My motorcycle's engine roared, cutting through the campus murmur. My hands gripped the handlebars so tightly my knuckles turned white. I didn't look back or say goodbye; a countdown pulsed in my mind: twelve minutes until the world changed.
I released the clutch to blast off, but a figure blocked my path.
"Move it, Yui," I warned. My voice, muffled by the helmet, carried a real threat. I had zero patience today.
My best friend didn't flinch. She held up a white envelope with maddening calmness.
"Aren't you even going to ask about this?" Her tone was sharp. "It's your recommendation letter, Ichika. You left it behind. Again."
The engine roared once more, like an impatient beast between my legs.
"If you don't move in three seconds, I'll run you over."
"And if you do, you'll never get that internship," she countered. She stepped toward the wheel instead of backing away. "You have strange priorities for a genius, you know?"
I snatched the envelope with a swipe and tucked it into my jacket. Yui stepped aside with a mocking bow and tossed out one last warning about not letting virtual addiction rot my brain. I didn't promise a thing.
I opened the throttle. The real world, with its gray responsibilities, vanished behind a trail of burnt asphalt.
The trip was a blur. I only regained awareness when the key turned in my apartment's lock. I stepped inside and double-locked the door. No one was there; Mom was out, and my sister was wasting time somewhere else. Better that way. I didn't have the energy for family lectures. I had emptied my bank account for this moment.
I locked myself in my room, stripped off my uniform, and changed into light athletic wear. My physical body needed to be invisible; comfort was a technical requirement for immersion. I sat on the edge of the bed, my heart hammering against my ribs.
"Start Nexus system."
A translucent menu floated before my retinas. I selected the golden icon I'd been waiting for for years: Aetheria.
But something went wrong.
The neural connection, which should have been instantaneous, crawled across an agonizing progress bar. As I waited, I closed my eyes. I hated my real appearance: the light hair and mint-colored eyes that screamed "foreigner." In the game, I'd be different: black hair, soft features—a perfect, ordinary version.
Suddenly, the game's logo flashed a violent red.
[WARNING: Synchronization successful. Assume rest position.]
I let myself fall onto the mattress. The world went dark.
Reality fractured. There was no epic music or sunny towns; only a brutal impact on the back of my neck, as if someone had struck me with an iron bar. The pain scraped my throat, and I clutched my head. Real pain? The sensory limiters were supposed to be infallible.
I forced my eyes open.
The world was a blur of shadows and stroboscopic flashes. I tried to sit up, but my body weighed a ton.
"Something's wrong..." I muttered. My voice sounded thick. "Exit. Emergency logout."
I made the hand gesture to summon the menu. The interface appeared, floating in the stale air, but the logout option had been erased. I opened and closed the menu three times, my fingers trembling over the holograms. Nothing.
A chill that was anything but virtual ran down my spine. My vision finally focused, and horror set in. I wasn't in a medieval inn. I was lying on a metal gurney in a room that reeked of rust and dried blood. Around me, dead machines and broken jars littered the floor like a technological graveyard.
"Stay calm, Ichika," I told myself, forcing logic. "It's just a rendering bug."
I summoned the menu again. This time, a sidebar slid out, displaying my name, level, and critical health.
I swiped the interface away and crawled toward a cracked mirror in the corner, desperate to see my new avatar's face.
"This can't be..."
The figure in the reflection stared back with a terrified but painfully familiar gaze.
There was no black hair or dark eyes.
There was the blonde hair, dirty and tangled. There were the mint-green eyes I hated so much. And beneath a tattered white gown that barely covered my voluptuous frame, my real skin prickled from the cold.
The game hadn't given me a new body. It had dragged me, exactly as I was, into this hell. I pinched my cheek hard, praying to wake up.
A sharp, hot sting pierced my skin. The pain brought back a cruel certainty: this was real.
A scream shattered the deathly silence, making the laboratory walls vibrate.
My chest tightened painfully.
It wasn't an ambient sound effect. It was pure terror.
"Exit... I want out..."
I summoned the menu frantically, my fingers clawing at the empty air. Nothing. Another scream, closer this time. Then a third, deafening.
"Please, let me out!"
My voice cracked. I crawled toward the door and peered into the hallway, where flickering lights illuminated a nightmare.
A humanoid figure advanced slowly. It wore no clothes—nor skin. It was a grotesque mass of raw muscle and exposed bone, an anatomical map of pain dyed in deep crimson. Its dark, tangled hair floated around a face that defied sanity: a single eye glowed with a feverish, hateful orange light, while the lower half of its face simply didn't exist.
In its place, a massive maw, filled with multiple rows of jagged teeth, stretched from ear to ear like an eternal wound.
Above its head, my death sentence floated in red letters:
[Level 60. ?????]
I froze. Its single eye rolled in its socket and locked onto me, relentless.
Suddenly, a noise to my right broke the tension. A girl came running out of an adjacent room, tripping over her own feet.
The monster turned into a red blur. It lunged at her with terrifying speed, sinking those impossible jaws into her shoulder. Blood splattered across the metal floor, accompanied by a wet, sickening crunch.
"Help me, please!"
Her screams were unbearable. My logical brain screamed for me to run, but my body reacted on instinct. My fingers closed around a heavy glass jar on the floor, and I threw it with all my might.
The glass shattered against the beast's exposed skull.
The monster let go of the girl and slowly turned its flayed body toward me.
"Shit..." I whispered, terror turning my blood to ice. "I shouldn't have done that."
I tried to back away, but it was too late. An invisible impact shoved me with brutal force. The cold floor met me, and an instant later, the monster's dead weight pinned me down.
Its face—that nightmare of teeth and tendons—was inches from mine, dripping fluids onto my gown.
"Get away!"
I screamed, my tears mixing with cold sweat. I pushed against its wet, slippery flesh in desperation, but it was useless. The creature tilted its head, its orange eye drilling into my soul, and opened its jaws right for my throat.
Then, time broke.
The creature's jaws stopped millimeters from my skin. It didn't pull away; it simply froze in mid-air, like a paused recording, while its orange eye continued to drill into me without blinking.
A bright blue rectangle overlaid the nightmare vision.
[SERVER UNDER MAINTENANCE. INITIATING FORCED REBOOT.]
A sob escaped my throat—a pathetic mixture of laughter and tears.
"Thank God..." I gasped, feeling my muscles melt onto the cold floor. "It's over."
Adrenaline gave way to fury. I was going to get out of there. I was going to demand a full refund, compensation for psychological damages, and then I was going to burn the console in the yard. I would never touch this damn game again in my life.
But my relief lasted only as long as the blink of an eye.
The darkness didn't return me to my room. It enveloped my vision like a shroud of liquid asphalt—suffocating and absolute. I tried to move, to scream, to manually disconnect, but my limbs didn't exist. I was trapped in a data limbo, where fear continued to throb in my real chest with the force of a war drum.
Seconds stretched, turning into eternal minutes.
Just when despair threatened to fracture my sanity, a new message broke the void, shining with surgical clarity:
[SYSTEM ANNOUNCEMENT]
"We deeply regret that your initial experience has been compromised. A Critical Seed Anomaly has been detected: a future expansion event has erroneously merged with the starting zone.
After analyzing security protocols, we have determined that a mass logout is unfeasible without causing permanent neural damage to users. Therefore, the server will remain active in its current state.
As compensation for the inconvenience, an enemy stat readjustment has been applied, and a Premium Support Package has been deposited into your inventory.
Our final recommendation is simple: give it your best, players. And when you wake up..."
A chill ran through my soul as I read the last line, which flickered in an ominous red:
"...run for your lives."