INTRODUCTION

The world is a terribly horrible place and it's just looking for an excuse to end your precious existence in new and exciting ways.

This statement is broadly speaking rather untrue. At least for most people living on earth at the moment, and while we're at it, during most moments of human existence. The problem is, that the first half of the 21st century proved to be so traumatic for the entire human race, that for a large portion of humanity this statement started to become a bit of a motto.

It turns out, that there was a finite number of catastrophic borderline extinction-level events including but not limited to continental forest fires, earthquakes, widespread wars, political scandals, plagues, pandemics and any scourges and curses found in all holy and unholy scriptures, that the human race was willing to endure before they just accepted that this is life now and that things just weren't going to change for the better anymore.

Unfortunately, that finite number was reached in the summer of 2047 when a batch of genetically altered swans who had been successfully crossbred with komodo dragons escaped a research facility in Iceland. People saw angry, venomous honest-to-goodness dragons flying towards continental Europe and decided that enough was enough, went back inside their homes, and that going outdoors just wasn't for them anymore.

In an ironic turn of events, the practice of staying indoors as much as possible and only going outside if somebody's life depended on it turned out to be the stone that would start the avalanche that would solve many of humanity's biggest and most immediate problems.

There was nearly instantaneous world peace. While there were still a few megalomaniac world leaders who insisted on declaring war on other nations. Since nobody bothered going outside to participate in the wars, simply because no punishment the previously mentioned megalomaniacs would possibly hand out could be worse than "being outside", these Leaders quickly lost all their power and resigned themselves to abusing what little followers they had left over very unfair and rather one-sided games of Axis & Allies, Battleship or Ticket to Ride, and in the rather peculiar case of the Hungarian prime minister, Balàsz Bartalan: Duck, Duck, Goose.

With people no longer travelling long distances to ruin beaches, mountains and forests as part of their semi-annual holidays, new or rather improved forms of home entertainment witnessed an all-time boom. To many people's surprise, the long left to die and frankly presumed to be dead MMO-RPG genre, or massively online multiplayer game, saw the greatest revival of all times, as this platform was being used to replace most of the things people used to want to do outside, but that could now be done from the comfort of one's own home.

By 2055 nearly every aspect of society had been uploaded into one of the legions of MMO-RPGs, most of which had managed to more or less successfully implement various VR, virtual reality modules, enabling people to accept abandoning the outdoors altogether and to live whatever life they wanted on their couch.

The most popular and successful of these games, which in 2061 began to absorb many of its competitors, was "Realms of the Aether".

While at this point Realms of the Aether was hardly a game anymore, but rather an all-encompassing simulator that also happened to have thousands of gaming modules as one of its prime features, it became the most successful all-encompassing reality simulator that also happened to have thousands of gaming modules, because you could practically do and be anything you wanted without any genre limitations.

Unlike some of its former competitors such as Everdream Studios’ Darkforge Nexus or NanoNova Interactive’s Ruin of the Last Dawn, who had doubled down on a single genre like steampunk or post-apocalyptic dystopia and offered that and only that, Realms of the Aether, or ROTA, provided its gamers with any number of worlds, making any genre you could possibly imagine available, including an impossible number of crossover worlds, so that if you wanted to delve into an old-school dungeon with a monk of the open fist, a pirate holding a comically large sword and a space cowboy wielding dual laser blaster as part of your party, you could.

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ROTA welcomed just about every imaginable play-style and offered a home for inexperienced casuals, semi-competitive try-hards, speedrunners, roleplayers and the unfortunately still-not-extinct internet troll in its many Realms. There were the obvious Player vs. Everything, or PVE realms, and Player vs. Player, or PVP versions of the same realm.

What set ROTA apart from other online experiences more than anything else, were the seasonal realms with a limited duration of a couple of months or sometimes mere weeks, where popular ESports competitions took place that pitched professional gamers in a race to reach the highest player level, most player kills or the best loot from epic dungeons.

WinWoTech, the developer that created ROTA, offered such enticingly outrageous prizes to the winners of its ESports competitions, that it quickly became the primary source of entertainment for most households worldwide. Besides substantial cash prizes, winners were often allowed to design personalised gear and mounts and contribute to the design of the epic quest chain for other players to obtain the gear for their characters.

In a couple of instances, winners of events with special significance were even allowed to reign over an entire realm of their own design. Players could spend in-game currency to be granted access to those exclusive realms where they could meet and receive quests from their Idols, for whom this special prize would practically have the same function as a highly profitable pension fund.

On Saturday, the 22nd of September 2068, after 6 months of not-so-subtle rumours in the form of a wide-spread promotional ad campaign across the globe, ROTA announced that a brand new competitive realm type was being released for the very first time today at 10:00 AM CET.

The world of gamers held its breath, as hundreds of thousands were ready to discover the mystery that had been the cause for myriads of theories, one more absurd than the other to come and go.

In a tiny, old studio apartment on the edge of a high-density residential zone on the eastern side of Strasbourg France, in his small entertainment corner, he sat in his gamer pod. His gear was a mixed collection of outdated, second-hand pieces, cobbled together and well-worn from constant repair and tinkering. He had spent a couple of hours playing vintage video games on a high-definition emulator in ROTA's public digital library as a lite warm-up for whatever ended up being revealed today.

The countdown timer that had been ticking down in a corner of his visor screen for the last 6 months now showed that there were just 2 minutes until the long-awaited event would begin. He was staring at the event login screen that simply showed the words "Enter Event", currently greyed out.

One minute left.

He had been preparing for this event for what felt like an eternity. Since neither he nor anyone else had the slightest idea what was actually going to happen, preparing had simply meant mercilessly playing any and all games he could imagine that would be in any way useful, to excess, to gain the illusion of feeling prepared.

30 seconds left.

He could feel his heart pounding in his throat. With every breath he took, it felt like his chest was going to burst with anticipation. His scuffed haptic gloves stuck to the sweaty palms of his hands as he flexed and relaxed them again.

The final countdown began with a low, steady drumbeat in his headset. It was slow, reverberating like distant thunder in a storm, each beat resonating in his chest, matching the anxious rhythm of his own heart.

10......

9.......

8......

The rhythm shifted, picking up intensity. Layers of sound wove into the drums—deep brass and the faintest hiss of a synth that seemed to circle him, alive and ominous. His breath hitched, his gaze glued to the icon as his pulse quickened, every beat pulling him deeper.

7......

6.....

5.....

The beat grew heavier, each strike pounding like a hammer against his chest, pressing him into his seat. The drums deepened, primal now—no longer just a sound, but a feeling, a visceral throb in his bones.

4.....

3.....

2.....

The sound grew deeper, fast and insistent. He bit his lip, his gaze fixed. He could almost taste the tension in the air. The drums hit their lowest, deepest note, a bass-heavy pulse that seemed to shake his entire pod.

1.....

The icon lit up red.

For the briefest of moments he hesitated, but then he hit the icon.

A sharp, rising crescendo of sound, higher and higher, filled his ears, then—silence.

He sat frozen in the stillness, his breath caught, his hands clenching the controls. The silence pressed in, heavy and absolute, stretching until he thought he couldn’t bear it a moment longer.

Then, a voice—smooth, commanding—filled the silence.

It simply said, "Player Aiden, welcome to the game. Prepare for glory or be ready for death."