The microwave hummed, a dull drone in the cramped silence of the apartment. 00:01:23. Leo Chen stabbed the plastic film of his instant ramen cup, ignoring the translucent blue prompt stubbornly floating in the lower left of his vision: ⌈ SYSTEM INTEGRATION: EARTH PRIME IN 00:01:22 ⌋. "Trashy VR ad," he muttered, peeling back the lid. Steam fogged his glasses. Ads always hijacked his cheap, second-hand neural implant.
Behind him, a wet, rattling cough cut through the quiet. Mia. Her wheelchair sat by the grimy window, her small frame dwarfed by it. The health monitor strapped to her thin wrist flashed a relentless, sickly yellow: ORGAN FAILURE: 72%. The smell of antiseptic and stale instant noodles clung to everything. 00:00:05.
"Leo?" Mia's voice was a fragile whisper, barely audible over the microwave's whine. "The sky… it's… wrong."
He turned, ramen forgotten.
The window cracked. Not like glass breaking, but fracturing into shimmering, glowing hexagons. Across the street, the brick facade of Mrs. Henderson's bakery dissolved. Not collapsed – dissolved. Streams of emerald-green code flowed upwards like digital smoke, unraveling the building pixel by pixel. A delivery drone froze mid-air, humming one second, then scattering into a million shimmering pixels the next, dissolving like ash in a digital wind.
⌈ WARNING: CELESTIAL SYSTEM ASSIMILATION OF TIER-3 WORLD (EARTH PRIME) COMMENCING. STABILIZING REALITY MATRIX... ⌋
Panic erupted like a physical wave from the streets below. A woman clutching grocery bags pixelated mid-scream, her terror frozen in a mosaic of light before vanishing. A blue sedan slammed into the dissolving bakery wall, its front end liquefying into streams of liquid light that flowed upwards into the fractured sky. The sound was wrong – not the crunch of metal, but the screech of tearing data.
"Mia, hold my–" Leo lunged for her wheelchair.
His fingers passed through her arm like smoke. Cold. Empty.
Her eyes met his – wide, terrified, confused – the eyes of his little sister who'd fought sickness her whole life. Then, like a sandcastle hit by a wave, her body fragmented. Not into blood or bone, but into countless points of pure, cold starlight. The light flared brightly for an impossible instant, illuminating the dust motes dancing in the air, before winking out.
No.
The sound of the city, the microwave, Mia's rasping breath – everything vanished. An eerie, absolute silence descended, broken only by the frantic hammering of Leo's own heart against his ribs. The smell of antiseptic was gone, replaced by ozone and something metallic, like hot circuitry.
Cold blue text seared itself across his vision, impossible to ignore:
⌈ ASSIMILATION COMPLETE. EARTH PRIME DESIGNATED: FLOOR 1, TOWER OF ETERNITY. SURVIVING POPULATION: 3.7 BILLION. SYSTEM INTERFACE ACTIVATED FOR ALL VIABLE ENTITIES. WELCOME TO THE ASCENSION. ⌋
Leo stood frozen in the ruins of his apartment. The counter where the microwave sat was half-gone, revealing twisted pipes and sparking wires beneath. His ramen cup steamed peacefully on the remaining sliver of countertop. Mia's empty wheelchair, somehow untouched, gleamed dully under the unnatural, blood-red light of a swollen moon now dominating the torn sky. The familiar skyline was replaced by jagged silhouettes of partially dissolved skyscrapers and swirling vortexes of corrupted light.
Grief, cold and sharp as broken glass, lanced through him, followed immediately by a surge of pure, unadulterated rage. Mia. Gone. Erased. Like faulty code.
