CHAPTER 2
The desert held its breath. Above the sprawl of Las Vegas, a bruised purple twilight surrendered to the empire of neon, a silent transition of power. In the warren-like corridors of the Desert Palms Apartments—a complex whose sun-bleached stucco and perpetually damp pool area whispered of faded glory and low-stakes survival—a different kind of electricity was humming.
It pulsed from Unit 217, a second-story box whose single window was a flat, glowing eye of blue-white light in the building's face.
Inside, the air was a tangible entity. It was thick with the sweet, chemical tang of Cool Ranch Doritos, the fermented sigh of a half-empty can of Monster Energy already going warm, and the ozone-tinged heat venting from a high-end gaming PC that was being pushed to its sobbing limit. The room was a museum of curated chaos: shelves bowed under the weight of collector's edition game figurines, their plastic eyes reflecting the screen's frantic glow. Posters for games that hadn't been relevant for half a decade clung to the walls with curling tape. In the center of it all, a cathedral of flickering monitors, sat Rez Crown.
At 19, Rez existed in the liminal space between boy and man, his body still holding the lean, restless angles of adolescence. His hair, a dark, unruly thicket, fell across his forehead, perpetually damp with the sweat of concentration. His face, usually animated with a lopsided, self-deprecating grin, was now a mask of pure, distilled agony. The kind of agony only achievable when your virtual self is being repeatedly and creatively dismembered by a pixelated demigod.
"No. NO! You can't DO THAT! That's a BULLSHIT hitbox!" he yelled, his voice cracking with righteous fury. His fingers were a blur on the custom mechanical keyboard, each clack a desperate prayer. On the primary 32-inch monitor, a colossal, horned entity made of shadow and screaming faces filled the screen. This was Malthor the Unraveler, the final boss of Soulforged: Eternal, a game renowned for its exquisite, soul-crushing difficulty.
On the secondary monitor, a different beast writhed: the live chat of his CrownCast stream.
LaserLlama42: REZ YOU HAVE ONE HP!!
JinxQueen: HEAL! FOR THE LOVE OF GOD HEAL!
DadBot3000: Statistically, your chances of survival are now 0.03%. Initiating "I told you so" protocol.
ShadowWeeb77: Just parry, bro. It's not that hard.
"I'M TRYING TO PARRY, YOU WALNUT!" Rez shrieked in response to the chat, his eyes never leaving Malthor's telegraphed, yet impossibly fast, scythe-arm swing. "He's got, like, eight different parry windows and they're all BULLSHIT!"
He had 87,422 subscribers. A number he checked with a mix of pride and existential dread at least ten times a day. To them, he was Rez, the CrownCast Clown Prince, the king of turning spectacular failure into content. They loved his rage, his running, rambling monologues about game design, his genuine, unscripted joy when he finally triumphed. They didn't see the stack of overdue bills tucked under his laptop, or the eviction notice peeking out from a pile of laundry he'd been meaning to fold for a month. They didn't see the gnawing fear that this—yelling at pixels in a hot room—was the peak of his life's trajectory.
The digital Malthor roared. The screen flashed crimson. Rez's health bar, a sliver of desperate green, vanished.
YOU DIED.
The text filled the screen, a flat, mocking epitaph. The game's somber, tragic music swelled.
Rez slumped back in his gaming chair, the air leaving his lungs in a long, defeated whoosh. He dragged his hands down his face. "Four hours," he groaned, his voice hoarse. "Four. Hours. I had him. I had the rhythm. And then he just… decides to invent a new attack? Who programmed this? A sadist with a personal grudge against happiness?"
The chat exploded in a frenzy of mockery and support.
LaserLlama42: F in the chat, boys. An era has ended.
JinxQueen: My therapist is going to hear about this fight.
TruthWatcher: Frame data shows you dodged 0.2 seconds early. Skill issue.
PanicPan: DUDE YOUR FACE! YOU LOOK LIKE YOU WITNESSED A MURDER!
Rez managed a weak laugh, leaning forward to peer into the webcam's unblinking eye. His own face looked back from a corner of the stream—pale, wide-eyed, a sheen of sweat on his upper lip. "I kinda did, PanicPan. Malthor just murdered my will to live. My hopes. My dreams. He killed them all, and then he teabagged their corpses." He grabbed his Monster can, took a lukewarm swallow, and grimaced. "Alright, Crownlings. That's it. That's the stream. My spirit is broken. My fingers are cramping. I'm going to go stare at a wall and contemplate the void."
He began his ending spiel, the practiced routine of thanking subscribers, urging follows, reminding them of the schedule. His body was going through the motions, but his mind was already in the post-defeat fugue state—replaying every mistake, every mistimed roll.
That's when he felt it.
