They told us the server would end. It was a sentence that fit into the back of my mind like an ordinary announcement—another news cycle, one more line in a game's lifecycle. I had watched Yggdrasil's trailer videos, read forum threads, and scrolled through posts that argued whether the shutdown would be a beautiful bow or the final erasure of a childhood. For years it had been the axis of my life's spare hours; for a long while it had been a quiet religion. Tonight, the bell finally tolled.
My name is Rio. I am, by the calendar I had been carrying in my head up until that sunset, twenty years old. I liked cigarettes more than I should and stories more than people. I liked Overlord obsessively—no, that is an understatement. I had studied it, replayed scenes, memorized lines the way some people memorize prayers. If life was a room, I had lived most of mine in the corner that watched other persons move through light and shadow.
Walking home that night, the city smelled like hot iron and rain that had mentioned itself but never came. Neon signs bled into wet pavement. The shop where I picked up cigarettes was still buzzing with life: a boy behind the counter laughing at something on his phone, a couple arguing softly in a corner. I walked a familiar route, the kind you can take with your eyes closed if you'd practiced enough. My hands were in my pockets. My head was full of NPC quests and the update patch notes I would scroll through when I got home.
Then, without a sound like a good punchline, two men stepped from an alley.
They were the kind of men who wore rage like a coat—dirty, heavy, too sure of the shape of their world to look for consequences. Machetes flashed. One thought to fling a joke at me; the other thought to make his reputation on my corpse. I couldn't remember being ready. I remember the first blade finding its home in my arm and how the air changed. It was not cinematic. It did not slow down. It was just a hot, sharp intrusion and then a sound like someone knocking on a wooden box. My knees gave out. I tasted iron.
Ordinarily, this would be where I describe fear, the mechanical panic that comes with a body betraying itself. Instead, there was an odd calm, clinical and detached, as if I were reading a passage in a book about someone else. Pain existed, but it lived in a different room from my thoughts. Perhaps that is how death announces itself to the unprepared: not with apologies, but with a sluggish politeness.
When the light finally broke—if it can be called light; it felt more like a cough from a distant machine—I was certain of one thing. The last thought I had about Yggdrasil's shutdown, the one I'd been rehearsing like a lover's name, folded itself between my ribs and I exhaled it into a world I no longer inhabited. I didn't scream. I could not.
Then: a void with texture. Coldness crawling in slow threads. The sensation of being unstitched from a life made of small, ordinary things. It frightened me—immense in a way that physical pain could not reach. I remember thinking: this is it. No more cigarettes. No more episodes to pause and rewatch. No more logs to grind. There was grief, simple and honest, for the things that had been mine.
And then, impossibly, the center of that blankness condensed into a single point and popped like a bubble.
When I came to, my lungs took air like someone waking up after drowning. The house I was in smelled faintly of plastic and lemon cleaner. My vision cleared to a ceiling painted a faded off-white with a hairline crack in the plaster. I turned my head.
There was a bed, neat enough to be suspicious, and beside it a machine that made the muscles along my spine go taut with recognition: a VR rig. Not the bulky antiquated models I had drooled over in magazines, but a slick, clinical arc with soft padding and a halo of luminescent nodes. It looked like something out of a sci-fi romance, or like one of those set pieces Suzuki Satoru might've used in any number of fantasies I had loved. My fingers brushed the mattress. They were warm. They moved without complaint.
I sat up. My limbs hummed with the borrowed solidity of someone else's body. At first I tested them like a clumsy child testing toys—lift an arm, wiggle fingers—then, as the shock dimmed into curiosity, I slid my feet off the side of the bed and stood.
There were no slash wounds. The ragged, bloody evidence of the alley attack had vanished as if it had never existed. Where my memory held jagged stabs of pain, my body offered the clean, hard lines of health. Muscles remembered nothing of being cut. My heart beat steady, almost annoyingly normal. For a moment, disbelief crashed through me like a wave I had to scramble up to avoid. I had died. I had been certain. And now I stood whole and unscarred in a world that smelled like lemon cleaner and ozone.
