Kenji arrived home in his small, cluttered room. He connected the black cartridge to his PC and attached his old, scratched VR visor. He lay down on his bed and pulled the visor over his eyes.
System: Link Start.
Instead of the usual cheerful startup music, there was only darkness and an icy silence.
Then, a single line of white text floated in the void.
SCANNING BIOMETRICS...
Kenji felt a strange, light pressure behind his eyes. It wasn't a scanning beam; it felt as though the system were boring into his brainstem.
SUBJECT: KENJI ASAHINA
STATUS: TIER ZERO (CIVILIAN)
CONDITION: ATROPHIED.
"Hey," Kenji protested. The system's blunt honesty stung.
The screen flickered, and the world materialized with a jolt. There was no soft transition. Kenji slammed face-first onto a cold, metal floor. The smell of rust and transformer oil was overwhelming. This was more than VR; it was sensory overload.
He scrambled up. He was in a dark, industrial corridor. His avatar was a simple, unarmed figure in grey overalls.
OBJECTIVE: SURVIVE.
WEAPON: NONE.
"Where is the tutorial? Where is my inventory?" Kenji's heart began to hammer. The fear was acute and real.
Hiss.
Twenty meters down the hall, a ventilation shaft opened. Something dropped out. It was a robot wolf, the Cyber-Hound, made of stripped metal and exposed wires. It let out a low, mechanical growl that vibrated in Kenji's gut.