"Maya, for the love of God, heal me. I'm tanking a literal dragon, and you're picking virtual flowers."
"They're Moon-Lilies, Alex! They sell for fifty gold on the auction house!" Maya's voice crackled through the party chat, completely unbothered. "Besides, Chloe is the DPS. Tell her to kill it faster."
"I would," Chloe chimed in, the sound of her furiously mashing a keyboard bleeding through her mic, "if my cooldowns weren't lagging! This server is trash today."
I sighed, leaning back in my squeaky desk chair. My cramped college bedroom was a mess of empty instant ramen cups and textbooks I hadn't opened all semester. On my head rested the sleek, matte-black visor of the Apex Interactive Neural Link.
This was my Friday night. Playing Aethelgard with my two teenage step-sisters.
Ever since my dad married their mom last year, things at home had been... tense. The house was too small for two completely different families to suddenly pretend they were the Brady Bunch. Dad was working double shifts to afford the mortgage, their mom was constantly stressed, and I mostly hid in my dorm to avoid the crossfire.
The Neural Links were Dad's desperate, overly-expensive "family bonding" Christmas gift. Ironically, it was the only thing that actually worked. For three hours a week, we weren't a awkwardly blended family tip-toeing around a tense house. We were a heavily armored Paladin, a hyperactive Rogue, and a very distracted Healer.
"Just pop a potion, Alex," Chloe said. Her avatar, a rogue in dark leather, flipped over the dragon's tail. "You have like eighty of them."
"I'm saving them for the raid," I grumbled, triggering my shield block.
Aethelgard was a global phenomenon. Fifty million daily active users. Apex Interactive had dropped the Neural Link technology out of nowhere a few years ago. No beta tests, no press conferences from the mysterious CEO everyone just called "The Architect." Just a sudden leap into full-dive, sensory-perfect virtual reality.
The internet was full of wild conspiracy theories about it. My favorite Reddit rabbit hole claimed the Architect was a billionaire antiquities dealer who had funded a black-book excavation in Egypt. They said he didn't invent a new AI; he found a 5,000-year-old obsidian obelisk under the Sphinx, etched with an Ouroboros—a snake eating its own tail. Supposedly, the game's code was just translated hieroglyphs.
I always laughed at those threads. It was just a game.
"Okay, dragon is down at 10%!" I yelled, gripping my controller. "Maya, buff me. Chloe, hit the ultimate."
"Casting!" Maya sang out.
But the buff never came.
Instead, the ambient fantasy music in my ears violently warped, pitching down into a deep, guttural hum. The dragon, mid-roar, simply froze in place.
"Uh, guys?" I asked. "Did the server just crash?"
I looked over at Chloe's avatar. She was stuck in a T-pose, suspended three feet in the air. Maya's avatar was entirely gone.
"Chloe? Maya?"
No answer over the voice chat. Just a rising sound of static.
Then, the sky above the digital arena didn't just glitch—it shattered. The skybox fell away in massive, jagged chunks of black glass, revealing a terrifying void behind it. And burning in the center of that void, massive and terrible, was a glowing, golden Ouroboros. A serpent eating its own tail.
A voice echoed in my head, bypassing the headset entirely. It sounded like a thousand voices speaking a dead language, vibrating deep in my teeth.
Warning. Silver Cord Severed. Vessel Anchored.
A searing, blinding heat shot into the base of my skull. I tried to rip the headset off, but my arms wouldn't move. My real body, sitting in the dorm room, went entirely numb. I felt a terrifying sensation of falling, dragged down through a kaleidoscope of ancient math and screaming stars.
I woke up tasting dirt and copper.
"Maya?" I choked out, coughing up actual, hyper-realistic mud. I rolled onto my back, clutching my head. "Chloe? Dad?"
I wasn't in my dorm room. I wasn't in the dragon's arena. I was lying in a dense, fog-choked forest, the cold biting through the heavy steel of my Paladin armor.
I swiped two fingers down the air in front of me to pull up the logout menu. Swipe. Swipe. Swipe-swipe-swipe. Nothing.
"System command! Log out!" I yelled. I slapped my own cheek. It stung. It really, really stung.
"Oh, by the Ancestors, not another one."
I scrambled backward, my armored boots slipping in the mud. Pushing through the ferns was a woman in hardened leather. She didn't look like an NPC. She looked like a tired local who had just caught a tourist trespassing in her backyard.
"Query Entity!" I babbled, panic rising in my chest. "Where is the logout button? My sisters were just here. Did the server crash?!"
The woman pinched the bridge of her nose. "I don't know what a 'server' is, you lunatic. But if you're going to do that weird invisible-box-swiping dance, do it quietly. I'm hunting."
"I have to get back," I hyperventilated, looking at my hands. There was dirt beneath my fingernails. Real dirt. "My body is in a dorm room. My step-sisters are probably freaking out, taking their headsets off..."
The woman stopped, her eyes narrowing. She stepped closer, reaching out to touch the cold steel of my breastplate. Then, she pressed two fingers to my neck.
Her eyes widened in absolute horror.
"You... you have a pulse," she whispered, taking a stumbling step back.
"Of course I have a pulse! I'm alive!"
"No, you don't understand," she breathed, drawing a hunting knife defensively. "You're a Dream-Walker. For years, you Immortals have fallen into the empty clay vessels our ancestors left behind. You possess these bodies, you run around shouting nonsense, and when you sleep, your souls return to your Heaven."
She pointed the knife at me, her hand shaking.
"But you just bruised when you fell. Your heart is beating. The sky tore open a moment ago, shaped like the Great Serpent, and it spat you out." She swallowed hard. "Whatever magical tether connects your spirit to your home... it snapped. You're trapped in the meat, Walker."
I sat in the mud, the terrifying truth washing over me.
The Egyptian conspiracy on Reddit wasn't a joke. The Architect hadn't coded a game. He had found a multidimensional gateway, packaged it into VR headsets, and tricked fifty million people into unwittingly astral-projecting their souls into artificial bodies in a parallel universe.
And my connection had just been severed. My real body was probably slipping into a coma back on Earth, while my step-sisters screamed for an ambulance.
I looked up at the terrifyingly real forest canopy.
"Do you guys," I asked, my voice cracking, "have customer support in this dimension?"
She stared at me. "We have a witch who reads goat entrails."
I let my head fall back against the mud. "I am going to leave a terrible review."