Chapter 1: The Blue Screen of Death
(To avoid confusion Lyta is the main character)
The end of the world began with a flickering monitor.
"Lyta, seriously, the client is threatening to pull off the contract. Just patch the damn API."
Lyta rubbed his temples in frustration, the headache behind his eyes were throbbing in rhythm with the slow hum of the server room next door. He stared at the lines of Python code on his screen. They were all blurring together, it was a mess of loops and variables that made no sense.
"I'm trying, Steve," Lyta muttered softly, his voice was raspy from lack of sleep. "But their backend is a disaster. It's like trying to plumb an entire house with paper straws."
"I don't care if you have to use duct tape and prayer," Steve snapped, while leaning over Lyta's cubicle wall. The project manager smelled like stale coffee and anxiety. "Just make it green before the 2:00 PM deployment."
Lyta sighed weakly and checked the clock. 1:59 PM.
Then he tapped the Enter key to run the diagnostic.
At that exact moment, the air pressure in the room suddenly dropped.
It happened so fast Lyta's ears popped up. The ambient hum of the air conditioning was cut out, now replaced by a sudden, and deafening silence. The sunlight that was streaming through the floor-to-ceiling windows shifted from a harsh afternoon white to a sickly, bruised violet.
"Who turned off the AC?" someone from the accounting department asked, their voice sounding thin and far away.
Then, the blue screens appeared.
The screens didn't fade in. They just snapped into existence. Glowing, translucent blue rectangles that were hovering in the air, directly in front of everyone's faces.
Steve stumbled a few steps backwards, while swatting at the air. "What the hell? Is this... is this AR? Did Marketing set up some holographic prank again?"
Lyta suddenly froze. He stared at the text floating inches away from his nose. It wasn't a projection, he was certain. It moved when he moved his head, locked to his retina.
[SYSTEM INITIALIZATION COMPLETE.]
[WELCOME, USER #492,102.]
[ANALYZING POTENTIAL...]
"Get it off me!" Mrs. Adesina, the head of HR, shrieked. She was clawing at her face in panic, her nails passing harmlessly through the blue light. "I can't see! Someone call security! It's a cyber-attack!"
"It's not a cyber-attack, look at the text!" the intern, David, shouted, his voice cracking. He was standing on his desk, while looking around wildly. "It says 'Class Assigned: Rogue'. Yo, is this... is this like an anime?"
"Sit down, David!" Steve barked, though his hands were trembling as he held his own phone, while tapping furiously at a black screen. "My phone's dead. Landlines are dead. Nobody panic. It's probably a power surge causing hallucinations. Or maybe Gas leak. Everyone, hold your breath!"
Lyta remained seated on his chair, his heart hammering against his ribs like a trapped bird. He wasn't screaming. He stayed silent while analyzing.
Hallucinations don't have font rendering this crisp, he thought to himself. And gas leaks don't make the sky turn purple.
He looked at Steve. Above the manager's head, floating text declared:
[CLASS: CITIZEN (NPC)]
[LEVEL: 1]
He looked at Mrs. Adesina, who was now on her knees, praying loudly in Yoruba, while rocking back and forth.
[CLASS: PRIESTESS]
[RANK: B]
[LEVEL: 1]
And then, Lyta looked at his own panel. It wasn't stable like theirs. It was glitching, the blue light flickering into static.
[ERROR 404: CLASS NOT FOUND.]
[ATTEMPTING REROLL...]
[CONNECTION TIMED OUT.]
"Great," Lyta whispered softly, a dry laugh escaping his throat. "Even in the apocalypse, my luck is bugged."
CRASH!
The sound of the break room window shattering tore through the office. It wasn't a small breaking sound. it sounded like a car had been thrown through the glass.
"Oh God, oh Jesus, protect us," Mrs. Adesina wailed louder.
"Stay back!" Steve yelled at the employees, while grabbing a stapler as if it were a weapon. "Who's there?"
Something crawled out of the shower of broken glasses.
It wasn't a person. It looked more like a monstrosity. It looked like a hunchback made of wet, grey clay and rotten muscle, it was holding a rusted machete. It stood about five feet tall, its breathing sounding like water gurgling in a drain.
[MONSTER DETECTED: SEWER GHOUL (LVL 1)]
The office went deathly silent. For a split second, nobody moved. The human brain couldn't even process it. It was too absurd. Too wrong and unrealistic.
Then the Ghoul shrieked. sound of grinding metal. and then it lunged forward.
It immediately tackled the intern, David, off his desk.
Blood sprayed across the pristine white whiteboard.
The scream that followed was primal, raw terror.
It wasn't human.
"DAVID!" Steve screamed, freezing in place.
Pandemonium broke.
The office exploded into chaos. People scrambled over cubicles, tripping over wires and chairs. The polite corporate veil vanished instantly, replaced by a stampede of animal survival instinct. Mrs. Adesina fainted. Others ran for the elevators, jamming the buttons that wouldn't light up.