A chime sounded in his mind, softer than the system announcements. A translucent panel flickered into existence before him, overlaying the ruined apartment:
NAME: Leo Chen
LEVEL: 1 (0/100 XP)
HP: 30/30
SANITY: 100%
STATS:
STR: 4 (Below Avg) [Carry Capacity: 40kg]
AGI: 5 (Average) [Movement Speed: 5m/s]
INT: 8 (Above Avg) [Mental Processing +20%]
VIT: 3 (Poor) [Stamina Regen -15%, HP +30]
SKILLS:
⌈ OBSERVE (COMMON LVL 1) ⌋: Allows rudimentary assessment of entities and objects. Range: 10m.
TITLE: None
CURRENCY: 0 Celestial Credits (CC)
INVENTORY:5/10 Slots
Empty
Empty
Empty
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Empty
Leo stared numbly. Stats. Levels. Skills. It was insane. Like the worst kind of immersive game, forced onto reality. A game that had just deleted his sister. His fists clenched, knuckles white.
As he focused on the stats panel, trying to process the impossible, a flicker of distortion washed over it. Glitches. Jagged lines of static cut through the clean blue interface. The text for his SANITY stat wavered, momentarily replaced by garbled symbols before snapping back. Then, a new prompt, jagged and unstable, pulsed with an angry crimson light, overlaying everything else:
⌈ ABNORMAL ENTITY DETECTED: LEO CHEN (ID: ERR_404_NOT_FOUND). PRIMARY COUNTERMEASURES… FAILED. SECONDARY… FAILED. ADMINISTRATOR PROTOCOL FORCED… SKILL GENERATION REQUIRED… GENERATING… ⌋
Leo stumbled back, a fresh wave of disorientation hitting him. *Abnormal entity? Administrator Protocol?* The crimson text pulsed, throbbing in time with a sudden, sharp pain behind his eyes.
⌈ SKILL GENERATED: [REALITY EDITOR] (ADMINISTRATOR TIER - CORRUPTED). ⌋**
DESCRIPTION: Manipulate the underlying code fragments of localized reality. WARNING: UNSTABLE. COST: VARIABLE (SANITY/LIFESPAN).
[REALITY EDITOR] (LVL 1): Alter minor variables within a 1-meter radius. Complexity: LOW.
Hope, dangerous and wild, warred with the grief and rage. A cheat? An Admin skill? In this hellish game? His eyes darted around the ruined apartment, landing on the small, half-shattered plastic bottle on the floor near Mia's wheelchair – her painkillers. Only three white pills remained amidst the broken plastic.
Could he? Should he?
He focused on the pills. Nothing happened. Then, remembering the glitchy prompt, he didn't just look. He reached. Not with his hand, but with a sudden, instinctive push from his mind, towards the shimmering, almost invisible strands of code he suddenly saw overlaying the physical pills. It felt like stretching a mental muscle he never knew he had.
⌈ TARGET ACQUIRED: OXYCODONE TABLETS (QTY: 3). EDIT VARIABLE: QUANTITY. CURRENT: 3. DESIRED? ⌋
Leo's breath hitched. *More. I need more. He visualized the number changing. Double it.
⌈ DESIRED: 6. CONFIRM EDIT? Y/N ⌋
Yes!
A silent snap echoed in his skull. The three pills shimmered. For a split second, they doubled, becoming six distinct pills before the image settled. The broken bottle now held six identical white tablets.
⌈ EDIT SUCCESSFUL. COST: SANITY -1% ⌋
A spike of pain lanced through Leo's temples, sharp and sudden, followed by a wave of dizziness. He gasped, clutching his head. His vision swam, and a faint, discordant ringing filled his ears. The SANITY meter on his interface flickered: **99%**. The cost was real. But so were the pills. He scooped them up, the plastic cool against his palm. Proof. Power. A terrifying, glitched power.
A guttural snarl ripped through the silence outside, shattering his moment of stunned triumph. Followed by a scream – raw, human, and abruptly cut off.
Leo scrambled to the jagged edge where the apartment wall had been torn away. Below, the street was a nightmare tableau. Rubble choked the road. Fires burned with unnatural green and purple flames. People ran, stumbled, fought. And among them, scuttling horrors.
