The year was 2030 when the world, for the first time in history, simply… slowed down.
War headlines began to fade, one after another, as if someone had started putting out fires in every corner of the planet at the same time. Negotiations that once dragged on for decades were suddenly resolved in months. Old conflicts, fed by generations of hatred, found peace treaties that no one teria acreditado serem possíveis poucos anos antes. Political disputes, which had turned social networks into battlefields, gave way to colder, more pragmatic debates that felt almost unnervingly mature.
No one could agree on a single reason. Some blamed pressure from newer generations. Others pointed to advances in diplomacy assisted by artificial intelligences. There were those who simply said humanity had grown tired of bleeding. Whatever the cause, the result was undeniable: the world slipped into a period of peace so broad it felt wrong. Too quiet. Too stable. Too suspicious.
By 2031, economies around the globe started aligning like pieces of a puzzle finally pressed into place. Global redistribution programs, optimized supply chains, and clean energy production on absurd scales reshaped everyday life. In many countries, the word "hunger" stopped showing up in daily conversation. Even those who had always lived on the margins gained access to reliable food, basic healthcare, and true quality education. It wasn't paradise — there was still inequality, injustice, old wounds — but compared to any previous decade, it was hard to deny: things were better.
At the same time, technology advanced at a pace that would have looked like science fiction to anyone from 2020. Full-immersion augmented reality, non-invasive neural interfaces, networks with almost zero latency. The line between physical and virtual blurred until it was no longer clear where one ended and the other began.
It was in that setting that something appeared and changed everything again.
In 2032, under an unprecedented partnership between practically all of the major game studios on the planet, a title was released: Last Chance — an MMORPG in full augmented reality, boasting 100% immersion. It wasn't just a game; it was an entire world laid over the real one. Hundreds of classes, each with ability trees so deep they felt like complete magic systems on their own. No forced main quests, no rails. Total freedom to evolve, explore, build, shape the world, form guilds, declare wars, dominate territories, or simply wander.
The hardware was discreet — lenses, neural bands, optional implants — but the impact was absolute. Once connected, players could see, hear, feel, and move in that world as if they were truly there. Sensations were calibrated not to break the human body or mind, but even so, the first login left a mark no one forgot.
Within the year of its launch, half of the world's population had logged into Last Chance at least once. In some countries, the numbers were so absurd that streets, bars, schools, and offices were filled with people whose eyes occasionally looked slightly out of focus — half here, half elsewhere.
At first, it was "just" the greatest entertainment phenomenon ever created.
With time, it stopped being only that.
Guilds became corporations. Virtual markets began nudging real economies. Territorial conflicts in Last Chance turned into symbols of status, political weight, and global influence. Quietly, this parallel world started to weigh as much as the real one.
By 2040, no one called Last Chance "just a game" anymore.
The ground trembled under the roar of a crowd in a colossal arena.
Tier upon tier of stands rose in an impossible structure, like a titanic coliseum that could never have been built in the physical world. Floating platforms of living stone hung in the air, each one crowded with spectators waving banners of their guilds. Holographic trees, rivers, and constellations drifted in the sky above, blending with particle effects and hovering projections of live stats and betting odds. Voices in dozens of languages crashed together — chants, screams, insults, praise — forming a single, thunderous noise.
At the center of everything lay a circular field of dark, cracked earth, scarred by battles that had reshaped it countless times.
There, in the middle of that vast arena, two figures faced each other in silence.
On one side stood a tall man, broad-shouldered, muscles clearly outlined beneath his clothes. His blond hair fell in slightly messy strands to the nape of his neck, and his blue eyes shone with the calm confidence of someone who belonged in that arena. He wore an elegant green outfit, its fabric embroidered with subtle patterns of trees, roots, and leaves, as if a forest had been woven into his clothing. Threads of pale green and gold ran through the design, catching the light in a gentle glow that made the whole ensemble seem noble, almost sacred.
He looked like an avatar of life at its peak.
Opposite him stood a contrast.
A young man who hardly seemed older than twenty-one. His black hair was slightly tousled, his brown eyes sharp and alert, measuring every inch of his opponent with quiet focus. His build was slender but defined, the kind of physique that implied endurance rather than raw power. His outfit wasn't exactly clothing; it looked more like a ritual armor. Small bones, carved and polished, were bound together with dark animal pelts, forming plates, bands, and collars wrapping around his body. They weren't placed at random — together they drew runes across his arms, chest, and back, etchings that pulsed with a dark green and black light, like profane embers on the verge of bursting.