Not a sound. Not a movement seen.
A presence.
A prickling sensation began at the nape of his neck, right under the collar of his faded Legend of Zelda t-shirt. It was the intimate, terrifying feeling of being watched from inches away. A cold point of focus in the warm, messy room.
He froze, mid-sentence. "…and don't forget to smash that like button if you enjoyed watching my soul get… uh…"
The chat noticed.
MedicMain: Rez? You ok? You just spaced out.
TruthWatcher: Bio-signs indicate a spike in heart rate. What's happening?
The prickling intensified. It was crawling. A delicate, multi-legged weight tracing a path up the sensitive skin of his neck towards his hairline.
Every hair on Rez's body stood up. A jolt of pure, animal adrenaline, sharper than any Monster Energy, flooded his system. With a strangled yelp, he slapped at the back of his neck with the frantic, uncoordinated violence of a man swatting a fire.
THWACK.
The impact stung his own skin. Something small, hard, and surprisingly heavy was dislodged. It hit the surface of his mousepad with a soft, distinct tink.
Rez spun his chair, heart hammering against his ribs. "What the hell? A cockroach? In my sanctum? I swear to God, if management sent another letter about my 'lifestyle'…"
His words died in his throat.
It wasn't a roach.
It lay on the black foam of the mousepad, momentarily stunned. In the stark, shadowless light of his RGB keyboard, it looked like a piece of obsidian carved into a perfect, lethal shape. It was the size of a silver dollar, but its presence seemed to dominate the desk. Its body was a carapace of deep, absolute black, a black so complete it seemed to warp the light around it, creating a tiny pocket of void. But running across that darkness, pulsing with a slow, rhythmic glow like embers in a dying forge, was a network of intricate veins. They shone with a sickly, beautiful amber light.
This was no desert wolf spider, no common house invader. This was something other. Something that had never belonged in the wild, let alone on a gamer's mousepad in Las Vegas.
"Whoa," Rez breathed, the sound barely a whisper. He leaned closer, the gamer's instinct to capture the bizarre overriding the primal instinct to flee. "Chat… are you seeing this? This is… this is some next-level nightmare fuel. I didn't order this prop, I swear."
He reached a hesitant finger out, not to touch, but to point. To frame it for the webcam.
The spider moved.
It wasn't the skittering scramble of a startled insect. It was a launch. A coil of pure kinetic energy releasing with terrifying precision. It became a black-and-amber streak, a living bullet aimed not away, but at him.
Rez had a microsecond to flinch before it was on him. It landed on the bare skin of his outstretched forearm, its legs a cage of cool, sharp points. He yelped, shaking his arm violently. "Get off! Get off, you little—"
But it was anchored. It scuttled up his arm with a speed that defocused his eyes, heading for the softer, vulnerable flesh of his inner wrist.
Panic, pure and white-hot, erased all thought. This wasn't content anymore. This was violation. This was wrong. He grabbed at it with his other hand.
He was too slow.
At the junction of his wrist, where the blue tracery of veins lay closest to the surface, the spider paused. It seemed to deliberate for an atom of time. Then it reared back, its front legs lifting, revealing its fangs—twin hypodermic shards of obsidian, glistening with a single droplet of liquid that shone with the same infernal amber as its veins.
It struck.
The pain was not what he expected. It wasn't a bee-sting burn or a sharp cut. It was a cold shock. A puncture of absolute zero that instantly caught fire, a line of liquid ice injected directly into his bloodstream. He felt it travel, a screaming comet of agony racing up his arm, searing through his veins, heading straight for his heart.
"AGH! SON OF A—!"
A convulsive, full-body spasm threw him backwards. His chair, already on wheels, shot out from under him. He crashed to the floor, his head narrowly missing the edge of his desk. The world did a violent, nauseating tilt. The neon EXIT sign of his keyboard melted into a smear of red light. The frantic scroll of the chat became a waterfall of gibberish, the individual letters swimming and bleeding together.
MedicMain: REZ?!?!
JinxQueen: OH MY GOD THAT WAS REAL THAT WAS REAL
TruthWatcher: I'm calling emergency services. That was a Latrodectus variant. Possibly hasselti.
PanicPan: SOMEBODY HELP HIM!
Rez couldn't read it. His vision was tunneling, the periphery collapsing into a buzzing, staticky gray. He was dimly aware of the spider. It had leapt clear during his fall. He saw it, a silhouette of perfect menace, skitter across the carpet with unnatural, robotic grace. It didn't flee for the door. It went straight for the wall, scaled the cheap drywall in a second, and vanished into the dark, slatted mouth of the air conditioning vent without a backward glance. A delivery completed. A mission logged.