It occurred to me—one of those thoughts that creeps in like a small animal—that perhaps this was reincarnation. The word felt too large to belong to my narrow life, but there it was: reincarnation. The idea unlatched a thousand other possibilities, each more illicit and delicious than the last. I could become someone else entirely. I could be in Overlord. I could—God, yes—I could try to find Momonga. I swallowed.
Before I could indulge in fantasies, the question of identity rose up with a demanding voice. Whose body was I in? The answer, when I saw it, almost made me drop to my knees.
A mirror leaned against a wardrobe by the bedside, the kind people put in bedrooms when they wanted to practice smiling. I crossed the floor and peered into it. The face that looked back at me was not mine. It never had been. It was…familiarly beautiful in a way that made my breath stutter: hair like spilled silver, eyes the color of frozen lakes, cheekbones that cut light into sharp planes. The mouth was thin, expression reserved by reflex—or perhaps by some personality grafting that came with the flesh.
Kevin Kaslana.
The name echoed in my skull like a song I had been born humming. He was a character from Honkai Impact 3rd—my other, quieter obsession. White hair. Blue eyes. The sort of handsome that did not smile often because it wasted its charity. I felt my lips move and the sound that came out was low, measured—not the soft inflection I'd expected from myself, but a voice that belonged on the inside of coat collars and midnight promises.
"…Seriously. Kevin Kaslana?" I said to air, and the voice answered like a stranger. Cold. Controlled. It did not match the whine of excitement that threatened to pull at my ribs.
I clutched the edge of the mirror for something real to ground me. This body—this face—gave off an instruction manual tone. It felt as if the skin itself had decided on a mood. *It's strange…is this body forcing me to become a cold man?* I thought, and the realization made my chest ache with absurd expectation.
Acceptance, when it arrived, was not cinematic. It came like steam curling across a window: slowly, inevitably. I counted heartbeats and let the foreignness settle into the furniture of my mind. The initial wash of guilt—a prick at having stolen a life—surfaced, honest and quick. Whose days did I now hold? Was there someone out there missing this face? But the guilt was a small, polite noise next to the roar of possibility. If reincarnation required a body, then perhaps taking one that belonged to a fictional icon was a kind of mercy.
There were other, more practical matters. Where was I? When had this happened? I pawed the bed and found a phone. It booted up with the dignity of modern devices, silk-smooth animation and a home screen that felt like an old friend. The date blinked back at me in soft, antiseptic numbers.
2132.
My heart hit a tempo like a drumline. Two centuries from the slices of old forums and fan theories I had once used as time anchors. The idea that I was now living in 2132 made everything more immediate: the presence of VR machines, the crisp clinicality of the room, the faint hum against the wall that I assumed was a municipal system. More importantly, it meant something else.
*Yggdrasil*—the game that had been my hearth, the virtual cathedral I had lived inside and treated like a second sky—had shut down tonight. The ritual had been performed. Players around the world had logged off, some with tears and others with denials like new vows. I had been excited; I had been sure I would be there to watch the server blink out like a dying star. Instead, I had woken up in a different body, in a different time, with a universe's worth of fiction pressing at the windows.
The thought made me laugh, a thin, surprised sound. It didn't reach my eyes. My reflection remained composed, composed as a statue.
Of course, there were things I wanted—simple, childlike things. The idea of meeting Momonga, the skeletal overlord who had become an icon for an entire subculture of fans, made my chest ache with an almost adolescent longing. I knew in my bones that the world had rules: Overlord's mechanics, its layout, the kami of Ainz's throne. Would he exist here, in flesh and political gravity, or would he be a mythified relic? Even if he did not, the possibility of shaping a life around one of my obsessions made me move with purpose.
But before I galloped off into fantasies of palaces and skeletal monarchs, another more immediate dream threaded into me like a song.
Fu Hua.
Her name was a whisper on my tongue, a prayer and a confession. Fu Hua—my compass, the face in the empty center of my devotion. She belonged to another world entirely, one I had folded under my pillow and taken to bed for years: Honkai Impact 3rd. I had loved her the way people love impossible constellations—by memory, by the shape of things she made in my head. To have her exist here, to breathe under the same stars, was a hunger I could not deny.
