'Only if I manage to preserve this state even after logging out. And only if... I can manage to log out at all,' Tori thought.
He tried to summon the Ouroboros system UI menu, but nothing popped up. Next, he thought of the logout command, but again, nothing happened.
For the first time since the transformation, he felt real, paralyzing fear.
'I am trapped,' he thought.
A few minutes passed.
Tori calmed down slightly, realizing that panicking would lead nowhere. He decided to test movement. The basic human desire to move an arm forward yielded no result. He had no limbs. If he wanted to move, he had to change his physical properties.
To the east of his central position, he felt a vast area with high surface temperature—likely a stone cliff heated by the virtual sun.
'Alright. Let's take this scientifically. Wind moves due to pressure differences. Cold air is denser. If I cool the western part...'
Tori intentionally sent a command to lower his own temperature in his western section. In the real world, this would be impossible. Here, it was just a matter of manipulating numerical values in a database. Colder air had higher density and pressure.
The game's physics engine immediately reacted to the pressure difference. Tori's mass began to move from the high-pressure area to the low-pressure zone.
Suddenly, he was moving. And fast.
The sensation was... indescribable. It wasn't like moving legs or wings. It felt as if every cell of his body was shifting forward simultaneously. As if he had become movement itself.
As he moved, his perception of the world accelerated. His lower layer brushed against blades of grass, bending them and flowing over them. He perceived every leaf on the trees he passed through. It was an overwhelming amount of data, but the neuro-link managed to filter it into abstract geometric sensations. The shape of the world was rendered in his head based on the resistance objects offered to his gaseous body.
Tori cooled his rear even further and heated the front. His speed increased. The gentle breeze became a strong wind.
At that moment, he felt euphoria. Pure, unadulterated joy. For the first time since the transformation.
"I AM FUCKING FAST!"
A wave of laughter rippled through him—though he couldn't actually laugh, his sense of humor remained. Yes, he was trapped. Yes, he didn't know if he would ever return. But for now...
For now, he was flying.
He slammed into something hard.
The impact didn't hurt—he had no pain receptors—but he felt a sudden, brutal decompression of his leading edge. His mass scattered across the surface of a solid wall.
It took him three long seconds to pull himself back together into a coherent stream.
'Ouch. Okay. Carelessness could... what? Dissipate me? Destroy me?'
He examined the obstacle more cautiously. It was a perfectly smooth, vertical surface that generated no heat and possessed absolute hardness. He perceived its edges. It was a building, likely a fortress of some kind.
Tori shifted his direction, flowing around the building's corners, feeling turbulence forming on the sharp edges—tiny fragments of his consciousness spinning in miniature vortices before rejoining the main flow.
He needed to check his system status. He sent a mental command to display the system log.
Instead of a visual window, he felt a vibration in the center of his mass. They were data packets translating directly into text in his mind:
[WARNING: User interface for class [Environment_Subroutine] is not available.]
[Control Parameters: Vector velocity, Temperature gradient, Humidity level.]
[Health: N/A.]
[Mana: N/A.]
[Inventory: N/A.]
His theory was confirmed. He wasn't exactly a player; he was a part of the environment.
But he wasn't deterred. He tried to invoke the logout command: [Log_Out_Request].
[ERROR: Function [Log_Out_Request] requires confirmation from a local avatar UI.]
[Local UI not found. Access denied.]
Please remain in position until the next server maintenance cycle.
'Dammit,' he cursed internally.
He knew the Ouroboros maintenance schedule. The servers weren't centralized; updates were rolled out live. The server never performed a global restart.
He was stuck here. Indefinitely.
For a while, he just hovered. He maintained a stable pressure. He felt the virtual sun warming his upper layer and the cold earth cooling his lower layer.
For the first time since the transformation, he allowed himself to feel true, boundless, and desperate grief.
'Mom. Dad. I'm sorry.'