Rat-like creatures, but the size of large dogs, with oily black fur that seemed to absorb the bloody moonlight and jagged bone spurs protruding from their backs. Their eyes glowed a sickly yellow.
⌈ VOID SCAVENGER - LVL 2 ⌋
HP: 50/50
DESCRIPTION: Opportunistic feeders drawn to residual energy of assimilation. Low threat individually.*
He saw a man, burly and wild-eyed, swing a length of broken pipe at one. ⌈ OBSERVE: HUMAN (LVL 3) - NAME: UNKNOWN. HP: 45/50 ⌋. The pipe connected with a sickening crunch. The Scavenger yelped, its health bar dropping to 30/50. The man roared, swinging again. ⌈ VOID SCAVENGER DEFEATED! +10 XP AWARDED! ⌋ The notification flashed above the man's head as the creature dissolved into dark mist, leaving behind a small, greyish stone.
Survival. Levels. XP. Loot. The rules of this hellscape were brutally clear.
Leo ducked back, heart pounding. STR 4, VIT 3. He wouldn't last five seconds against even one of those things. He needed to move. He needed… Bastion.
A new prompt materialized:
⌈ NEW QUEST: REACH SAFE ZONE 'BASTION'! ⌋
OBJECTIVE: Navigate the ruins of Sector 7-G and reach the designated Safe Zone marked on your minimap. Distance: 2.3 km.
REWARD: 100 XP, Common Loot Box (x1)
FAILURE: Exposure to the Cleansing Wave.
A small, pulsing blue dot appeared on a minimap overlay in the corner of his vision. Bastion. Safety? His eyes were drawn to the timer beneath the quest:
⌈ NIGHTFALL IN: 01:47:22 ⌋
⌈ CLEANSING WAVE IMMINENT AT NIGHTFALL ⌋
Cleansing Wave. The name alone sent a chill down his spine. Failure meant death. He had less than two hours.
He grabbed a dented metal thermos from the floor – empty, but solid – and stuffed it into his hoodie pocket. Inventory Slot 1 filled. He hesitated, then grabbed Mia's faded blue scarf from the back of her wheelchair. It smelled faintly of her, of antiseptic and the lavender soap she liked. Slot 2. He couldn't leave it.
Moving to the shattered doorway, now just a gaping hole leading to a crumbling stairwell, Leo peered down. The sounds of struggle and screeching Scavengers echoed up. He focused on a lone Scavenger sniffing at a pile of debris below. ⌈ OBSERVE: VOID SCAVENGER - LVL 2. HP: 50/50. AGI: 7. THREAT: LOW ⌋. He could maybe sneak past it…
A whimper cut through his planning. Across the street, half-buried under fallen masonry, a young girl, maybe ten years old, was pinned. Her leg was twisted at an unnatural angle, blood soaking her torn jeans. A Void Scavenger, larger than the others (LVL 3), was stalking towards her, drool dripping from its jagged maw. Its health bar pulsed: 70/70.
"Help! Please!" the girl sobbed, her voice thin with terror.
Leo froze. Hide. Run. That was the smart play. STR 4. VIT 3. Against a Level 3? Suicide. But her eyes… wide with the same terror Mia's had held.
No. He couldn't just… watch. Not again.
[Reality Editor]. The thought was reckless, desperate. He focused on the girl, pushing past the disorientation, reaching for the shimmering code surrounding her. It was messier, more complex than the pills. He saw strands representing her form, her bio-signs… her HP: 12/30.
He could see the variable. Current HP: 12. He visualized it changing. Increase. Heal her. Make it 20.
⌈ TARGET ACQUIRED: HUMAN (LVL 1 - INJURED). EDIT VARIABLE: HEALTH POINTS. CURRENT: 12. DESIRED: 20. CONFIRM EDIT? Y/N ⌋
The cost warning pulsed red. Unknown. High.
Yes.
He pushed. Hard.
