Spring, a season of growth and renewal, a time in which plants start to flourish, and their new cycle of life begins. But as for a certain boy, his life was about to take a very tragic turn.
It was a Friday evening, Dante had just gotten out of school and was headed towards his local supermarket, humming as he tread along.
"Gotta stock up on energy drinks, as I'm not planning to get any sleep for this spring break." Dante thought as he finally reached the supermarket. But before he could enter, he was suddenly approached by a handsome man with strands of blonde hair slightly pretruding from his cap. He looked to be around his late 20's, but Dante wasn't completely sure.
"Hello, how may I help you?" Trying to be polite Dante greeted the man, but the man just smirked back.
"..."
"Oh yes, hello." After a short pause the man finally greeted back awkwardly.
"It's nothing, you just looked familiar that's all."
"Oh, alright." Dante replied back awkwardly.
After the brief yet strange conversation with the handsome man, Dante quickly shook it off and continued with his mission to buy the energy drinks.
After finally purchasing the drinks he had come for, Dante finally started to head home.
RING
RING
Once he reached the front door of his house his phone started to go off. When he checked who was calling, he wasn't surprised to see that it was his friend Kyle. Once he answered the phone, he had to take a step back due to the voice at the other end screaming directly through the mic.
"Yo, Dante when are you going to get on the game?!"
"I just got home, so I'm about to hop on the game right now."
"Cool, but hurry up everyone is already on. We are just waiting for you now." Kyle told him hurriedly.
Dante rushed up the stairs to turn on his computer and once he did, he loaded up the game 'Star-Fall: Protocol 0,' which was a brand-new game that had come out earlier that month. It was one of the most hyped-up games to launch this year, with its unique selection of powers and abilities, a vast open world map, good PVP mechanics, and its main feature. A complete emphasis on NPC realism.
The premise of the game took place in space. Players are meant to hop from planet to planet, explore worlds, and figure out how to save the planets they visited. Of course, some players went rampant and took a genocidal route instead. Given this much freedom to do whatever the player desired, it was no shocker that game had garnered a huge following.
"Finally! You're on now." Kyle shouted angrily.
"Yeah dude, we've been waiting like forever for you to get on." Ray chimed in.
"Geez, cut me some slack, I ran all the way from the supermarket. Plus, don't we have the rest of the spring break to grind this game out?" Dante retorted.
You're right, but still, you really couldn't have been any slower getting home?"
"Alright dude, I'm already on, so just drop it already."
After their little banter they finally decided on what planet they were going to drop on.
"Alright, we should drop at Verak-9." Kyle declared with the utmost confidence of someone who had pretty clearly already looked this up beforehand.
"Isn't that one pretty challenging. It's difficulty is hard, isn't it?" Dante asked, as he was pulling up the planet's info on the side of his screen.
"Yeah, but the loot there is INSANE. Plus the NPCs on that planet have a whole civil war going on right now, so we can either help one side or just... you know."
"Cause chaos!" Ray cut in.
"I was going to say 'observe the situation strategically' but sure, chaos works too."
"Potatoes potato's, just hurry up and start." exclaimed Ray as he was already entering his pod.
Dante leaned back on his chair and opened one of his newly purchased energy drinks, taking an unhurriedly long sip before dropping his character into the landing pod alongside the rest of his group. The loading screen filled his monitor with a slow rotating view of Verak-9. It looked beautiful from up there. Rust-red continents bleeding into pale yellow oceans, stormy clouds the size of small countries swirling lazily across the surface of the beautiful crimson planet.
It never looked as pretty once you actually landed.
They played through the evening and well into the night, speedily getting through the civil war questline, making decisions that were morally questionable at best and outright catastrophic at worst. But at least they were having a blast doing it. Dante's character had some way, somehow ended up being appointed as a war general for a faction he had joined purely by accident, which the rest of the group found outright hilarious.
"How are you LOSING? You have an entire army." Kyle pointed out, watching Dante's strategic disaster unfold in real time.
"These NPCs do not listen to me! I told the left flank to hold, and they just walked directly into a canyon! Didn't this game pride itself on its NPC's realism?"
"Maybe you're just a bad general." Ray offered helpfully.
"I didn't even want to be a general in the first place!"
By the time the clock crept past the 27-hour mark the group's energy had plummeted considerably. Ray had gone quiet, which usually meant he was half asleep at his desk by now. Dante was giving one-word answers, and Even Kyle, the self-proclaimed last-man-standing of the group, had started yawning in between his sentences.
"Alright, I'm done. I'm tapping out." Ray mumbled as saliva trickled down his face.
"Same. My brain stopped working an hour ago." Dante agreed.
"We can't stop now, we're right in the middle of the..."
Yawn
"...War arc." Kyle tried protesting but it was clear he was also exhausted.
"Kyle, Dante's army just lost to a group of NPCs armed with sticks." Ray said.
"They had very big sticks." Dante muttered in his own defense.
