The door clicked shut behind him.
The familiar weight of the keys rattled in his hand, cold against his fingers, before he dropped them onto the small tray by the entrance.
A sigh slipped out, half from routine, half from the ache of a long day.
'Work again. Meetings. Reports. Faces smiling just enough to hide the boredom...'
He loosened his tie as he walked through the narrow hallway. The faint hum of the refrigerator, the muted glow of the city bleeding through the blinds, the shoes he hadn't put away last night — all the little reminders that his life was… ordinary.
'Not miserable. Not wonderful. Just steady.'
Some people say that's all you can ask for. Stability. A job that pays. A roof that doesn't leak. A body that wakes up every morning.
He knew that. He repeated it often enough in his head. Yet there was always a restlessness in him, like an itch under the skin. Something that work never scratched. Something daily routines could never quiet.
His gaze slid to the desk in the corner. The monitor slept in darkness, the sleek gaming rig beneath it whispering softly.
Games.
Never an obsession, not like the streamers or the guys who spent paychecks on digital skins. But they were… a sanctuary.
'I work. I eat. I laugh with coworkers sometimes. And then I play. That's not pathetic... Right?'
He slipped out of his shirt, tossing it into the laundry basket, and padded into the kitchen.
Dinner was reheated leftovers, eaten without thought while scrolling through newsfeeds on his phone.
Headlines about the economy. Another political scandal. The usual noise.
But buried between them was the email.
The one with the dark logo.
"Invitation: Closed Beta Access – ECLIPSE ONLINE."
The name hit like a spark. He'd seen the trailers plastered across forums, the countdown threads buzzing with speculation. Everyone was waiting.
"The first full-dive cyberpunk MMO," they called it. No VR headsets, no gloves, just neural sync, straight into the machine.
He had signed up weeks ago, not expecting anything. 'Who ever actually got picked for these things?'
He ignored it and do his routine.
The rest of the night blurred. Shower. A quick glance at tomorrow's schedule — meetings he already dreaded. And then, finally, the desk.
The machine glowing awake as if sharing his excitement.
He sat down, fingers tracing the smooth surface of the console device that had arrived just two days earlier.
His reflection wavered on the blank screen of the monitor.
Brown eyes dulled by routine. Hair slightly unkempt.
The message blinked across his screen again.
[Connection Request: Accept Invitation?]
He had ignored it earlier. Half out of caution, half out of habit. There was work tomorrow.
He had planned to just look at the interface, maybe skim the menus, and then log off. But the thing had popped up again, hovering over the screen like it was waiting.
He leaned back in his chair, exhaling slowly.
'Persistent little bastard.'
A soft thrum pulsed from the console, like a heartbeat in sync with his own. The neural link glowed faintly, waiting for him to make a choice.
'It's just a game... I might as well do it.'
Still, he hesitated. A whisper of doubt threaded through his mind. No company had ever promised this level of immersion.
"Neural sync," they'd called it. It sounded more like science fiction than entertainment.
His finger hovered over the option. His lips pressed into a thin line.
'I should probably read the terms again. Maybe look up the forums, see what others are saying. Don't rush it. Don't—'
Click.
The word Accept glowed bright.
His chest tightened instantly.
'…Did I just—?'
The monitor shifted. The familiar glow of the desktop dissolved into cascading symbols, streams of light sliding like rivers across the screen.
The air around him seemed to hum, faint and electric. He blinked rapidly, but the symbols didn't fade. They spread, leaking past the frame of the monitor until the whole room flickered as though it had become part of the screen.
And then it started.
His hand. The fingers that had clicked the mouse. They shimmered, edges breaking apart into tiny fragments of light. Pixels.
"What the—"
His voice cracked, too sharp in the silence of the room. His pulse spiked, heart hammering against his ribs.
'Wait, wait, this isn't— This isn't supposed to happen, right!?'
He tried to pull the neural link off his head, but his arms felt strange, heavy and light at the same time.
He looked down and froze. His forearm was unraveling, skin peeling away into glowing dust. Like smoke caught in sunlight, except it was him.
'No. No, no, no. This is wrong. This isn't VR. This isn't how it works. My body—'
His breathing grew ragged, chest rising and falling in short bursts. He felt his heart punching against his ribs so hard it hurt.
'I can't breathe!'
But he could. Air still rushed in, shaky and fast, but his mind screamed louder than reason.
His legs disintegrated next, the sensation so alien it made his stomach twist. Not pain, not numbness... just an absence. A slow unraveling. A terrifying sense of losing pieces of himself.
'Stop. Stop it. Make it stop! Cancel. Abort. There has to be a button—'
He couldn't move fast enough. His hands were gone, nothing left but fragments dissolving into the glowing tide. His torso flickered, vision swimming with static.
Then suddenly—
Darkness fell.
...
Cold.
That was the first sensation that touched him. A sterile chill crawling up his skin. He blinked, or thought he blinked, and the blur of white light sharpened overhead.
Faces leaned over him. Covered in surgical masks, eyes sharp and dispassionate.
Their hands moved with precision, gloved fingers stained with the faint sheen of blood and metal dust. Tools clicked. Machines hummed.
"He's conscious."
"Vitals stabilizing."
"Hold him steady. The graft isn't finished."