A silent, psychic *wrench* tore through him. It felt like his brain was being squeezed in a vice. White-hot pain exploded behind his eyes. Simultaneously, a crushing weight slammed into his chest, stealing his breath. He gasped, doubling over.
⌈ EDIT SUCCESSFUL. COST: HEALTH -10, SANITY -3% ⌋
His own HP bar plummeted to 20/30. His SANITY dropped to 96%. The world tilted violently. He tasted copper, bile rising in his throat. He vomited onto the cracked floor, his body shaking uncontrollably.
But across the street… the girl gasped. The unnatural pallor lessened. The bleeding from her leg visibly slowed. Her HP bar flickered: 20/30. The advancing Scavenger paused, confused by the sudden change.
Leo didn't wait. Gasping, wiping his mouth, he turned and scrambled down the crumbling stairwell away from the girl, away from the Scavenger, fueled by agony and shame. He'd helped, maybe. But the cost… it was too high. He couldn't save everyone. He had to get to Bastion. He had to survive. For Mia. Because if he had this power… maybe, just maybe, she wasn't truly gone. Maybe the System could be forced.
The next hour was a blur of terror and exhaustion. He moved like a ghost through the ruins, using Observe constantly, ducking behind scorched cars and collapsed storefronts. He saw horrors: packs of Scavengers tearing into the dead and dying, desperate survivors fighting over scraps of food, a man glowing with unnatural energy (LVL 5) incinerating Scavengers with bolts of fire from his hands. Leo avoided it all, sticking to shadows, his VIT 3 stamina draining rapidly, forcing him to rest often. He found a half-crushed vending machine and used [Reality Editor] to duplicate a bottle of water (COST: SANITY -1%), the effort making his head throb but quenching his desperate thirst. His minimap showed the blue dot of Bastion agonizingly slowly getting closer. 1.8km.
As dusk began to bleed the bloody light into deeper, more ominous purples, Leo crouched behind the scorched, overturned hull of a delivery van. His breath came in ragged gasps. HP: 20/30. Sanity: 95%. Stamina felt dangerously low. Ahead, the highway he needed to cross was a killing field.
A pack of creatures unlike the Scavengers blocked the way. Larger, leaner, with sleek, rust-red fur that seemed to smolder. Their eyes burned like hot coals, and smoke curled from their panting maws.
⌈ FLAME JACKAL - LVL 5 ⌋
HP: 120/120
SKILLS: Inferno Bite (Ignores 50% armor, applies Burn)
THREAT: HIGH
Three of them. Level 5. HP 120 each. Inferno Bite. They were tearing apart the remnants of a group of survivors who had tried to fight. Charred bodies littered the asphalt. The Jackals ripped into them with terrifying efficiency. Leo watched one survivor, a woman with a makeshift spear (LVL 4), get surrounded. A Jackal lunged, its jaws engulfed in sudden flame. The spear shattered. The woman screamed as fire bloomed across her chest. Her HP bar vanished.
Too strong. Panic clawed at Leo's throat. He couldn't fight them. He couldn't sneak past on the open highway. Bastion was right there, just beyond the overpass they guarded. The timer on his interface was a relentless countdown:
⌈ NIGHTFALL IN: 00:03:15 ⌋
⌈ CLEANSING WAVE IMMINENT ⌋
He needed an edge. Anything. His eyes fixed on the lead Jackal, the largest, currently worrying at a corpse. [Reality Editor]. The glitched skill flared in his mind, a beacon of terrifying potential and cost. He pushed past the lingering headache, focusing on the Jackal. The shimmering code surrounding it was more complex, denser than anything he'd tried before. He couldn't touch its HP – too big, too vital. But maybe… something simpler. He scanned the variables. STR: 12. END: 10. AGI: 9.
Agility. Speed. Reflexes. If he could slow it down, even for a moment, cause confusion…
He targeted the AGI variable. CURRENT: 9. He visualized it dropping. Plummeting. Make it slow. Make it clumsy.
