The day the world ended was quiet. No one even knew that the time limit for their everyday lives had started. It began with an ad that appeared all over the world. Major metropolitan areas with electronic billboards began to display a simple image of a black crown split down one side with a crack over a red background with a timer. It started at thirty days and began to count down. It took the internet nearly a full day to realize that it was in more than one city or country, and it took a day longer for the website to be found. The same icon of a broken crown could be seen, and the same timer counted down twenty-seven days, sixteen hours, forty-two minutes, and twenty-seven seconds; however, this website included a name, Age of the Fallen Kings. Wild speculation abounded as national and international news alike began to report of the strange advertisement for a product seemingly no one would claim until a man stepped forward, Marcus Avery, head of Dolus Studios, an independent video game developer who was ready to release a massive project that would put all others to shame. He claimed the world was more extensive than our planet, character options based on player choice and in-game decisions, immersive gameplay unlike anything ever seen, and more.
Rumors spread rapidly about this studio no one had ever heard of, led by a man who seemed to not exist before this, with massive claims. The only thing that everyone seemed to agree on was that Age of the Fallen King would be an MMORPG, and, according to the man himself, it would set a new precedent for video games worldwide. The news media was in a frenzy, from content creators online making in-depth analysis videos about the single image available to massive news networks reporting on the now viral sensation that had seemingly the entire world's attention in an iron grip. Even as the timer ticked down into the final days, there was still no new verifiable information, images, or video footage of this game. Marcus Avery had not said a word since he first appeared to announce the game. Little did the world know the six hours left on the timer was simply a warning that no one understood.
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Grayson sat, staring at the glowing red screen in front of him. His computer monitor lit up his dark room, and the sun set outside his window. The timer on the screen ticked down to the fifteen-minute marker, meaning whatever Age of the Fallen Kings was, it would happen at half past six o’clock.
“Gray, you still there?”
Grayson started and unmuted the microphone attached to his headset. He had almost forgotten he was still on a call with his friends.
“Sorry, Mikey. Just spaced out for a minute,” he laughed wearily.
“Long shift again?” Mike asked.
“Yeah, but I took tomorrow off in preparation for this, so I’ll be able to get some rest tomorrow.”
“Are you sure about that? What about your dad’s bills?” Charlie’s voice rang out of the tiny speakers in Grayson’s headphones.
“I need a rest day and I still have some PTO sitting around before the end of the year. Besides, they’re not going to pull the plug on him if a few days late,” Grayson said.
“Alright, man. You ready for Fallen Kings?” Mike relented.
“Hopefully it’ll be as good as they said it would be. I’ve been dying to have something to grind on for a while and I even upgraded my computer for this,” Grayson continued.
They sat quietly for a few minutes as Grayson peaked at the forum he had on another window. People were still speculating wildly about the game and celebrating the end of the timer. A slight ding could be heard as he looked back to see the timer hit five minutes left.
“Here we go,” Charlie said.
“I’m ready to see whatever sick designs they have for the monsters,” Mark declared, the sound of him rubbing his hands together being heard through his microphone.
“See you on the other side, lady and gentleman,” Grayson laughed.
The timer reached one minute left as another beep sounded. The group of friends sat silently and watched. Thirty seconds, twenty seconds, ten seconds, the timer reached zero.
“Is something supposed to-” Mike started as he was cut off when Grayson’s room went dark.
“Of all the times to lose power,” Grayson swore as he pulled his phone from his pocket to text his friends, but the screen remained black.
Grayson’s eyebrows furrowed. He knew it was at least at half battery just before he sat down at his desk. He stood up and went over to his window to see all the houses down his street, which were also completely dark. The faintest light left from the setting sun gave everything a slight purple glow. Suddenly, a massive gridded wall of white light appeared, bisecting the houses across the street from Grayson’s. He fell back in surprise despite there being no sound as the wall simply came into existence, seemingly from nowhere. Grayson scrambled back up to his feet and pressed his face to the glass of his window pane. Outside in the street, he could see an ornate-looking wooden table in the middle of the road with objects on it.
A massive horn sounded so loud that it rattled the widow in front of Grayson. He jumped back from the glass as it shattered in a moment, sending shards of glass scattering all over his bedroom carpet.
“Approach the table.”
A hollow, robotic voice had given the command, but Grayson could not identify where or who it came from.
“Hello?” Grayson called out, slightly annoyed with himself for how high his voice had gotten when he asked.
