The light’s all wrong.
Alex's first coherent thoughts struggled to make any sense to his subconscious as he was dragged through a dozen layers of disorientation and the endless fogginess of just rising from deep slumber.
It wasn’t the pale lights of waking in the middle of the night that was his familiar monitor forgetting to go to sleep.
Nor was it the streaks of sunlight that tended to assault his eyes from the gaps of his curtains.
This light was golden, warm, and it moved like living water across his closed eyelids.
Alex shifted as was struck with another bout of disorientation, as though something was awfully wrong.
He groaned as the strange light didn’t disappear so he rubbed his face and found something unexpected.
The clinking of metal and his entire head encased in it too.
heavy.
Did I fall asleep with the VR headset on again? Except this was different.
Angles were too square compared to the sleek VR set he had.
His fingers felt encased in something hard and cold as well– Realization arrived like a bucket of freezing cold water.
Alex snapped his eyes open and immediately regretted it.
The sky above him was a brilliant, bright blue that was punctuated by actual clouds, not the flat texture skybox of The Night Eternal, the last game he had been playing.
Rather it was genuine three-dimensional clouds that shifted and drifted with real depth.
The sun felt warm on his great helm.
He could smell grass and stone and something metallic he couldn't quite place. "W-What the… What’s going on?" he said only to freeze once more.
His voice came out deeper than it should have, resonating with an authority he had never possessed as a skinny-fat gamer that barely got any sunlight and was fueled by endless cups of coffee and energy drinks.
Alex sat up, and the world tilted.
Not from vertigo, but from sheer height.
He was taller.
Broader.
When he looked down, he saw not his own chest but gleaming plate armor that caught the sunlight and threw it back in golden rays.
The metal was engraved with intricate symbols that seemed to shimmer with their own inner light. "No.
No, no, no." Alex said as he scrambled to his feet and threw off the great helm on his head.
It clanged on the solid stone that surrounded him, but he wasn’t aware of it, rather he was focused on the sheer grace by which he had launched himself with that shouldn't have been possible in full plate armor.
Yet, it was worse.
Alex knew this armor.
He'd spent endless hours customizing every detail of it, agonizing over each enchantment slot, each legendary material component, and the rigours of making sure to upgrade it with every chance he got.
A ping echoed in his mind as words appeared in his mind.
The Radiant Bulwark set.
Complete legendary gear.
Owner - Livicitus LionHeart the Third.
He spun in place, taking in his surroundings with mounting horror.
Alex stood on a plateau of black stone that jutted from the earth like broken teeth.
All around him, ancient pillars lay toppled and overgrown with vines, their surfaces carved with runes he recognized from the game's final raid.
A tournament ground much like the Cell Sage in DBZ.
In the distance, a massive obsidian spire stretched toward the sky or what remained of it.
The top third had been sheared away, leaving a jagged stump.
The Obsidian Spire.
The Night King's fortress.
The site of the game's Final Battle.
The same game he had been playing right before he fell asleep.
But it looked wrong.
In The Night Eternal, this place had been pristine, preserved in crystalline perfection by the game's static environment.
Here, everything was weathered, ancient, buried under centuries of growth and decay.
Moss covered the pillars.
Trees had taken root in cracks in the stone and birds, actual birds, not texture-mapped sprites, that nested in the ruins. "Status menu," Alex said, his voice shaking. "Character screen.
Settings.
Logout.
Logout!" Nothing happened.
He tried the mental commands next, the muscle memory of four years playing the game.
Nothing.
No translucent menus appeared before his eyes.
No logout prompt.
No comforting interface to tell him this was just a game, just a dream, anything except what his senses were screaming was the truth. "This isn't real," he whispered to himself. "This can't be real.
I'm in bed.
I'm asleep.
I fell asleep with the headset on and I'm having some kind of fucked up lucid dream because I played too many hours and… Here this is proof–" He slapped himself.
Hard.
The pain was immediate, shocking, and real.
His gauntleted hand had struck his face with enough force to stagger him.
He tasted copper in his mouth.
When he touched his lip, his fingers came away with a smear of blood. "Oh god.
Oh god, this can’t be happening?" Alex tried to steady his breathing, which was difficult because he could feel every breath in a way he never had before.
Not just air moving in and out, but the expansion of his lungs, the way the armor shifted with each inhale, the pounding of his heart against his ribs.
Everything was too vivid, too detailed, too present.
Think, Alex.
Think.
He forced himself to focus.
He'd played The Night Eternal obsessively for years, knew every quest, every mechanic, every secret.
If this was somehow real.
If he'd somehow ended up inside the game then he should have enough information to figure everything out right? Yet, what if everything was different? What if he woke up before the game started by centuries, or worse, woke up millennia after. "Status page," he tried again, this time with more intention behind the words.