If the blond man looked like a living forest at midday…
The young man was the memory of everything that dies and rises again.
For a heartbeat, the whole world seemed to hold its breath.
Then, somewhere far in the background, an explosion thundered — the echo of another battle in some other arena of that enormous complex. The sound rolled through the tiers and into the stone, reverberating underfoot.
The blond man moved first.
He raised both hands in a fluid, practiced gesture, and the arena floor answered. From invisible cracks in the earth, thick roots exploded upward, twisting like giant serpents in every direction. They lunged toward the young man in a storm of living spears, so fast and numerous they looked ready to pierce the very air itself.
But before the first root could reach him, something shifted under the necromancer's feet.
His shadow stretched.
What had been a simple shape on the ground began to expand outward, growing longer, wider, distorting as if the surrounding light was being consumed. Darkness rose in silent waves, creeping over the ground around him. Every root that surfaced too close was swallowed by that shadow, its wood withering and crumbling into black dust before it ever reached flesh.
When the fastest roots were just a breath away from skewering him, they smashed against something no one could see — a barrier of dense, invisible force, woven from pure darkness.
The entire first wave of attacks was neutralized.
The blond man's eyes narrowed, just for an instant. Then he stamped his foot into the earth.
His stance shifted.
He dropped his center of gravity, feet apart, knees bent — the low, grounded "horse stance" from traditional Kung Fu. The air around him grew heavy. Behind him, the ground tore open yet again — but this time, what rose wasn't a tangle of wild roots.
It was a tree.
First a giant sprout, then a thick trunk, then a full colossal form, rising at impossible speed. Within seconds, a massive tree towered above the arena, its broad crown spreading shadow over the cracked earth below. Huge roots coiled around the man's legs, climbing his body, encasing his torso and arms, weaving together into living armor. In mere moments, only his blue eyes remained visible, glowing between layers of braided bark and wood.
Then he leaped.
The weight of the wooden armor seemed meaningless. The man launched forward with superhuman speed, tearing a furrow in the ground where he had stood. Wind howled around him as he crossed the distance in a heartbeat, aimed straight at the young man wrapped in bones and runes.
The necromancer lifted his arms in front of him.
The earth answered him as well.
A wall of bone erupted from the ground, forming in layers of interlocked plates, skulls, rib cages, and vertebrae, twisting together into a grotesque barrier that filled his field of view. For a brief moment, runes flickered faintly along its surface.
It still wasn't enough.
With a single punch, the blond man crashed his fist into the wall. The impact sounded like a contained thunderclap. Bones flew in every direction, shattered into fragments. In an instant, the defense was gone — reduced to a cloud of spinning shards — and the blond warrior stood right in front of the young man.
His fist, wrapped in hardened roots, drove straight toward the necromancer's head.
Reflexes took over.
The young man snapped his left arm up, bracing his forearm in the path of the strike.
The moment fist met bone, the runes carved into his left arm lit up, exploding in a surge of deep green light. Energy spread from the impact point, crawling up the blond man's arm like an infestation. It raced along the wooden armor, seeping into every root and vine.
The wood began to rot.
Roots along his arm turned black, cracked, then disintegrated into dust that rained to the floor, leaving parts of his skin exposed. The perfect stance faltered, just for a breath, as surprise carved itself onto the blond man's face.
The young man did not waste that opening.
He shifted his hips and drove a punch with his right arm, aiming for the blond warrior's chest — roughly where a heart would be.
The runes on his right arm blazed even brighter, not just in deep green now, but in a violent storm of black flame. The impact carried that energy into the wooden armor, spreading across the trunk-like chest piece.
The roots began to burn.
Not with ordinary fire, but with flames that seemed to erase whatever they touched. In a single second, the armor across the blond man's chest was consumed, the wood evaporating into nothing, not even ash left behind. The blow launched him backwards, sending him crashing through the air until he slammed into the ground beside the colossal tree he had summoned.
The stadium exploded in a frenzy of screams, whistles, and floating bursts of light. The earth shuddered where his body carved out a groove before finally stopping.
Still, he stood.
