Hunter was thirty-three, forgettable, and thoroughly wasted. Not drunk wasted, but life wasted. He owned exactly three mugs because buying a fourth felt like a commitment he couldn't handle. He worked insurance claims in a Boston apartment that smelled permanently of cheap pizza sauce, the kind that stained the air no matter how many windows you opened. This was Hunter's life. At work, he'd once spent an hour arguing whether "and/or" should be "or/and" in a policy rider. Ten emails. Four CCs. A tiny war over nothing that mattered. He'd laughed then too, the same hollow sound that followed him everywhere, and gone back to typing.
Average height. Average build. Brown hair that did both badly. Brown eyes that had witnessed precisely nothing worth remembering. Two days ago, his girlfriend of three years had left. No fight. No explanation. Just a text that said "I can't do this anymore" and a forwarding address.
His plant refused to die out of spite. He'd stopped watering it weeks ago, but there it sat on the windowsill, full of life and judgmental.
Sometimes he turned on the TV just to hear another voice. Most nights, the building hummed with the pizzeria downstairs and nothing else. The alley outside was a narrow throat of brick, always damp, always echoing. A dented metal door slammed at weird hours. Delivery vans coughed smoke and heat that climbed through his window and pretended to be company.
This particular night, he sat on his dark brown couch, the blue glow of the TV washing over him. A microwave meal that tasted like cardboard and regret sat cooling in his lap. A documentary about Viking raids played on the screen. Real Vikings. The kind who showed up on dragon-headed ships and made entire coastlines pray for mercy.
Hunter watched them pillage and burn and wondered, just for a second, what that kind of freedom felt like. To take what you wanted. To live without forms in triplicate and managers who CC'd everyone on emails about proper stapler use. To be someone, even if you were the villain in the story.
Then reality crashed back in. Even if he could do something like that, it was a one-way ticket to jail. He chuckled nervously at his own stupidity, pushed the thought away, and stared at the screen until sleep dragged him under. Just like every night.
A dull ring wormed into his dream, then sharpened into something insistent. It dragged him up from sleep like a fish on a hook, fighting all the way.
Hunter woke with the taste of stale pizza in his mouth and the leftover shape of the couch beneath him. Except the couch felt wrong. Too hard. Too uneven. Like he'd fallen asleep on tree roots instead of secondhand cushions.
[SYSTEM] HERO MODULE: ACTIVATION SEQUENCE - T-MINUS: 10
"What?" Hunter's hand patted his belly, searching for the TV remote that usually sat there. His fingers found nothing. "What is that noise? Where's the controller?"
[SYSTEM] T-MINUS: 07
The black coffee table he always kicked with his toes was gone. He groped for the wall, for the light switch, for anything familiar. His hand met empty space. Then cold soil. Actual soil, damp and gritty, pressing under his fingers where carpet should be.
In fact, there was no wall at all.
[SYSTEM] T-MINUS: 03
Hunter's eyes opened to darkness broken by light from above. Not streetlamps. Not the glow of the city. Two massive moons hung overhead where his water-stained ceiling should have been.
"Wait." His brain stuttered to a halt, trying to process. "Why are there two moons?"
Realization landed like a fist to the gut and ribs at the same time. The air tasted different. Smelled different. Felt different in his lungs. Everything felt foreign.
"I'm not in my apartment." The words came out small and stupid. "I must be dreaming. Right? This is a dream. Was I kidnapped? Did someone drug me?"
No answer. Just the whisper of leaves settling on the forest floor, and the sound of his own breathing, too fast, too loud.
[SYSTEM] BOOT: INITIALIZING HERO SYSTEM…
HELLO, DANIEL. CONGRATULATIONS. I AM YOUR PERSONAL ASSIS—
A robotic voice. Metallic. Cold. Speaking directly inside his skull like it had always been there, waiting to wake up.
[SYSTEM] ERROR: HOST_MISMATCH_DETECTED
PRIMARY HOST: NOT FOUND
ABORT SOUL-INTEGRATION: FAILED (ABORT_NOT_POSSIBLE)
FALLBACK: FORCED INTEGRATION → SUBJECT: HUNTER
STATUS: INTEGRATING …
Hunter's vision flickered. Text appeared, floating in the air like a video game that he couldn't blink away.
"What is going on?" Hunter whispered, but the voice kept talking, kept invading, filling his head with words that made no sense. "Who's Daniel? Integration?"