“Approach the table,” the voice repeated.
“Is this some kind of invasion?” Grayson yelled, forcing his voice to deepen.
There was no response.
“Is this a test from some god?” Grayson shouted as anger started to boil up inside of him.
“Approach the table. You have ten seconds to comply.”
“Not until you explain what the hell is going on here!”
Grayson tried to look around for something to defend himself with, but the only light was the faint glow streaming through his broken window, which barely illuminated his room. Suddenly, pressure like a giant hand wrapped around him and squeezed Grayson as he flung forward through the window and onto the street below. He landed with a thud on the asphalt and skidded a few feet across the ground, leaving large scrapes down his arms and a warm feeling as blood began to drip off of his face. He pushed himself to his feet, wobbling slightly as he regained his balance. He had landed in front of the wooden table. A metal sword with a dull black handle, a similar knife, and a stick lay on it.
“What is this? What is going on?” Grayson roared at the sky, but there was still no answer.
An alarm blared loudly from somewhere in the distance, and the white walls surrounding Grayson suddenly began to flash red. The table before him disappeared as it turned into liquid and splashed to the ground. The alarm continued to pound against Grayson’s ears louder until he was forced to hunch down close to the ground and hold his hands over the sides of his head to keep his eardrums from bursting. With a sound like a glacier splitting, the alarm stopped, and the walls disappeared. Grayson was hunching in the middle of the road as an eerie silence overtook him.
“Disembodied voice? Is this still part of whatever this is?” Grayson called towards the sky as he stood again, but there was no response.
The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.
“Did it forget about me or something?”
Grayson looked around at the houses around him. Nothing had changed from what he could tell of his neighbor’s home, but he ran back into his own to check. Nothing electronic would work, whether plugged in or with a battery. He grabbed his car keys off the counter and tried to start his old sedan, but it, too, was dead. He let out a roar of frustration and hurled his keys into the side of his house. He pressed his back against the cheap siding and slid down to the ground, cradling his head as his mind raced to try and figure out what was happening. His mind wandered to his friends he had been talking with right before and to his father sitting in a hospital bed. He started, and his eyes flew wide open. His father was on full life support. If the power was entirely out at the hospital, he would die. Grayson jumped back to his feet and snatched his keys off the ground, desperately trying to start his car, but not even the lights on the dashboard were lighting up. He swore and kicked his front tire before returning inside to pack a backpack and change into his running shoes.
Grayson had taken his physical fitness much more seriously in the last year or so after his father’s massive heart attack that had seen him bedridden and unresponsive. While he was no bodybuilder or model, he had seen fairly good improvement with his body, but he was going to need to travel nearly twenty miles on foot to reach the hospital, and he had never done that in one session before. After he changed and shoved some extra clothes into a backpack, he went to the kitchen to grab his water bottle to fill it up, but no water came out of the sink faucet. He frowned and smacked the side of the counter, but still no water. While it was uncommon for his power to go out, Grayson had seen it enough to know gravity would still bring some water to his house even when the grid went down.
“Turn on!” He roared as he slammed his fist into the counter again.
A window appeared floating in front of Grayson, causing him to throw himself back in surprise, but the glowing screen followed him.
ERROR. PLAYER DATA IMPORT FAILED. GM SUPPORT REQUIRED. PLEASE STANDBY FOR FURTHER ASSISTANCE.
“What the hell?” Grayson murmured as he tried to touch the screen, but his hand passed through it like it was not even there.
The only thing it held was the red box with the error message. Grayson did not know what the GM was or what kind of assistance he needed, but his singular focus at the moment was his father. He grabbed a couple of the plastic water bottles in his kitchen and ran out the door, following the route he had driven almost every week for the last year.
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A swirling orb of ice-blue energy appeared in the middle of a suburban street as a man stepped out. He wore an impressive outfit: a long-tailed black waistcoat and high-waisted, slim-cut trousers. His highly polished boots reflected the light of the energy behind him before it disappeared. He turned his entirely hairless head to the left and then the right as he scanned around for the player he was here to manually input into the system. He sighed and shook his head as he saw no one around.
“Is it so hard for these people to understand the term ‘standby?’”
He raised a hand, and a map appeared before him, showing a green dot moving along a marked path. He tapped through a few menus, and a handful of red dots appeared on the map along the path of the green dot.
“Those will keep you busy while I track you down.”
