Cultists have opened a portal to a Lovecraftian-styled dimension.  Around the world, people go mad or transform into unspeakable things, and humanity faces an apocalypse of terrible proportions.  There is no escape.  In a last-ditch effort to have some semblance of a life, gamers around the globe are climbing into their gaming pods , and finding their frame rate already jacked to the max after logging into Darkest Knights Online, a world of dark fantasy filled with monsters and darkness that players were meant to cleanse.  That's the rub. The creator knew of the upcoming abyssal infection and laid out a path to eradicate the darkness not only from the virtual world, but IRL as well. Cushing, an out-of-shape horror fanatic, wanted nothing more than to crawl inside his pod, crank up the time scale so that time outside would become virtually meaningless to him, and live out his days among virtual monsters.  Little does he know that some gamers have aligned with the abominations and brought the madness into the virtual world as well and that they have created a way to eject gamers back into the real world and lock them out of DKO forever.  Once locked out, the players are quickly dealt with by the old one's minions.  The god of monsters recruits Cushing to unlock the ritual that will close the nightmarish portal in both the game and the real world.  He is partnered with a giant spider, the true heroine of the tale, a predator of extreme prejudice and a loner attitude to achieve his goals.  Along the way they encounter resistance and other monsters who form the vanguard that is humanity's last hope. Can three monsters and one man save two worlds?  Given the "hero's" affinity for acting without thinking and the fact that the team works as well as a rusty engine with nothing but gas fumes in the tank it's a highly dubious propoition at best.  Maybe the cowardly cur, the naive teen ogre, and the predatory spider can set aside their diferences long enough to make a real difference.  There has to be a reason that the god of monsters placed so much trust in a horror movie fanatic, right?