Sebastian woke up with a violent gasp. His hands clawed desperately at his own chest!
His fingers dug into the cheap synthetic fabric of his t-shirt. He was searching for the gaping hole where the Void God's obsidian spear had impaled him.
There was no blood. There was no hole!
There was only the erratic thumping of his own heart beating a frantic rhythm against his ribcage.
He bolted upright. His breathing came in shallow hyperventilating hitches. Sweat slicked his forehead and matted his dark hair to his skin.
The air in the room didn't smell of ozone and vaporized human blood. Instead it smelled of stale ramen and the distinct metallic dampness of city rain.
Sebastian threw his legs over the edge of the mattress. The rusted springs groaned in protest.
He buried his face in his calloused hands to try and ground himself.
The phantom pain of his death was still searing through his nervous system. It was a cosmic cold that had frozen his soul right before the server had shattered. He had died!
He was absolutely certain of it. You simply do not survive a direct hit from an entity that consumes dimensions for breakfast.
Slowly the dim blue light of his cramped apartment began to register. He lowered his hands and stared at the flickering neon sign buzzing obnoxiously outside his smeared window.
The rain of 2077 was a relentless acidic drizzle that fell over the megacity like a shroud.
His eyes darted to the cracked holographic terminal resting on his cluttered desk.
May 1st, 2077. 06:00 AM.
Sebastian stared at the glowing green digits until they blurred. May 1st. Exactly one year.
A hollow dark chuckle scraped its way out of his throat. It rang out in the suffocating silence of the tiny apartment.
He had returned!
The universe had kicked him back down the time stream. May 1st was the day it all started. Today was the official launch day of The Ethereal Plane. It was the revolutionary virtual reality game that promised a second life for the dregs of society.
What the megacorporations didn't know was that the game wasn't just code. Exactly one year from today the Great Merge would happen. The digital servers would collapse into the physical world and bring the magic and monsters right to Earth's doorstep!
The buzzing of his personal comm device shattered his morbid reflections.
He glanced at the device blinking angrily on his nightstand. INCOMING CALL: OMEGA CREDIT RECOVERY.
It was the debt collectors. They had been hounding him for months over the loans he took out to afford the virtual reality rig sitting in the corner of his room.
Sebastian reached over and picked up the device. He didn't answer it.
He simply crushed the cheap plastic casing in his grip. The screen splintered into spiderwebs before the battery shorted out with a pathetic fizzle. He tossed the broken pieces into the trash can.
"If only you parasites knew." Sebastian muttered to the empty room. His voice was devoid of any warmth.
"In twelve months you will be ripped apart by Level 1 Demon Rats in the sewers. Your credits won't buy you a bandage."
He stood up. His body felt oddly heavy and painfully mortal. He was no longer the Tier 9 hybrid who could shatter mountains with a flick of his wrist.
He was just a baseline human. Weak. Fragile. Traumatized.
But he was alive! And he had a one year head start.
Sebastian didn't bother showering or eating. He walked straight to the corner of his room where the sleek metallic helmet rested on its charging pedestal. It was his ticket to survival.
In the apocalypse power was the only currency that mattered. The game was the only place to mine it.
He picked up the helmet. It was cold to the touch. He didn't feel the thrill of a gamer about to embark on a fantasy adventure.
He felt the cold pragmatism of a soldier picking up his rifle for a war that had already been lost once.
Lying back down on his lumpy bed Sebastian slipped the helmet over his head. The neural needles pricked the back of his neck with a sharp familiar sting.
"Link start." He whispered into the dark.
The world vanished.
His consciousness was violently pulled through a tunnel of blinding white light. The sensation of his physical body dissolved. It was replaced by the weightless floating feeling of the digital ether.
Normally this was the part where a soothing artificial intelligence voice would welcome the player to The Ethereal Plane.
Instead the white light abruptly shifted to a sickening bloody crimson!
An ear splitting burst of static ripped through Sebastian's mind. It sounded like grinding metal and screaming code.
He gritted his teeth as his digital avatar flickered wildly in the void.
[SYSTEM ALERT: ANOMALY DETECTED.]
[ATTEMPTING TO LOAD PLAYER PROFILE: SEBASTIAN.]
[ERROR: TIME STREAM PARADOX DETECTED. SOUL SIGNATURE MATCHES TIER 9 ENTITY ZERO.]
Sebastian's eyes widened. The system was trying to load his data from the future! The data of the man who had fought the Void Gods.
[ATTEMPTING TO SYNCHRONIZE DATA... FAILED.]
[CRITICAL ERROR: VESSEL CANNOT CONTAIN TIER 9 METRICS. OVERLOAD IMMINENT.]
The red void around him began to crack like shattered glass. He could feel the pressure building in his digital skull. The game's architecture was trying to force a god's power into a level 1 server space!
'Stop.' Sebastian thought coldly. He tried to forcefully disconnect. 'You are going to fry my real world brain.'
[SYSTEM PROTOCOL 001 INITIATED: PLAYER ACCOUNT CORRUPTION PROTOCOL.]
[TO PREVENT CATASTROPHIC SERVER FAILURE PREVIOUS DATA WILL BE PURGED. COMPENSATING PLAYER FOR CORRUPTED SAVE FILE...]
The agonizing pressure suddenly vanished. The crimson void melted back into a pristine calming white.
The heavy grinding static was replaced by the gentle chime of a standard system notification.
Sebastian floated in the white expanse and caught his breath. Purged. All his old skills and god tier stats were gone.
It was the logical outcome but it still stung. He was back to square one.
Then the compensation window materialized in front of him.
[SYSTEM BUG RESOLUTION: COMPENSATION PACKAGE AWARDED.]
Sebastian narrowed his eyes. He waited for the standard max level boost or a cache of starting gold. Often when the system glitched during beta tests it threw raw stats at a player to keep them quiet.
The text on the translucent blue screen scrambled and glitched into a mess of unreadable symbols. Finally it settled into a single line of text that made Sebastian's cold heart skip a beat!
[NEXUS GLITCH OCCURRED. ERROR IN COMPENSATION ALGORITHM.]
↳ Awarded: 10,000x Skill Proficiency Multiplier
Sebastian stared at the floating text. He read it once. He read it twice.
The game hadn't given him max level. It had given him something infinitely worse!
In The Ethereal Plane progression was a brutal unforgiving grind. To level up a single skill from Tier 0 to Tier 1 required casting it hundreds of times.
To reach the conceptual laws of magic a player had to perform millions of perfectly executed actions. They had to grind for years without rest. It was a system designed to keep humanity suppressed even within the game.
With a 10,000x multiplier every single action would grant him the experience of ten thousand repetitions!
Sebastian reached out and swiped the notification away. A slow chilling smile spread across his face. This was a stark contrast to his normally dead eyes.
The Void Gods had won because humanity hadn't had enough time to scale their power.
'You gave me the glitch.' Sebastian thought. His mind was already calculating the absolute carnage he was about to unleash upon the game's economy. 'Now let us see if your physics engine can handle the consequences.'
The white void dissolved and he began his descent into the Hall of Heroes.
.
.
A/N: Creation is wild, exhausting, and sometimes my brain wants to run away. Power stones are my only bargaining chip to drag it back. If you liked this chapter, toss me one or a few, it helps more than you think.