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Grayson had been running for the better part of half an hour now. This was longer than he had ever gone in a single session before, and he could feel his adrenaline keeping him going at this point, but it was fading quickly. He stopped to take a water bottle out of his backpack and had to stop himself from sucking the whole thing down in one gulp or else make himself feel sick. He looked around the city block he found himself on and saw a corner store a dozen feet away. He pushed the door open, finding it unlocked. There was no one inside, same as any of the houses Grayson had peaked in or any of the other stores he passed, but the refrigerator units in the back were still full of drinks as he took a few of the sports-related ones and left a few bills on the counter. He suddenly heard grunting sounds outside as he walked out to the street. He ducked back into the corner store and craned his neck to peek through the glass door. In the middle of the road stood five squat, almost child-size creatures. Grayson nearly made the mistake of calling out to them in the excitement of finding other people when he saw the short knives and spears they held. Then he saw their dark green skin and bulbous, black eyes as one sniffed the air and shouted something in a guttural language to the others, its mouth full of misaligned and jagged teeth.
Grayson turned to face back into the store and looked around for anything he could defend himself with, but the heaviest items he could find were cans of dried peanuts and large liquor bottles behind the counter. He also managed to get into the closest behind the counter and found a medium-sized wrench and a broom. Sticking his head back over the counter, he could see three of the creatures had begun to move towards the door to the shop. Grayson stared at the pile of junk he had managed to collect on the floor in front of him as his mind screamed at him to do something. The only thing he could come up with was when he remembered a movie his dad liked to watch and how the hero made a burning torch he used to scare away a tiger. It was the only thought that consumed his mind now as he went into autopilot, tearing off his shirt and tying it around the end of the mop before soaking the cloth in liquor and snatching a lighter off the store counter. Looking over the counter again, Grayson could see the monsters had made it to the door as the lead sniffed the air again.
With a shout, Grayson lit the end of his makeshift torch and charged into the door with his shoulder, slamming it into the frontmost creature and sending it sprawling as he slammed the end of his burning broom into the next one. Almost like the creature had been soaked in liquor too, it burst into flames as it ran screaming, trying to bat the flames off of itself. The third monster dove forward with its dagger, but Grayson swung the broom like a baseball bat into its side. There was a crack as the broom split in half, but he managed to throw the monster a few feet away as it also burst into flames. He took the now broken broom handle and slammed the jagged wooden end into the first creature still lying on the ground before him. The splintered wood quickly sunk into its chest as the monster’s eyes bulged to the point that Grayson thought they might fly out of his head. He heard three faint dings from somewhere behind him but ignored them as he focused on the last two monsters still in the street as he scooped up the dagger lying on the ground.
The remaining two looked at each other and then back to Grayson as he ran toward them. They both let out a squeal that sounded like a mix of a sick pig and a drowning bird and turned, sprinting down the road away from him. Grayson did not chase them, stopping to catch his breath. His eyes widened as he heaved air in, and he quickly realized what he had done. He whipped his head around to see the three bodies turn into black liquid and seep into the ground. All that was left were a few scorch marks on the ground, another dagger, and what Grayson had realized was a short, slightly damaged sword.
“I just killed them,” Grayson declared quietly, “I killed them without hesitating.”
Then he remembered the three dings he heard earlier, and, as if it already knew it was needed, the window appeared in front of Grayson again. The red box from before had been replaced by a new box.
TIER 1 GOBLIN KILLED x3
EXP REWARDED: ERROR
GOLD REWARDED: 6
“How can my reward be an error?” Grayson asked the screen.
In response, it flickered slightly, and the box was replaced again.
LEVEL-UP REQUIREMENTS MET
NEW LEVEL: ERROR
STAT INCREASE: ERROR
REWARD: ERROR
“This doesn’t make any sense. Answer me, damnit!” Grayson shouted as he tried to slam his hand into the screen, but it passed through harmlessly.
Then the screen shifted as error messages began to appear again, and Grayson felt a sharp pain in the back of his head as if he had suddenly gained a migraine. His eyes blurred as they watered from the pain, and he dropped to one knee as he squeezed his skull, trying to keep from blacking out. When the pain finally ceased, Grayson stood back up to see the window had changed again.
NAME: GRAYSON NEWELL
LEVEL: NONE 2
STATS
STR: 6
AGL: 5
WLL: 8
ALR: 6
SAN: 100
SPECIALITY
NONE
ATTRIBUTES
RES: NONE
IMN: NONE
VUL: NONE
AFF: NONE
SKILLS
NONE