Nausea, sudden and overwhelming, rose in his throat. Sweat, cold and clammy, drenched his shirt. The room was spinning on a drunken axis, the glow-in-the-dark stars on his ceiling becoming streaking comets.
"I'm… I'm good, Crownlings," he slurred, his tongue a thick, uncooperative piece of meat. He tried to push himself up, but his arms were rubber. The two puncture wounds on his wrist, so small and neat, now throbbed with a deep, ominous heat. They had already begun to bruise, the skin around them turning an ugly, violaceous black. "Just… just need some air… gonna… end stream…"
His hand flailed for the mouse, for the keyboard shortcut to stop broadcasting. His fingers brushed plastic but couldn't grasp. The strength was draining from him as if a plug had been pulled.
Darkness crept in from the edges of the screen, from the corners of the room. The last coherent image he saw was his own face in the webcam feed—pupils dilated to black pools, skin the color of parchment, a mask of dawning, incomprehensible terror.
Then, the world folded in on itself. The sound of the chat's panic, the hum of his PC, the distant wail of a siren from the Strip—all of it was swallowed by a rising, oceanic roar in his ears.
Rez Crown, YouTube streamer, chronic underachiever, collector of vintage game cartridges, went utterly still on the floor of his apartment.
The stream, however, did not end.
For one hour and seventeen minutes, CrownCast broadcast a still life of modern paralysis to 4,832 viewers. The image was a diptych of chaos and stillness: on the left, the frozen, triumphant form of Malthor the Unraveler on the primary monitor; on the right, the prone body of a young man, one arm outstretched, two tiny, ugly wounds on his wrist catching the light. The chat scrolled in a sustained, escalating panic, a digital vigil. Subscribers from Tokyo, from London, from Sydney typed frantic pleas, coordinated calls to Las Vegas Metro, shared the stream link with tags like #HelpRez.
It was his roommate, Leo, who finally broke the scene. Leo, who worked the late shift bussing tables at a casino buffet, stumbled in at 3:45 AM, smelling of stale coffee and fryer grease. He found Rez, checked for a pulse with trembling fingers (it was there, fast and thready), and with a muttered curse, located the mouse and ended the stream, plunging the thousands of watching eyes into darkness.
He called 911. The paramedics came, moved with efficient boredom, noted the "possible spider bite," the patient's rapid but stable vitals, and the lack of any apparent spider. They loaded Rez onto a gurney. As they wheeled him out, Leo grabbed Rez's phone and hoodie.
In the sterile, buzzing silence they left behind, the apartment held its breath. A single, shimmering strand, almost invisible, stretched from the edge of the desk to the vent in the wall. It was not a cobweb of dust and neglect. It was a cable of perfect, glowing amber silk. It quivered once in the draft from the open door, then lay still, the only physical evidence that a threshold had been crossed.
Deep in the building's ventilation system, curled in a junction box warmed by a nest of wires, Subject X-99 rested. Its metabolic processes were hyper-accelerated, burning through the last of its sedation. It had analyzed the host during the brief connection. Sub-optimal physical conditioning. Elevated stress hormones. But the neural activity… it was a maelstrom. A constant, high-speed loop of stimulus, reaction, pattern recognition, and emotional feedback. Not the disciplined, focused mind of a soldier, but a different kind of battlefield: chaotic, adaptive, creative.
The venom was already at work. It had entered the host's bloodstream not as a mere toxin, but as a billion tiny architects, each carrying a radioactive blueprint. They were seeking out adrenal glands, synaptic junctions, muscle fibers, and bone marrow, not to destroy, but to rebuild. To evolve. The host's own DNA was being scanned, edited, and rewritten in real-time, guided by an instinct millions of years old, now supercharged by human ambition.
The formula was adapting. The intended outcome—a predictable, militarized super-soldier—was no longer the template. The environment had changed. The host was different. The evolution would be, too.
In the quiet dark, X-99's amber veins pulsed once, slowly, like a dormant heartbeat.
In a Las Vegas hospital, Rez Crown lay in a curtained bay, an IV dripping saline into his vein. The doctor, after a cursory examination, diagnosed "severe vasovagal syncope likely triggered by stress and possible minor envenomation." They gave him fluids, advised him to watch for signs of infection, and told him he could go home in the morning.
They did not scan his DNA. They did not detect the subtle, pervasive gamma radiation now emanating from his cells. They did not see the microscopic threads of exotic polymers beginning to knit themselves into his bone density, or the rewiring happening along his neural pathways.
They saw a tired, skinny kid who'd gotten spooked by a bug.
They sent him back into the neon night, utterly unaware that the boy they were discharging was no longer entirely human. The crucible had been heated. The transformation had begun. And the city of Las Vegas, in all its glittering, indifferent glory, was about to meet its first, accidental guardian.