He saw them in his mind. His father trying to stand up after the man kicked him. His mother fumbling through her purse for any spare change she could offer. Their small apartment smelling of cheap detergent and dry bread.
'I wanted to save you. Instead, I've just buried myself.'
But then, deep in his mind, another, colder voice spoke.
'Stop focusing on what you can't change. Focus on what you can.'
He decided to stop moving and equalized the temperature across his entire volume. In this state of stillness, he began to perceive tiny anomalies.
Something passed through his mass, exactly 25 meters south of the building. He felt two cylindrical forms moving forward in a regular, alternating pattern, slicing through his air.
Step. Another step.
Soon he registered four more similar movement patterns.
They were digital avatars. So players.
Tori didn't see them with eyes, but he felt their shape, volume, and the heat their models radiated into the environment.
He felt sharp protrusions on their backs—weapons. A group of five players was advancing toward the building, walking right through him.
One of the players stopped. Tori felt a change in air pressure around the player's face, indicating their head turning from side to side.
Then Tori felt vibrations of acoustic waves spreading through the air—the players were communicating via voice chat.
'Wait... if they're talking, they're producing sound waves. Sound waves are just changes in air pressure,' Tori thought. 'I AM the air. If I can capture these micro-vibrations...'
His first attempt took three minutes. He focused on the slight fluctuation of pressure around one of the heads. Initially, it was just static, but then he began to slightly compress the air around the sound source.
He created a microscopic, extremely dense layer of air around the players' heads that acted like a microphone diaphragm.
Every word the players uttered hit this diaphragm. Tori's neuro-link captured the vibrations and translated them via a decoding algorithm...
And suddenly, like tuning an old radio, voices crackled in his mind.
"...I'm telling you, Jaxx, that broker screwed us," a gravelly, irritated voice said. It was full of anger but also exhaustion. The voice of someone who had been fighting too long and kept losing.
"Shut up, Riven," a second, calmer voice replied. It sounded authoritative but not cruel. "The coordinates match. This old fortress is supposed to be the Forgotten Mystic Dungeon. The boss inside should drop that Core-key."
"I don't like this," a third, softer female voice chimed in. "The physics engine is glitching out. Didn't you feel that weird gust of wind a second ago? There was no weather shift in the map forecast."
'That was me, sweetie,' Tori thought with a flash of dark humor.
"You're being paranoid, Seris," Jaxx laughed. "We're on the edge of the rendering zone; everything glitches here. Besides, dungeon-triggered weather changes don't show up on forecasts."
"No," Seris snapped. "I don't want to risk it again. Maybe we should—"
"We should GO IN," another voice
interrupted. Deeper, slower. "We've been hunting for that key for a week. A week! If we turn back now, Garrick will boot us from the guild and we'll never make Raid Tier 3."
The final member of the group, with a younger, more nervous voice, muttered, "Maven's right. We need that drop."
Tori listened, piecing together the mosaic of their personalities. Jaxx was the leader; Riven was the hot-headed DPS. Seris was the scout or mage. Maven was the tank. And that last one...
"He's just filler. A sub who's just happy to be playing with the high levels."
Naturally, before he'd planned to break into this game, he had done his research.
He focused his attention on the blades of grass beneath Riven's feet. He cranked up the local temperature in a small patch.
Cold air rushed into the vacuum, resulting in a short, extremely sharp burst of wind that sent Riven's cloak whipping violently.
"SHIT!" Riven yelled, drawing his weapon—a heavy two-handed sword, based on the shape. "Again! Something's here! That annoying invisible rogue again?"
"Chill out, you paranoid prick," Jaxx laughed, though his voice sounded slightly less confident than before.
"I'm not paranoid!" Riven spun around, his sword slicing through the air—slicing through Tori.
"I see it on the HUD! The temperature here is spiking like crazy!"
Tori felt his mass scattering around the blade. It didn't hurt, but it was... unsettling.
"Riven, CALM DOWN," Seris hissed as they pressed on...