Adrien blinked, his vision fracturing as he tried to anchor himself to the floor. The pulse had been deafening. It hadn't just torn the phantom of Lovegrove to ribbons right before his eyes; it had also dissolved the arachnid into a steaming, putrid puddle of goo, but that small mercy was instantly obliterated.
A violent pressure slammed into his skull, followed by the sickening sensation of his bones splintering under an invisible press. He was being stretched, hauled in three directions at once, while a relentless roar tore through his ears, threatening to split his eardrums.
'God damnit, did the Rektor blow up? Damnit, Lovegrove, your plan...'
He ground his teeth, forcing his boots forward against an invisible tide. 'Whatever this is, I'm not stopping. I'll find Vera. We're leaving this hellhole together.'
Then the agonising pressure vanished, leaving his mind spinning into sudden, dead silence.
Adrien wasn't in the familiar dungeon anymore, but he was standing in a place that didn't make sense.
'Did I die?'
The thought flared, but he choked it down. He had spent enough time buried in forums and watching stream archives to know how death worked here. Dying meant a clean cut to a black screen, punctuated by that mocking, blood-red notification before the inevitable respawn, but this wasn't that.
'If I'm not dead, where the hell am I?' Adrien looked up.
The sky was stained in the bruised, twilight violet that lingers just after the sun slips below the horizon, lit from nowhere and everywhere at once. Beneath his boots, the ground didn't stretch out; he was marooned on a jagged shard of stone, a lone island drifting in an infinite, quiet void.
'A glitch? Did I clip through the map?'
He raised his hands to examine them, but the thought died in his throat. A faint, iridescent spark licked across his fingertips, shimmering like oil on water before winking out of existence.Adrien stared at his hands, his pulse quickening. "Interesting."
Adrien crept to the lip of the floating shard and peered into the abyss. He let out a long, heavy breath. "Terrific. Just a rock in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by an endless twilight sky. I definitely clipped through the geometry."
He pulled up his mental interface, debating. "Maybe a hard logout will reset my position."
He hovered his hand over the command, hesitant. A strange intuition stayed his fingers. He closed the menu and decided to pace the perimeter of the floating island one last time, looking for anything he might have missed.
Crunch...
The sharp sound of scraping stone made him freeze. He whipped his head toward the noise. Floating just off the edge of his island was a jagged slab of rock, barely wide enough for a man to plant both boots. It hadn't been there a second ago.
'Whoa, what is this? An actual path?'
A cold spike of dread hit him right in the gut. 'Please don't tell me I just accidentally stumbled into a high-level zone. If I'm trapped here...'
He shook his head to clear the panic and muttered to the empty air, "Speculating won't get me anywhere. Only one way to find out."
He bent his knees, bracing himself to leap, but the choice was instantly made for him. With a deafening crack, the massive platform beneath his feet began to break apart, fissures tearing through the stone at a terrifying speed.
"Son of a—!"Adrien threw his weight forward, launching himself into the air just as his starting point dissolved into a shower of pebbles. He slammed onto the tiny stone slab. It groaned under his weight, tilting violently.
Before he could even steady his balance, another slab materialised a few feet away, and the stone under his boots began to crumble beneath him.
The tempo accelerated, as each new platform disintegrated faster than the last. There was no rhythm to it; they spawned at random, one to his left, one behind him, another several feet higher, forcing him to twist and climb in mid-air. It was a frantic, lethal game of hopscotch.Adrien leapt blindly, dropping into a hard shoulder roll onto a narrow ribbon of stone. It was already splintering into powder before he even stood up. Stranded in mid-air, with the void yawning below him, he broke into a desperate, dead sprint.
The crumbling edge of the stone was snapping at his heels. When the next platform finally materialised, a cold wave of despair washed over him instead of relief. It was a steep, agonisingly high leap, and the gap between them looked completely impossible.
Adrien gritted his teeth, pushing his leg muscles past their limits, and forced one final, explosive burst of speed before launching himself into the void.
Even with everything he had, he fell short. His outstretched fingers only grazed the rough edge of the stone.
"God dammit, you stupid, idiotic—oof!"
He opened his mouth to curse the developers, but the insult was choked out of him. A localized gravitational pull suddenly grabbed him like an invisible fist, violently yanking him upward. He slammed unceremoniously onto the stone, flat on his chest.
He groaned, staring into the abyss, but except now, the abyss was above him. 'Huh, localised gravity. I'm upside down.'
He didn't have time to process the vertigo, as the rock beneath him began to fracture, forcing him to his feet in a mad scramble. He sprinted again, but this time the next platform spawned at a bizarre, vertical tilt. He leaped toward it, bracing for impact, and watched his entire orientation twist mid-air as a new gravitational field took hold of him.
He stuck the landing, but a horrifying thought struck him, making him freeze for a split second. Wait a minute. The platforms have their own gravity fields, but what about the open void between them? Does this space have an actual up and down, or...He gulped, a bead of sweat tracing down his neck. 'What if it's like a dead zone in deep space? As long as you have a surface to push off from, you can move, but if you miss a jump entirely and end up floating out there without any momentum... you're stranded forever. Just floating in place until your character starves or you delete it.'
Adrien bit his lip, his eyes darting frantically to the next spawning ledge. I have to test this. I need to know the rules of this map, but testing a physics engine required a projectile, and right now, a digital beggar had more items in their inventory than Adrien had in his pockets.
Without breaking his stride, he dug into his pouch and flung them ahead of him. One coin caught on a jagged ridge in the stone, grinding to a halt. The other skipped across the rock and sailed straight over the edge.
Adrien launched himself toward the next platform, twisting his body in mid-air to look back. The old platform shattered into dust. The coin that had been resting on it instantly froze, suspended in the empty air without a hint of motion. The coin that had gone over the edge was still drifting out into the dark, maintaining its exact speed.
'It really is a zero-gravity void. If I miss a ledge, I'm done, but how massive is this map? Where is the end? How long do I have to keep—'
A sharp crack cut his thoughts short, as the rock beneath his boots vanished before he could even flex his knees to jump.
Adrien's heart stopped as panic flared in his chest as he braced to be stranded in the weightless vacuum forever, but instead of floating, a crushing force suddenly gripped his body and dragged him downward.
'Huh, gravity.'
He was free-falling, and beneath him, the infinite void was gone, replaced by a sprawling courtyard choked with towering, broken ruins, and he was plummeting toward it from a lethal height.Adrien braced for impact, timing his landing perfectly to drop into a desperate shoulder roll. It mitigated the worst of the momentum, but the physics engine was unforgiving, and pain spiked through his lower limbs as his knees buckled.
"Ugh, who the hell designed this place?" Adrien groaned, clutching his throbbing legs.
"An unwanted, lowly, uncouth trespasser," a voice echoed through the ruins, dripping with aristocratic disdain. "With the audacity to sneak in like a vagrant thief, and the nerve to complain after getting caught and broken. The sheer audacity."Adrien went rigid, the pain in his legs instantly forgotten.