Lyta didn't run. Because He couldn't. His legs felt like spaghetti. He watched as the Ghoul raised the machete again, the blade dripping with red blood.
David is dead, Lyta's mind supply was unhelpful. That thing just killed him, in cold blood. It's going to kill us all.
The Ghoul turned its head suddenly. It's beady, and milky eyes locked onto Lyta.
It snarled and charged, scrambling over the desks with terrifying agility.
"Move!" Lyta screamed at his own legs, he forced himself to roll backward.
His office chair had tipped over, sending him crashing to the floor. The machete bit into the carpet right where his head had been a second ago.
Lyta scrambled back on his elbows, while kicking out. His foot connected with the Ghoul's face, feeling like he had kicked a bag of wet cement. The monster didn't even flinch. It raised the blade again.
This was it. He was going to die next to the water cooler, killed by something that looked like a reject from a horror movie.
Lyta threw his hands up, it was a pathetic, and instinctive defense.
[SYSTEM ALERT: CRITICAL THREAT DETECTED.]
[EMERGENCY PROTOCOL INITIATED.]
[ADMIN CONSOLE: UNLOCKED.]
[NEW SKILL: CODE EDITOR: UNLOCKED]
[NEW SKILL: CODE VISION: UNLOCKED]
The world suddenly turned gray.
The sound of screaming, including the gurgle of the monster, and the thud of running feet. it all warped into a low, slowed-down moment. The Ghoul froze mid-swing, a drop of saliva suspended in the air near its jaw. Time had slowed down.
Lyta blinked twice, his breath was now hitching in his chest.
The flickering blue error screen in front of him vanished. And It was replaced by a stark, black window with neon green text. It looked more like the terminal on his Linux machine at home.
> USER: LYTA_ADMIN
> STATUS: AWAKEN
> TARGET: SEWER_GHOUL_01
"What..." Lyta gasped, while looking around. The dust motes in the air were all frozen.
He looked at the monster. Instead of skin and muscle, he saw shimmering lines of code that began to overlay the creature's body. It was like looking at the wireframe of a 3D model, but detailed down to the DNA.
[ENTITY CODE: 0x5F3A9]
[HP: 99/100]
[BEHAVIOR: AGGRESSIVE]
[WEAPON: RUSTED_CLEAVER]
Lyta reached out, with his trembling hand passing through the frozen space. He didn't touch the monster; instead he touched the code.
There wasn't a keyboard. The interface just... knew what he wanted. It was like the code was speaking to him directly, a language he had spent ten years learning. Coding languages.
It's just a script, Lyta instantly realized, the fear giving way to a sudden, cold clarity. It's just an object with properties.
He then focused on the line that defined the creature's weapon.
object.weapon = "RUSTED_MACHETE"
"Delete," Lyta whispered.
[ERROR: CANNOT DELETE OBJECT. INSUFFICIENT PERMISSIONS.]
"Damn it!" Panic flared up again. The gray world was now starting to vibrate. The System couldn't hold the pause for long. "Okay, okay... if I can't delete it... I'll just have to modify it."
Lyta looked at the creature's aggression variable.
aggression_target = "NEAREST_HUMAN"
Lyta focused all his mental energy on that one string of text. He felt a sharp pain in his head, it felt like a migraine spike, as he forced his will onto the system console.
Change target.
aggression_target = "SELF"
[COMMAND ACCEPTED.]
[COMPILING...]
SNAP.
In no time, time roared back to full speed.
The Ghoul roared, while swinging the machete down with lethal force.
Lyta flinched, while closing his eyes.
THWACK.
It sounded was wet and heavy. But Lyta didn't feel any pain.
He opened his eyes.
The Ghoul had twisted its torso mid-swing. The machete was now buried deep in its own shoulder. Black blood oozed out. The monster shrieked in confusion, while ripping the blade out of its body, and then plunging it into its own thigh.
"What is it doing?" Steve yelled from behind a file cabinet, his face was as pale as a sheet of pepper. "Why is it attacking itself?"
"It's malfunctioning," Lyta whispered to himself, standing up slowly. His legs were still shaking, but his hands were steady.
The Ghoul collapsed to the floor, while it continued hacking at its own chest until it stopped moving. With a soft chime, the body dissolved into motes of light, leaving only the rusted machete on the blood-stained carpet.
[SYSTEM NOTICE]
[TARGET ELIMINATED.]
[EXPERIENCE GAINED: 40xp]
[LEVEL UP!. LEVEL 0 ->LEVEL 1]
Lyta looked around the devastated office. Mrs. Adesina was sobbing into her hands. David was now gone. The world outside the window was a warzone of smoke and purple light.
Steve looked at Lyta, eyes wide. "Lyta... what did you do? Did you use a spell?"
Lyta looked at the black terminal window that was floating silently in his peripheral vision, while waiting for the next line of code.
"No," Lyta said, wiping a speck of black blood off his cheek. "I just hacked it."