THe same golden words appeared with the echoing ping.
It took a second before his status page's first part showed up, suspended in the air before him.
LIVICITUS LIONHEART THE THIRD Level 4538 Paladin Supreme Title: The Eternal Radiance Status: Awakened Alex's legs gave out and he sat down hard on the stone.
Level 4538.
That was right.
That was exactly his level when he'd last logged off.
He'd been grinding the final hidden achievements, pushing for the theoretical maximum of 5000 that no one had ever reich, not that anyone else had reached level 4500 either.
He was meant to be a trailblazer, but not to this level and intensity.
The system message expanded, showing his stats.
Strength: 892,441 Agility: 445,223 Constitution: 2,913,551 Faith: 8,886,128 Holy Power: 42,530,275 Wisdom: 12,001,998 The numbers were absurd.
In the game, they'd been impressive but abstract.
Nothing more than just digits that determined damage calculations.
Here, looking at them, Alex could feel the power thrumming through his body like a caged star.
The holy energy suffusing his being pressed against the inside of his skin, begging to be released. "Dismiss," he said, and they vanished.
Alex took several deep breaths, trying to process the madness he was experiencing.
Okay.
Okay I’m inside my character.
This was...
something.
A coma? A dream? A neurological event? Some kind of– He froze as heard sounds coming toward him.
Footsteps.
Multiple people, their every movement echoing off the stone, and voices, speaking in a language he somehow understood despite never having heard it before. "–telling you, I heard something! Someone spoke!" Alex hurried to grab his great helm and strapped it to his side so he did not end up losing it.
He would need to check if he had an inventory later. "You're imagining things.
No one comes to the Mourning Plateau.
It's forbidden." "I'm not imagining it! There's someone up there!" Alex turned toward the sound and saw a small group of people climbing the plateau's eastern slope.
Six of them, dressed in simple robes and carrying what looked like offerings of flowers, candles, small wooden tokens.
Pilgrims? What are they doing up in the mountains? They reached the top of the plateau and stopped dead when they saw him.
For a long moment, no one moved.
The pilgrims stared at Alex, at Livicitus, with expressions of mounting shock.
One of them dropped their bundle of offerings, cracking the case she had been carrying the entire way. . "It can't be," the woman whispered, yet it was still caught by his hearing.
An older man fell to his knees. "The Eternal Radiance.
By God, he's returned." "No, wait–" Alex started to say, raising his hands.
The gesture made light burst from his palms.
Not much.
Just a flicker of golden radiance, barely brighter than a candle, but the pilgrims recoiled as if he'd summoned the sun itself.
The woman who'd spoken began to weep, another pilgrim prostrated himself on the ground thanking God for his deliverance. "Please, lord! Please, we didn't mean to disturb you!" the old man said in a hurry. "I'm not… I didn't…" Alex clamped down on the power instinctively, and the light vanished. "I'm not going to hurt you.
Please, just...
just tell me what year it is." The pilgrims exchanged confused glances.
The older man who'd first knelt spoke carefully, as if afraid of giving offense. "My lord, it is the 1247th year of the Sacred Peace.
The many years of peace that you...
that you sacrificed and gave us." 1247 years.
The timeline clicked into place with horrible clarity.
The Night Eternal's story had concluded in the year 247 SP.
Sacred Peace, the calendar counting from the defeat of the Night King.
If it was now 1247 SP, that meant... "A thousand years," Alex whispered to himself, feeling lightheaded. "I've been gone for a thousand years." But he hadn't been gone.
He hadn't existed.
This was a game.
These were NPCs.
Except they weren't moving like NPCs.
They were trembling, crying, staring at him with genuine human emotion in their eyes.
The woman who wept did so with real tears that left tracks down her dusty face. "My lord," the older man said, his voice shaking, "Forgive us, but we thought you were dead.
The legends say you fell in the Final Battle, that you gave your life to seal the Night King.
We come here to honor your sacrifice.
To remember." Dead.
They thought he was dead.
Alex tried to reconcile that with his memories.
The game had ended with Livicitus standing atop the ruins of the Obsidian Spire as he made the ultimate sacrifice and used a skill that was not part of the game.
Nothing more than a cutscene to show the character giving their lives up to seal the Night King.
Then credits rolled for a few minutes to top it all off.
Unless...
Unless the game's ending hadn't been the real ending.
Unless there was more to the story than what the players had seen.
An unreleased sequel.
Alex opened his mouth to ask more questions, but movement caught his eye.
Not from the pilgrims, but from behind him.
He spun, hand instinctively going to the greatsword in his inventory and the heavy shield that appeared in his hands.
Alex found himself staring at seven figures that had appeared without a sound.
Each one armed to the teeth and covered in heavy suits of metal.
All of them ready for war.