checkpoint in a game. The relief was there, but it was thin, already eroding under the weight of everything he still had to do.
"You good to lock up?" Janelle asked as she shrugged into her jacket.
"Yeah," Max said. "See you Thursday."
"Unless you die of exhaustion first," she shot back, waving. "Take a nap sometime, grandma."
He locked the door behind her and went through the closing checklist on autopilot: counting the drawer, wiping the counter, switching off all but the security lights. His feet ached. His lower back throbbed in a dull, constant way, as if it had forgotten what not-hurting felt like.
By the time he stepped outside, the rain had turned into a fine mist. It clung to his hair and soaked into his hoodie as he cut across the quiet campus, phone held up to light his path.
The world felt strangely far away. Buildings loomed like sleeping giants, windows dark. The usual noise of traffic was muted, swallowed by the wet streets. Even the air smelled tired.
Max checked Idle Dungeon Tycoon as he walked, more out of habit than genuine interest. Gold numbers continued to accumulate. His tiny skeleton miners swung their pickaxes in a loop that would never end unless he told them to stop.
"Lucky," he muttered.
He was aware, dimly, that he was being a little ridiculous. That using a game about passive progress as a coping mechanism for the fact that his own life felt like permanent grind was… not healthy, probably.
But it was either that or think too hard about the other things: the empty space where "family" should have been on forms, the way other students' eyes slid past him in the hallway, the way professors forgot his name three times in a semester. Max had made peace with being invisible in high school. College was supposed to be different. It just turned out to be more expensive.
He stuffed his phone into his pocket and picked up his pace. The wind had teeth tonight. It slid down the back of his neck and made his bones feel hollow.
His room was on the third floor of a crumbling brick building that technically counted as "off-campus student housing," which in landlord language meant "we put a Wi-Fi router in a condemned building." The stairwell light flickered as he climbed. The smell of burnt food drifted from someone's open door.
Inside his tiny room, he kicked the door shut, dropped his backpack onto the lone chair, and collapsed onto the bed without bothering to change. The mattress springs protested under his weight.
"Just lie down for five minutes," he told himself, already dragging his hoodie over his face to block the light. "Then get up. Study. You can sleep after the test."
He pulled his phone out again, thumbed open his notes app, stared at the wall of text he'd written about regression models and error terms. The words swam. He blinked until they settled, then blinked again.
Somewhere between the second and third paragraph, the text blurred into the soft glow of Idle Dungeon Tycoon's notification. His finger drifted almost on its own, tapping the icon.
The game loaded. Gold. Numbers. Progress bars.
Max watched them move for a few seconds, mind pleasantly empty. His eyelids drooped.
"Wouldn't it be nice," he mumbled, barely aware he was speaking, "if real life worked like this? Just… set it to idle and wake up level 100."
His thumb slipped. The phone slid out of his hand and bounced once on his chest before dropping to the side of the bed.
He was so tired he didn't even reach for it.
The world narrowed to the rhythm of his heartbeat, heavy and uneven. His chest felt tight, like someone had cinched a belt around his ribs. He tried to take a deep breath and his lungs refused to cooperate, stuttering halfway.
Not now, he thought, panic flickering weakly through the haze. You can't be getting sick now, come on—
The belt around his chest pulled tighter.
Pain shot down his left arm, sharp and electric. His heart stumbled, then started racing like it was trying to catch up to itself. A cold sweat broke across his skin.
Max realized, with the detached clarity of someone who had read too many health articles and ignored all of them, that this was very, very bad.
He tried to sit up. His body didn't respond. His limbs felt distant, as if someone had unplugged them.
His vision narrowed. The ceiling blurred at the edges. Every beat of his heart hammered in his ears, louder, then softer, then—
Darkness.
Not the gentle, drifting kind of darkness that came with sleep, wrapped in fuzzy thoughts and half-formed dreams. This was total, absolute, crushing absence. No sound. No light. No sense of body at all.