In an office, a boss grilled their employee on the responsibilities of their job. Responsibilities the boss was supposed to oversee, but had ‘delegated’ to their overworked underling. Meanwhile the underling worked to appear appropriately servile between brief expressions of anger or envy whenever their superior wasn’t looking.

It was a dynamic not unfamiliar to many on Earth, but despite these similarities, the room would never have been mistaken for a normal office, and the two beings within never mistaken for human.

“You’re sure the System writers have cleansed the game of the previous inferiors’ alterations?” The boss asked as they sat in a plush chair, the chair’s similarities to wood and leather at odds with the pure metallic sheen of the rest of the room.

“Yes, Superior, I went over every detail. No trace of the inferiors’ corruption remains within the System.” The employee lied as they shifted uneasily in their seat, a simple chair made of the same metal as the floor and the walls, created by the room like every other furnishing within the office. All but one, which the employee took a longing glance at when their Superior turned their attention to the floating screen in front of them.

“Good. Good, everything is in order then. Launch the towers and the atmospheric blockade, then tell the entertainment department they have my permission to begin broadcasting. You’re dismissed.”

The employee nodded and rose, their chair melting back into the floor as they did so. With a bow, the employee muttered, “For the prosperity of the Worldspire,” as protocol dictated, before leaving the office.

Hah, I knew he wouldn't truly look over the reports himself. The employee thought as he made his way down the hall. As if we could have gone over every detail of every tower with the workforce they left us. Purging everyone with an ascendant or descendant who was rumored to be a member of the lesser cult took out a third of our number! How they let things get that bad is beyond me, but I suppose I should be grateful. So many losses made it easy to climb this far. At least we managed to remove the 'Mana Weaver’ class, and players won't be able to edit the system itself any longer.

As the employee walked through rooms full of underlings, their eyes lingered on the desks, chairs, and machines, all made from the floor and walls, and thought back to their boss’s chair.

We scanned the majority of the towers and their System, there shouldn’t be anything left in them to cause another… Restructuring of our floor, but I’ll need to keep an eye out for anything suspicious. If I play my cards right, any minor alterations can be played off as ingenuity on my part to make the game more interesting, and anything too serious can be blamed on my boss if I report it first. If he gets fired, maybe I'll be the one to get promoted to Floor Overseer! Sarax Seer-Twelve sounds much better than Sarax Floor-Twelve. I might even go up two Admin Tiers!

Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.

<----->

Back on earth, people's lives were soon interrupted as every webpage on the internet now led to a single website. Any attempts to close the webpage or interact with anything on the device short of unplugging it or removing the battery would fail. The website displayed a single video, which began playing automatically after five minutes from when it first appeared.

In the center of the video, for a single frame, a being with greenish-blue skin, four arms, two antenna, and compound eyes sat behind a metal desk. The image was replaced immediately after with that of a white skinned human male, with graying brown hair and a blue suit with a red tie, giving a grin that showed too much teeth to be welcoming, and staring at the camera with pitch black eyes.

"Congratulations inhabitants of Planet Earth, you've been invited to play the universe's greatest game, translated into your language as The Struggle of Souls! I'm here to be your announcer of dramatic or entertaining events throughout, of which we'll have two starting right now! First off you should now be seeing a red hue overtaking the color of your atmosphere, this is the sign of our atmospheric blockade taking effect. You humans don't seem to be a multi planet species, but you sure like throwing things into your upper atmosphere and beyond!" A laugh track played, as the man flashed another too large grin and winked at the camera.

"This will help ensure you cannot send communications or transport yourselves offworld. This may have the side effect of cutting off whatever functions your satellites up there are supposed to have, but I assure you you'll soon have much bigger things to worry about!" The man flashed a grin and winked again as the laugh track played once more, though this time the laughter turned to screaming near the end.

"This brings us to our second order of business! The deployment of our System Towers. These will be periodically picking up people at random from all over the world, until there's not a single soul that hasn't been in one. They'll attach the System to your soul, granting you the potential to obtain incredible power, which you'll need to survive the monsters within it, as well as the ones that will begin to appear outside of it. Surviving and getting stronger will be a daunting challenge, but power, wealth, and even fame await those of you who succeed. Give it your all, good luck, and most importantly, remember to be entertaining!"

With that the man gave a grin and waved, the illusion of a human flickering out for half a second as the alien took his place, continuing to wave with two right arms at the camera from a desk turned to metal once more. The video ended then, and any browser or app displaying it closed itself automatically.

Meanwhile, in twelve separate locations around the globe, twelve cylindrical towers, each one half a kilometer in diameter and three kilometers tall, made of a black metallic material appeared floating five kilometers above the earth's surface. They stayed suspended in the air for only a minute, before they plummeted down onto the earth with no regard for the buildings or people underneath. As chaos and destruction ensued, hundreds of people disappeared as the towers around the world claimed their first victims.

The game had begun.