"One more round, come on. We can't end the game sesh like this." Kyle kept pressing.
Dante slumped back onto his chair, rubbing his eyes with both hands. "Dude, I know you said we can't end this on a loss, but it's been 28 hours. I'm tired, I'm sleep deprived, and we haven't won a fight in hours."
"Come on! One last game and then you can go take your nap." Kyle pleaded, his voice now carrying a twinge of desperation.
"…"
A long silence permeated the call.
Suddenly, the familiar crack of another energy drink being opened resounded through the call.
"...Fine, one last round."
His friends cheered through their mics.
Dante stared at the can in his hand for a moment. He had lost count of how many he'd had. He took a sip of it anyways and turned back to his screen as the next session loaded in.
It was somewhere in the first ten minutes of that final round that he felt it.
A dull pressure started burying in his chest. Not exactly painful… Just present in a way it hadn't been before. He shifted in his seat. Rolled his shoulders. Assuming it was the posture, the hours hunched over a desk, the abuse he had put his body and mind through over the past day and a half was finally starting catch up to him.
He took another sip of his drink.
The pressure got heavier.
"You going left or right at the crossroad?" Kyle asked.
"Left, give me a second." Dante muttered, pressing a hand absently to his chest.
The small break he gave himself didn't help.
The heaviness spread, slow and then very suddenly not so slowly, blooming outward from his chest in a way that made his breath catch. His hand on the mouse froze. His vision darkening at the edges, the bright colors of the game bleeding into something dim and distant.
"Dante? You went quiet, what's going on?"
He opened his mouth.
And yet nothing came out.
The energy drink slipped from his grasp. He heard it hit the floor somewhere far below him. The sound of his friends' panicked voices stretched and warped like audio played at the wrong speed. The glow of his monitor was the last thing he saw, Star-Fall: Protocol 0 still running without him, his general character standing motionless on a battlefield while his army descended into freshly brewed chaos around it.
Then his vision went completely dark.
***
Everything was dark.
And then, a blood-curdling scream could be heard.
Dante's eyes snapped wide open.
It wasn't your typical scream. It was the kind that came from somewhere deep and involuntary, it was the type of scream a person made when their body was producing more pain than their mind knew how to process.
He shot upright and immediately regretted it. His head throbbed. His body felt wrong in a way he couldn't quite explain it, it felt like wearing a coat that almost fit but didn't quite sit right on his shoulders. He pressed a hand to his chest out of reflex, expecting the crushing weight from before.
Nothing. Just a heartbeat. Fast, but there.
Another scream rang out somewhere in the dark, and this time it was followed by something worse. Silence.
"What the hell is going on?" Dante muttered to himself.
"Shut up."
He flinched. A hand shot out from darkness and grabbed his arm, and when he turned he found a boy around his age sitting on the floor not too far away from him, one finger raised to his lips, eyes wide and deadly serious.
"Shut up, Noah." The boy hissed through his teeth, his voice barely above a whisper. "Or else they'll hear us."
Dante opened his mouth.
But closed it shortly after.
Noah?
Questions started to form in his head.
Why did that kid call me Noah? Do I know him? And what was that scream?
He forced himself to stay quiet and actually look at his surroundings for the first time since waking up.
Bars.
He was looking at bars.
Metal ones. Old and slightly rusted, but still very solid. He looked up, but all he could see was stone at the top and at the bottom. He reached out and wrapped a hand around one of them and the cold bit into his palm immediately. Real. Very real. He looked left, then right. More cages lined the corridor on both sides, each one holding kids around the same age as him, some sitting with their knees pulled to their chest, some standing gripping the bars, some with their faces turned away from the dim light coming from further down the hall.
He could hear whimpering nearby. Small, muffled sounds from kids trying very hard not to make a squeak but failing as their sniffles were still heard.
Dante slowly turned back to the boy who had shushed him. "Are we—" he started, keeping his voice as low as he could manage.
"Going to die? Most likely." The boy cut him off, jaw tight. "We've been in them for a while. So please, for the love of god, do not make another sound."
Although that wasn't the question Dante was going to ask, the answer he did receive terrified him.
Dante looked down at his hands again.
Then at the bars in front of him.
And then at the dark corridor, from which no further screaming came from, which was somehow more unsettling than if it had.
The panic hit him slowly, which was almost worse than if it had arrived all at once. It crept up from inside his lungs and settled there making it hard to breathe. He didn't know if he was hyperventilating but there was one thing he was sure of, it was cold and heavy. As his brain finally caught up to everything his eyes were telling him, he started to curse inside.
'What bull shit is this, why am I here? Why me out of all people?'
The more he thought of his predicament, the angrier he became.
But he knew, if he wanted even a chance of getting out, he needed to think of a plan. So, he reviewed the information that he was greeted with.
He was alive.
He was not home.
He was in a cage.
And apparently, his name was Noah.
But he wasn't given much time to ponder as a tall shady figure started approaching.