Their voices were muffled, clipped, the words almost drowned by the high whine of the operating equipment.
What… the hell…?
He tried to move, but leather straps held him down. His chest rose shallowly, each breath strained. He glanced sideways and froze.
His left arm... or what should have been an arm was a mangled wreck of wires and bone fragments, metal twisted together with torn flesh.
A machine hissed as something surgical burrowed into his shoulder socket, sparks arcing in brief flashes.
A wave of nausea hit him, followed by a stabbing pulse behind his eyes. Then the memories came.
Not his. Yet… his.
Flashes of gunfire in neon-soaked streets. A chase through collapsing ruins. Blades of alloy tearing into flesh. His arm caught, crushed and destroyed.
'No. That wasn't me. That was—'
But the memories felt real, heavy, like they had always belonged. He gritted his teeth.
'Damn it… they are mine. This isn't just a game character. This is me now.'
The surgeons worked without pause, voices overlapping. "Install the skeletal graft." "Prepare the myomer weave." "Nanite stabilizers on standby."
His thoughts spun.
'Where am I?'
The word surfaced: Dominion of Purity.
It slipped into his mind like a whispered answer, dredged from the memories flooding his head.
A place where men and women hunted down the corrupted. A place that made weapons from flesh and steel.
Their specialty: harvesting the Fallen, turning their twisted bodies into armaments.
Fallen.
The word alone made his skin crawl. Images followed: creatures with human faces Monsters pretending to be men. Flesh-eaters and shapeshifters.
A hundred years ago, after the Nuclear Wars, they had appeared like a plague. Perfect imitators of humanity, save for the hunger gnawing inside them.
And the Dominion hunted them. Captured them. Cut them apart and forged their remains into "holy weapons."
He swallowed hard.
'Holy, huh? I can see what you really are. But why… why am I here?'
Another surge of memory.
Ash of Dawn.
The name surfaced, bitter and strange. He almost laughed aloud at how absurd it sounded.
'Ash of Dawn? That's the rebellion's name? What kind of idiot came up with that?'
But the weight of it pressed down.
The group that had placed him here, inside the Dominion of Purity, as a double agent.
A spy. Their spy.
'So I'm theirs. And theirs. Double agent... There's too much information! Why do I have to live in a body who have a complicated situation!'
The surgeons leaned closer. One of them held up a new limb — pale alloy, layered with cables that twitched like veins. Artificial muscle fibers rippled under the shell.
"This will take," one of them murmured. "His body's already been reinforced. It'll adapt."
The metal gleamed as they lowered it toward him.
His heart hammered.
'This isn't a game anymore. I'm not a player. An arm torn off, a new one bolted in, memories shoved into my head like they own me...'
He clenched his jaw.
'Damn it. I didn't ask for this!'
When he woke again, the light was softer.
No hum of surgical tools. No cold smell of antiseptic.
A ceiling stared back at him — pale gray, cracked faintly at the corners, a dull fixture casting weak light.
The walls were steel with a thin veneer of synthetic wood. He lay on a narrow bed. Sheets rough but clean.
He knew this place.
Or at least, the memories he had been given did.
'This… this is my room. My quarters.'
The thought came with certainty and dissonance, like a word spoken in two voices at once.
His own, and someone else's. Memories trickled in but never fully formed, like a puzzle with missing pieces.
Faces he should know but couldn't name. Places he should recognize but only half-remembered.
He pushed himself up slowly. His new arm moved first. The alloy glinted faintly as it flexed, fingers curling with unnatural precision.
He stared at it.
'It's mine now... Like it's always been. Damn, this is so wrong.'
His eyes shifted to the small desk across the room. A standard-issue console sat there, dark. Beside it, a coat hung — black, cut sharp, marked with the insignia of the Dominion Bureau of Purity.
He exhaled shakily.
'DBP. Dominion Bureau of Purity. That's where I work now. Or… where he worked.'
The name flickered in his mind. Asher.
No surname. Just Asher.
Why no last name? Why do I only remember calling myself Asher Reaves? Was that a cover I made up, or something I stole?
He rubbed at his forehead. The memories swirled, incomplete and jagged. They told him enough to stand, enough to act like he belonged, but not enough to feel whole.
Then it appeared.
A flicker in the air.
A thin panel of light, faint as frost on glass, unfolded in front of him.
He froze.
It was a game panel. Status data, icons, words. No one else in the room. Just him and the hovering display.
'No way. I can actually have a panel... I guess this is truly a game world.'
Lines of text scrolled softly:
[Name: Asher]
[Alias: Asher Reaves]
[Occupation: Senior Investigator – Dominion Bureau of Purity]
[Tier: 2]
Under it, a simple chart:
Rank 1 – Junior Investigator
Rank 2 – Senior Investigator (current)
Rank 3 – Third Class Investigator
Rank 4 – Second Class Investigator
Rank 5 – First Class Investigator
Rank 6 – Special Class Investigator
Rank 7 – Supreme Investigator
His gaze lingered on the list.
'Second-lowest...'
His chest tightened as he thought of it.
'If anyone else saw this panel, I'd be dead. Or worse. People here don't have this. Only me. If they find out, I'm finished.'
He flicked the panel closed with a thought, and it vanished like mist.
He sat on the edge of the bed, head in his hands, new arm cold against his temple.