He rose with a presence that refused to shrink, even partially burned. Resting one hand against the bark of the towering tree, he drew in power. A pure yellow glow pulsed through the trunk and branches, then flowed back into his body. The wooden armor regrew, weaving over his chest again, new roots curling around him. The remaining black flames were smothered, crushed beneath that radiant life-force.
But while he rebuilt himself, the battlefield had changed.
When he finally lifted his gaze, he realized.
He was surrounded.
Hands — pale, skeletal, rotting — protruded from the earth. Skulls lit by ghostly flames turned slowly toward him. Zombies nearly three meters tall dragged heavy chains as they rose. Skeleton soldiers in rusted armor clattered into formation. Vampires with crimson eyes and exposed fangs stood atop crumbling bone platforms. Twisted beasts, stitched from mismatched parts, growled low in their throats. An entire army of the dead now filled most of the arena.
Behind the young man with the bone armor, something even larger took form.
A skeletal dragon, about ten meters tall, was assembling itself piece by piece. Vertebrae clicked into place, ribs arched outward, a long, jagged skull settled atop an immense spine. Invisible hands seemed to be guiding the construction. When it was complete, the creature drove its claws into the ground and spread its tattered wings wide, letting out a hollow roar that sounded like an echo rolling out from a mass grave.
The blond man dropped back into the horse stance.
He drew in a deep breath.
And roared.
It was not a human shout; it was a call that dragged the full power of the colossal tree behind him. The trunk erupted in swirling yellow and green light, so intense that the arena itself seemed to brighten. A moment later, a wave of energy burst outward from the tree, a shockwave of raw, concentrated life.
The power spread in all directions.
Where it touched dead flesh, dried bone, stagnant blood, existence itself was denied. Zombies crumbled into dust. Skeletons shattered, ribs and skulls collapsing into heaps of fragments before scattering. Vampires screamed one final time before dissolving into nothing. In mere seconds, almost eighty percent of the undead army was simply… gone.
Barely a few dozen creatures remained on their feet, scattered around the massive tree.
And the dragon.
The blond man's transformation continued.
The roots near his feet surged upward, forming a thick column that lifted him off the ground. His body was enveloped in even more wood, his musculature widening, his proportions expanding. He grew until he stood nearly four meters tall, a colossal figure anchored to the trunk of the tree — a living avatar of the forest. Around the central trunk, other roots rose and twisted into the rough shapes of gigantic arms, each as big as a siege weapon, ready to crush anything they could reach.
The tree itself now towered close to fifty meters high, a wooden titan dominating the entire arena.
But all of that came at a cost.
Time.
Too much of it.
Time the necromancer did not waste.
In the air before the skeletal dragon, the space rippled. A magic circle blossomed into existence — drawn in lines of black and sickly green, filled with symbols that looked wrong, as if they were moving even while standing still. A sinister energy bled from the circle, turning the air sharp and heavy, buzzing with power.
The dragon drew in breath — or whatever would count as breath for a creature without lungs — and then unleashed a stream of black fire straight into the circle.
The magic reacted.
The flames were sucked inward, compressed and refined. The temperature spiked. The darkness grew denser, deeper, as if what burned wasn't merely heat, but the absence of everything else. In an instant, the circle responded, releasing the attack, amplified.
A beam of black fire, easily ten times more intense and concentrated, shot out from the glyph in a straight line.
It crossed the arena like a sentence being carried out.
It struck the wooden giant and the tree behind him dead center.
For a moment, everything vanished into light — or rather, into the lack of it. The black flames devoured the living wood without resistance, ignoring the yellow life-force that attempted to fight them. Roots vanished, branches fell apart before they could hit the ground, the trunk split and was swallowed whole. The roar of power and cracking wood blurred into a single, deafening noise.
When the blaze finally died down, silence swallowed the arena.
Where a moment ago there had stood a man clad in living roots and a fifty-meter tree…
…there was nothing.
Only a blackened crater of scorched earth, its edges still humming faintly with residual heat and lingering shadows.
Standing in front of the skeletal dragon, with a thin wisp of darkness still coiling beneath his feet, the young man in bones and fur lowered his arms. His chest rose and fell in steady breaths. His brown eyes remained fixed on the empty space where his opponent had been.
It took the crowd a second to understand.
Then reality caught up.
The arena detonated in sound — screams, cheers, shouts, and roars, all crashing together into a single, deafening wave that shook the world.