⌈ TARGET ACQUIRED: FLAME JACKAL (ALPHA) - LVL 5. EDIT VARIABLE: AGILITY. CURRENT: 9. DESIRED: 4. CONFIRM EDIT? Y/N ⌋
The cost warning screamed in his mind, red and jagged. High. Very High.
No choice. Yes.
He poured his will into the edit, a mental shove against the fabric of the Jackal's being.
⌈ EDIT SUCCESSFUL. COST: SANITY -8% ⌋
Agony, ten times worse than before, exploded in Leo's skull. It felt like ice picks driven into his temples and twisted. He cried out, slamming his fists against his own head, vision blurring, the world dissolving into static and screaming colors. His SANITY bar plummeted: 87%. Nausea overwhelmed him, but he fought it down, blinking tears from his eyes.
Across the highway, the Alpha Jackal stumbled mid-pounce. Not just stumbled – it tripped over its own feet, legs tangling, crashing heavily onto the asphalt with a yelp of surprise and pain. Its pack mates froze, turning towards their suddenly clumsy leader, heads cocked in confusion. A low growl rumbled from one.
Leo managed a grim, pain-filled grin through the disorientation. It worked. It actually…
The thought died.
A shadow, vast and impossibly deep, blotted out the swollen, bloody moon above.
Leo looked up, the grin freezing on his face.
Something massive hit the highway fifty meters behind him. Not landed. Impacted.
The sound was apocalyptic. Concrete shattered like glass, erupting upwards in a plume of dust and debris. The overturned van Leo hid behind groaned and shifted violently. Shockwaves rippled through the ground, throwing Leo off his knees onto his back.
The surviving Flame Jackals didn't hesitate. They whimpered, high-pitched sounds of pure terror, and fled, scattering into the ruins, abandoning their meal and their fallen alpha.
Leo scrambled back to the van, peering over its mangled edge, his heart hammering against his bruised ribs.
Through the settling dust, it rose.
Twelve points of cold, violet light – eyes – stared down from a nightmarish body. Chitinous plates, blacker than the void between stars, covered a segmented, insectoid torso the size of a delivery truck. Six multi-jointed legs, ending in scythe-like claws that dripped sizzling, green-black acid onto the melting asphalt, supported its bulk. A pair of vestigial, shredded wings hung limply from its back. Its maw split open vertically, revealing rows of rotating, fractal teeth that seemed to shift through geometric dimensions.
Its health bar burned into Leo's vision, crimson and immense, dominating the top of his interface:
⌈ VOID LURKER - MINI-BOSS - LVL 25 ⌋
HP: 5,000/5,000
DESCRIPTION: Vanguard organism of the Cleansing Wave. Deployed to eradicate concentrated anomalies.
A new, urgent quest update flashed, pulsing like a panicked heartbeat:
⌈ WARNING: NIGHTFALL IN 00:02:45! CLEANSING WAVE IMMINENT! VOID LURKER DETECTED! EVADE OR PERISH! ⌋
The timer ticked down: 00:02:44… 43… 42…
The Void Lurker took a single, ground-shaking step forward, its fractal maw opening wider, emitting a subsonic drone that vibrated Leo's bones. Its twelve violet eyes locked onto the small, trembling human crouched behind the ruined van.
Leo's breath caught. Level 1. HP 20. Sanity 87%. Against a Level 25 Mini-Boss with 5000 HP. The sheer, hopeless scale of it threatened to crush him.
But deep within the agony and terror, [Reality Editor] flickered. A raw, unstable power thrummed in his mind, tasting the impossibly complex, terrifyingly powerful code radiating from the Lurker like a digital supernova.
The fractal teeth gleamed. The acid dripped. The countdown to annihilation continued.
Leo Chen, the glitch in the System, the Level 1 Admin, bared his teeth in a snarl that mirrored the monster's own.
Okay, you oversized bug, he thought, the chaotic energy of [Reality Editor] coalescing into a desperate, razor-sharp focus. Let's see what part of you… breaks first.