As I watch the screen of my laptop where my glorious army was breaking trough all the enemies, I was wondering where did everything go wrong in my life. This was the fifth consecutive hour I spent watching them destroy everything in their paths and then fixing it all in the end anyway. Another hour, another campaign. Meanwhile in real life I am nothing close to the strong man ideals I created in my head of these numbers.

It's not like the game was fully rendered anyway, so I could not actually experience the consequences of my own actions even if I wanted to. I could never stand on the same field as my men, feeling the iron in their blood which was slowly dripping away from their cold, lifeless cadavers, watching the burnt walls of the rubble from what used to be their homes, or smelling the ashes of the ones destroyed by the weapons of mass destruction every general was so proudly using.

Even if I was winning in my conquest, I still felt miserable. I was still in the same small apartment, the debt of which I had to carry on my shoulders for however many years I had to work to pay it all off, work which in itself was incredibly miserable and boring. Checking almost the same papers with minimal variations over and over again for hours until I was finally given the green light to go home. A continuous cycle of work, eat, sleep that any office worker similar to me can probably relate.

The only thing that kept me from going towards the downwards spiral of insanity for a while was that time I decided to try something I never used to do before: play strategy games. I never understood their appeal and thought they were pointless, especially as a child, but when each and every thing feels numb and the same, how could something that I used to reject before be any worse than this? I could always give up and go back to the monotony I was used to if I ever feel like not doing anymore, couldn't I?

This grew a sparkle inside of me which got me to think and learn stuff that I used to deeply disregard before: history. I used to be like everyone else around me and think of it as an useless subject with no applicable uses in real life, but now without anyone around to conform to, why would I need to think using the same system of beliefs they used to have? Learning why and how everything got so bad in the first place opened a whole new world in my head. But as everything nice always ends, I got burnt out of everything, my ruined mind not having the capacity of analysing and understanding most of the stuff I learnt anymore. I let society rot my mind by consuming more than actually processing and here I was sitting in front of my monitor, tired of it all, clicking and clicking, commanding armies and conquering worlds, wishing to be as strong and imposing as the portraits of the fake generals at the bottom of the UI.

I mean why shouldn't I end it all anyway? I've been trough enough of the same already, so why would I go trough more? The world has already gone to hell and back anyway, so if I wouldn't do it, someone else with enough nukes would.

The world situation was incredibly bad, when every country that had nukes available started producing more and more as the others were claiming they would attack, until one of them decided to attack a smaller country to annex them. They were instantly backed by the others, and the world instantly split into two. One half on the side of the aggressor and another on the side of the defendant.

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One nuke was enough to destroy the world as one thought was enough to destroy my world. As I got closer to the edge of my 30 plus floor tall building's roof, I could feel the nukes flying left and right, the panicked people running bellow me, the sense of impending doom amplified by the static of the various televisions around that lost signal. As soon as I got both my feet of the edge, everything was engulfed into an incredibly bright light and I started losing all grasp I had on myself.

I guess I might be dead... or not, as when I opened my eyes I could see myself infinitely falling into a multi coloured void. In each and every direction the only thing that could be seen was my image, always looking away and in the same direction as my original self. A very similar kind of an illusion that you can experience when inside a box of mirrors, except this one instead of becoming greener and greener and eventually fading away into nothingness was actually incredibly clear and... real. I swam trying to closer to any of the copies but to no avail as the distance remained static, no matter how much I struggled.

Is this what the after life was? What every religion and every belief system tried to condense into a human understanding? Even if I am currently experiencing it I don't understand how anything works here, and I never understood it for the indefinite amount of time I spent here. But because of this I could analyse everything. Every wrong decision taken by myself and by humanity in general as I learned from my recently found passion. The more I analysed the more confused I got and the more I discovered... until I eventually thought it all and just stopped.

In the end I arrived somewhere... I was laid on my back, face up right into the burning shining sun. I could breathe the air around me again! I could feel the coldness of whatever I was laid on, I Could feel all of my body, legs, fingers, head, everything! As I finally got a grasp of myself again, I got up and started looking around, like a sonar scanning its surroundings and I found out that was in a completely new place, unknown to me.

I was now sitting on a stone piece of sorts, with a lot of green around me: trees, bushes, grass and nature in general. The realisation hit me that I was on the top of a hill from where a river could be seen flowing into an accumulation lake bellow. A place far away from the monotony and monochromaticity of the old cityscape I was accustomed to. At the base of the hill there were only plains, but as you got closer to the flowing water you started entering a forest of some sorts. Now that I look closely to it all, nothing looks like the nature that was present in our reality, as the forest, the water, the stone mountains in the horizon... all of them look off? Like they were made of some kind of alien materials the composition of which were probably never created on our planet.

And just who are these people around me...?