A thousand years into the future, the world as it was once known had crumbled. The old governments collapsed into dust and memory, their borders erased by time and catastrophe.
Even the continents themselves were renamed, their ancient identities lost to new maps drawn in the ashes of the old world.
From the chaos, powerful clans emerged, carving out territories and influence through strength and strategy.
In a bid to forge a semblance of peace from the constant strife, the nine most powerful families came together to form the Council, a governing body that would create and enforce the laws that now ruled the fractured globe.
The Velthane family had held a prestigious seat on this Council for over three centuries, their name synonymous with power and legacy.
Their last true leader was Vincent Velthane, a man whose disappearance twenty-five years ago created a vacuum of power.
For the two years Vincent was gone, his cousin, Morgan, seized control of the clan.
But Vincent returned, not alone, but with his wife, each of them holding a child—a boy and a girl named Aelion and Celastine.
Their return should have been a celebration, but it only served to poison Morgan's heart further.
'Two years I held the reins,' he seethed in silence, 'and he waltzes back in as if he never left.'
The taste of leadership had awakened an insatiable greed within him. He no longer wished to languish in the shadow of another; he wanted to rule, to see his own ambition made manifest.
His heart curdled with black envy, but he was forced to hide it, for Vincent had returned changed.
The man who came back was a strategist of overwhelming talent, crushing the family's enemies with ruthless efficiency and rapidly expanding the Velthane influence.
This meteoric rise threatened another great family, the Andrews, who sat just one rank above the Velthanes on the Council.
Fearful of being overtaken, they found a willing partner in the resentful Morgan. For twelve years, this secret alliance festered beneath a surface of familial normalcy.
Then, one rain-swept day, the first true blow fell. Aelion and Celastine were walking home from school.
Celastine, ever the spirited sister, playfully hit her brother on the back and darted away, laughing as she challenged him to catch her.
Aelion, his young heart light, gave chase without a second thought. The rain poured down, a curtain of grey that muffled the world.
Then, an ominous shape emerged—a truck, its approach silent until it was nearly upon them.
Aelion's instincts flared. He lunged, shoving Celastine with all his strength, sending her tumbling to safety as the world exploded in a crash of metal and glass.
He awoke in a hospital. Though his life was spared, his body was permanently broken.
He could barely stand for more than a few minutes at a time, his physical potential stripped from him.
As if that tragedy were not enough, three years later, the final pillar of his world crumbled. Vincent and his wife perished in a plane accident, a tragedy that Morgan had been waiting for.
He struck without mercy, seizing control of the family and embezzling its vast funds to his allies, the Andrews.
Aelion and Celastine were callously expelled from the only home they had ever known.
They found refuge on a private island their father had owned, a lonely fortress in a world that had cast them out.
There, they devoted themselves to a single purpose: compiling the evidence of their uncle's crimes.
For five long years, they pieced together the intricate web of treachery and embezzlement.
When their dossier was complete, they submitted it to the Council, an act that formally severed their last ties to the Velthane name.
They started a small business, attempting to build a quiet, independent life away from the cutthroat politics of the clans.
But peace was not to be theirs.
The young master of the Andrews family took a profound liking to Celastine.
Though she rejected his proposal with unwavering firmness, his family pursued the matter relentlessly, seeing it as a way to further humiliate and control the remnants of the Velthane legacy.
This relentless pursuit was the final straw for Aelion. His rage, simmering for years, finally boiled over, and he formally declared a clan war.
In this era, to prevent the catastrophic loss of life that such conflicts once caused, a strict edict was enforced: no physical conflict was permitted.
Instead, whenever a new Virtual Reality game was released, the warring families would channel their hostilities into a digital arena, competing for supremacy through in-game achievements and dominance.
As if the universe itself were mocking their struggle, the next game to be released was 'Myth of Dungeons,' hailed as the most popular and unforgivingly difficult game ever created.
For the past five years, Aelion and the Andrews family had been locked in a brutal, silent war within its code, their real-world conflict playing out in a realm of fantasy and data.
And today, it would all end.
"..lion"
The voice was a distant echo, pulling him from the depths of memory and strategy.
"Aelion.."
It grew clearer, more insistent, cutting through the digital haze that surrounded his consciousness.
"Aelion Velthane."
He snapped out of his daze, the ghost of his past receding as the final, decisive battle in the virtual world lay directly before him.
A soft nudge at his side broke the tense silence of the grand hall. Celastine leaned in, her voice a hushed whisper meant for his ears alone. "Go, the Council Elders have arrived. Show them the progress."
Her words were steady, but he could feel the faint tremor in her hand where it brushed his arm, a mirror of the hope and anxiety that had been their constant companions for five long years.
With a slow, measured breath, Aelion pushed himself upright, his weight settling heavily onto the polished wooden stick that was as much a part of him as his own scarred leg.
Each step toward the central podium was a small, private battle, a feat of endurance that drew the eyes of the assembled crowd.
He moved with a painstaking slowness that stood in stark contrast to the high-speed, digital war he had just emerged from.
As he reached the podium, a figure emerged from the opposite side—Richard Andrew, the so-called "Little Prince" of the Andrew family.
Richard moved with an indolent, swaggering confidence, his expensive clothes tailored to perfection, a smirk playing on his lips as his gaze flickered past Aelion to linger on Celastine with a possessiveness that made Aelion's knuckles whiten on his stick.
'That insect,' Aelion thought, his internal monologue a cold, sharp blade. 'He still dares to look at her like she is a prize he has already won.'
Aelion's protective instincts, a fire that had burned fiercely since the day he pushed her from the path of that truck, flared white-hot.
His eyes, when they met Richard's, were chips of glacial ice, promising a reckoning that five years in a virtual world had only delayed, not diminished.
Just as the tension between the two young men threatened to boil over into the physical realm, a door at the far end of the hall swung open with a weighty, resonant sound.
Nine old men filed in, their movements slow and deliberate, each face a mask of ancient power and inscrutable judgment.
They were the Council Elders, one from each of the nine great families, the ultimate arbiters of their world.
Their presence immediately silenced the hall, imposing a formal and unbreachable gravity upon the proceedings.
Without a word, Aelion reached into the inner pocket of his worn coat and produced a small, sleek remote.
His thumb, calloused from years of gripping a game controller rather than a weapon, found the single, illuminated button. He pressed it.
A complex hologram materialized in the air before him, casting a soft, blue-tinged light across his pale, determined face.
It displayed his current status in the game "Myth of Dungeons," the data stark and undeniable:
[Player Name: Aelion Velthane
Player ID: Aetherius
Level: 100
99th Floor]
A wave of palpable shock rippled through the Council members themselves, their stoic masks cracking for the first time.
Some leaned forward, their eyes widening in disbelief, while others exchanged hurried, concerned glances.
The game "Myth of Dungeons" was widely acclaimed to be unbeatable, a digital leviathan designed to break the will of the most powerful clans.
It contained one hundred floors, and each floor was a watershed, a chasm of difficulty that separated the competent from the legendary.
Its challenge did not lie solely in the strength of its monstrous inhabitants, but in the ever-increasing, soul-crushing pressure of the ambient mana.
The higher one ascended, the denser the magical atmosphere became, exerting a tangible, psychic weight that could shatter a player's concentration and physically force them to log out.
To reach the 99th Floor was not merely a display of skill; it was a testament to an almost inhuman resilience and willpower, a feat that no one, not even the combined might of the Andrews family, had come close to achieving..