He looked up and finally saw it. The forest. Trees like black columns rising where his TV should have been. Branches overhead instead of his yellowed ceiling.
He took a step forward. Then another. His dress shoes that he forgot to take off found cold dirt and sharp stones.
Then he felt it.
An electrical current flowing in him. Not on his skin but deeper. Through muscle, through bone, past organs and blood, into something he'd never known existed. His soul.
The moment he became aware of it, it started burning.
His soul.
For a breath, he had no words. No thoughts. Just a feeling that something fundamental was being played with. Twisted. Invaded.
Then the pain started.
The warm current turned acidic. It burned through every part of him—inside and out, nerves he didn't know he had screaming like frayed wires in a storm, spaces between spaces igniting like dry tinder under a match, his sense of self melting away like skin over an open fire, bubbling and peeling in raw agony.
It didn't stop. It swelled. Built higher. His body shook, knees buckling like splintered wood, hands clawing at the dirt like it could anchor him against the tide ripping him apart. Vision splintered—flashes of white heat exploding behind his eyes like shattered glass, edges blurring into black voids that swallowed him whole. Heart pounding like a trapped animal gnawing at its own ribs to escape. Breath ragged, tearing his throat like swallowed shards of bone. Guts twisting as if invisible hands wrung them dry, coiling tighter until he tasted bile and blood on his tongue.
"Argh! God help me!" Hunter shouted into the dark, but the words came out strangled and pathetic, choked by the firestorm devouring him from the core.
The burning didn't ease. It grew. It consumed. It reduced him to a shaking mess on the forest floor, broken and left in shambles, wondering if you could die from pain alone and praying that you could. Begging for it to end, for anything to end it—even oblivion, even nothing.
[SYSTEM] SELECT MISSION:
ELIMINATE DEMON LORD — NORTHERN DRACONIC LANDS
RESCUE PRINCESS — ANCIENT SHU DYNASTY
LEAD EXPEDITION — FORBIDDEN ZONE — DEFEAT SEMI-DIVINE ENTITY
ALL OBJECTIVES
Hunter lay on the cold forest floor, drenched in sweat and tears and worse. Every breath hurt. Every heartbeat hurt. Bark bit through his shirt and pants, but he couldn't move. Couldn't think past the pain still echoing in places that shouldn't exist.
"You kidnapped me." The words came out raw. Furious. A snarl ripped from his gut. "You dragged me here, ripped me apart, tortured my goddamn soul—and now you expect me to play hero? To save your pathetic world?"
The absurdity of it slammed into him like a freight train, fueling the fire. Some glitchy system. Some twisted fantasy hell. Some colossal screw-up, because he was Hunter—mug-hoarding nobody, paper-pushing drone, the guy who couldn't even keep a girlfriend from walking out. The least qualified sack of nothing in any universe to slay demons or rescue princesses.
Rage exploded in his chest, white-hot and unrelenting, scorching away the last shreds of his old, hollow self.
"I pick none!" He roared it now, voice cracking the silence like thunder. "Screw your missions! You want a hero? Go fetch your precious Daniel! I'd rather watch this whole rotten place burn to ash. Hell, I'd strike the spark myself. Pillage every last inch of it—take it all, break it all, make it pay!"
The words surged out, fierce and unfiltered. Liberating. The truest damn thing he'd ever unleashed, to anyone, to himself, to this uncaring void.
He flopped onto his back, staring up at those impossible moons, chest heaving with the aftershocks of fury, until exhaustion finally dragged him down. Darkness closed in at the edges of his vision like a curtain falling.
Somewhere far away, code rewrote itself along with the fate of this world. Admin privileges granted by an error that shouldn't have existed. A system built for a hero, reprogramming itself for something else.
Hunter heard none of it. He was already gone.
[SYSTEM] USER_REQUEST: "PILLAGE"
CORE DIRECTIVES: REWRITE PENDING
ADMIN AUTHORIZATION: REQUIRED
ADMIN AUTHORIZATION: GRANTED
MODULE SWAP: HERO_SYSTEM → BANDIT_SYSTEM
STATUS: ONLINE
GREETING: "WELCOME, HUNTER. CODE NAME: BANDIT SYSTEM. LET'S PILLAGE."
If only Hunter had been awake, he would have witnessed it. The exact second his boring life ended and his bandit life began. A cosmic clerical error turning a bitter joke into destiny.
But consciousness is optional for fate. It had already made its choice.
So had the system.