My eyes found the VR rig again, the arc of potential, and something in me hardened. I imagined codes and servers and a technical labyrinth I might stumble through. I imagined, more plainly, being so good at this new existence that I could, somehow, carve a path for Fu Hua into reality—replicate the mind, the grace, the terrible tenderness I had built for her in wallpapered corners of my brain.
*I will make you real and alive,* I told the empty room, the words soft as incense. The face in the mirror did not flinch. There was a faint curl at the corner of my mouth that may have been satisfaction—or perhaps it was the body remembering a habit it had once owned.
There was a whole world here I could explore. There were questions like doors I wanted to toss open: was this some thread of the game-turned-verse, or had the shutdown been a key to another scheme? If Yggdrasil's end had been an ending in one dimension, had it become a beginning in another? I felt ridiculous and holy thinking that. It felt like stealing a religious phrase and wearing it as a jacket.
I dressed in clothes that were folded tidily in a drawer: a dark jacket, a shirt with a collar that could be buttoned to look respectable, a pair of trousers that fit with the ease of someone who had been measured for them. The mirror reflected the new silhouette, the borrowed dignity of someone who leaned into the cold. The house—if it could be called that—seemed designed for a single tenant. There were shelves with books whose titles I could not read; diagrams of star charts that looked like schematic poetry; a corner with a small desk and an unlocked laptop. The architecture whispered of someone who loved the boundary between the technological and the spiritual.
Every sensible part of my brain wanted to be cautious. *Find out who you were. Find out if anyone is missing the life you now hold. Learn the rules.* The more reckless part—the part that had followed anime plots like sacrament—wanted to climb onto the nearest roof and shout the names of fictional kings into the night.
I did both. I fed the pragmatic hunger first: I searched for identification tucked into the wallet in a dresser drawer. A teenage photograph stared back at me: someone younger than twenty, smiling with teeth too even, eyes the same blue as mine now. A name printed beneath; it was not mine, and yet it felt like a page torn from a book about someone I might have been.
I set it aside. The face in that photograph had a life I had not yet lived and a family I had yet to meet. I made a note to find out, later, whether they were missing. The moral calculus wavered and then resolved into a small, fierce necessity: I could not right every wrong, not yet. There was a world to learn. There were stories waiting.
When I finally sat before the VR rig, my fingers hovered over its controls like a pianist's over keys. The console's soft haptics confirmed my presence with a pulse of light. For a long, almost ceremonious moment I let my reflection in the machine's polished surface look back at me. The voice in my head—the one that had always been mine—hadn't changed, but it had learned a new language of quiet ambition.
Tonight the server had ended elsewhere. Somewhere, billions of lines of code had gone silent. Here, in a small house with lemon cleaner and a mirror, the end had turned into a beginning. I didn't know if this world was stitched from game data, myth, or something older and stranger. I didn't know if Momonga prowled some throne room of bone and power or if Fu Hua could be coaxed into existence by patience and will. I only knew the fact that anchored me: I had been given a chance. It tasted like metal and rain and the ash of fireworks.
Outside, the city hummed with the life of people who were unconcerned with catastrophic lore or the transmigration of fandom. Perhaps this new world would not allow me to find everything I wanted. Perhaps the price of living as Kevin Kaslana's reflection would be a loneliness sharp enough to cut. But the story had begun, and for the first time since the alley, my expressions matched the questions bubbling inside me.
I ran a hand across my face in the mirror and, for a sliver of time, allowed myself to feel what the new skin felt: the weight of cheekbones, the tug of jaw, the quiet hostility that lives in an expression that does not smile without good reason.
"Fu Hua," I whispered again, and this time my voice did not sound like a stranger's. It carried a promise. There are promises in stories, and there are promises between lovers, and then there are the dangerous promises you make to yourself when you know the map only begins where you stand.
"I will make you real," I said, and as the words left my mouth the VR rig's halo pulsed, almost as if in agreement.
Outside, the night continued exactly as it had before I died: indifferent, patient, full of small lives that did not belong to me. Inside, a man who was me in every way I had not expected—named Rio, given the face of Kevin Kaslana, alive in the year 2132—turned toward a machine humming with possibility and toward a story that would not end easily.
End.