You ever piss off a thousand gods at once?
I'm about to find out what that feels like.
I'm hanging here like a broken puppet in what looks like the world's most nightmarish courthouse. These chains around my arms are literally glowing—not like some tacky glow-in-the-dark toy, but with this weird, pulsing light that makes my skin look sickly. I can't feel the ground because, well, there isn't one. Just me suspended in nothing.
The really messed up part? My legs are gone. Not cut off or anything dramatic like that. They're just... dissolving. Turning into these green lines of code that keep glitching in and out like when your computer crashes and everything goes pixelated. One second I can see the outline of my knee, the next it's just scattered data fragments floating away into the void.
This whole place feels wrong, like someone took a courtroom and threw it into a blender with a nightmare and a computer virus.
The irony isn't lost on me. I used to fix corrupted files for a living.
The tribunal stretches endlessly in every direction. Living constellations sit on thrones carved from compressed starlight, and every single one of them is staring at me like I just deleted their life's work. Which, to be fair, I kind of did.
At the center of this cosmic shitstorm sits the head judge.
Libra, Constellation of Balance.
She's perfect in the most terrifying way possible. Even her hair falls in exact symmetry on both sides! I'd be impressed if I wasn't so terrified. Imagine divine justice turned into art. Golden robes that hurt to look at, and shimmered with beauty. Scales glowing brighter than nebula, and a voice that crushes you with pressure yet somehow stays graceful.
"Brand of the Broken World."
Even her saying my name makes reality hiccup. I swear I see a few stars glitch.
"Do you acknowledge your crimes? The Balanced World..." Her scales tilt, weighing my sins. "You corrupted it. Perverted it. Turned the divine order into a mockery!"
I can't help it. I grin.
Ops… that gets a reaction. A few constellations lean forward. Libra's burning eyes narrow to slits.
"Something amuses you, mortal?"
"Corrupted?" I let out a laugh that echoes through the void, jagged and a little too loud. "Lady, you've got it all wrong."
I shift against the chains, letting them rattle for effect. Drama was always my weak spot.
"I didn't corrupt anything. I improved it."
The temperature drops. Like, actually drops. I can see my breath now.
"You made chickens stronger than ancient dragons!"
"Yeah, and?" I tilt my head. "They're literally living dinosaurs. I just gave them their dignity back."
"You flooded your dwelling with enough gold to destabilize three kingdoms!"
I snort. "Destabilize? Please. That was wealth redistribution. An economic stimulus package."
"You gave yourself more health points than the World Tree itself!"
"Correction." My smile widens. "I just leveled the playing field."
The silence that follows is so complete I wonder if sound itself just gave up.
Then Libra explodes.
"BLASPHEMY!" Her voice cracks the fabric of space. A few nearby galaxies flicker. "You dare mock the sacred code that governs all existence?!"
I tilt my head, considering. "Mock? No, no, no. You're still not getting it."
I look directly at her, and for the first time since this whole thing started, my grin turns genuine.
"I revolutionized it."
That's when I notice you watching. Yeah, you. Sitting there, reading this, probably wondering where the hell this is going.
Let me tell you something.
"Dear readers," I say, and my voice drops to something almost conversational. The glitching mess where my legs should be pulses with soft green light. "You need to understand something about this world they're so upset about."
I pause, letting the cosmic courtroom fade into background noise.
"When I first arrived, it was perfect. Terrifyingly, impossibly balanced. Every creature exactly as strong as the system intended."
My chains spark as I spread my arms.
"A masterpiece of cosmic engineering. NPCs running their neat little dialogue trees… mostly. Quests tuned with precision, risk and reward balanced like weights on a scale. And the dragons… God, the dragons. Stat distributions so mathematically elegant they could've been carved in stone."
I pause, watching the cosmic courtroom blur at the edges.
"But here's the thing about perfect systems." My voice drops. "They always come with perfect vulnerabilities. Hidden in plain sight, waiting for someone stubborn enough to pry at the cracks."
"And me?" My grin flickers. "I've always had a talent for finding those cracks in the foundation."
"It was dying of predictability. So I fixed it. I gave it color. Chaos. Life. I turned a stale sandbox into something worth playing."
The chains tighten, trying to shut me up. Fat chance.
"And you know what? It was beautiful. Chickens pecking dragons to death. Peasants swimming in gold coins like they're in a cartoon. A world where anything could happen because someone finally threw out the boring rule book."
I lean forward as much as the restraints allow.
"But they want their precious order back. Their safe, predictable, dead little world."
Libra's scales start glowing white-hot. "Your arrogance knows no—"
"Let me tell you how it all started," I interrupt, because honestly? This is my show now.
The void trembles. Code flickers across the edges of my vision, cascading strings of commands I shouldn't even be able to see. The tribunal doesn't realize it yet, but while I've been talking, I've been rewriting. Slipping past their locks. Claiming access line by line, word by word.
Then the universe hiccups.
[Administrator Privileges: Overridden]
[Temporary Administrator Transfer: Brand]
[Dimension Lock At Location #005 – Tribunal Hall]
[Dimension Lock Exception — Brand]
Libra freezes mid-rage, mouth open, scales locked in place like a paused video. The constellations become still images. Even the swirling galaxies in the background hang motionless like cosmic wallpaper.
Time just… stops.
Except for me.
[COMMAND: RESTORE_BODY]
Processing... 30%
Processing... 60%
Processing... 100%
[RESTORATION COMPLETE]
The chains shatter into pixels and fade away. My mangled lower body rebuilds itself. Lines of green code began to weave together into flesh and bone, ending with my favorite pair of beat-up sneakers materializing like the world's weirdest 3D printer just finished its job.
I drop to the crystalline floor and take a few experimental steps. Each footsteps echoes like I'm walking through the source code of reality itself.
Which, let's be honest, I probably am.
I look around at this frozen tableau of divine fury and can't help but chuckle.
"Sorry, folks, but we're doing this my way."
Name's Brand, by the way. Twenty-eight years old, professional coder, amateur reality-hacker, and the guy who figured out how to debug the universe.
And right now? I'm going to tell you exactly how I turned the most boring world in existence into something worth fighting gods over.
[COMMAND: REPLAY_SEQUENCE]
Initializing Backstory...