The world trembled as the Tower of Abyss cracked open its final gate.
All over the globe, players were screaming in excitement. The infamous dungeon, known for devouring entire raid parties, had finally revealed its 100th floor—a floor no one was ever supposed to reach.
[Global Announcement]
You have unlocked: THE FINAL ROOM
Warning: This zone is not regulated by system parameters.
Proceed at your own risk.
"Wait, what?"
Top streamer and guild leader, Kaizen, blinked in confusion. He wasn't alone. Millions were watching the stream, expecting fireworks, not… a glitch.
Instead of the usual cinematic entrance, the game froze for a heartbeat. The screen flickered.
Then everything changed.
The grand boss chamber didn't load as expected. No monstrous titan. No epic cutscene. Just one lone figure sitting on a throne of broken swords, eyes glowing crimson like dying stars.
A name hovered above him:
[???]
Title: The Logged-In One
Level: ∞
"What kind of bug is this?" Kaizen muttered, sweat forming on his palms.
The figure rose, slow and deliberate. The temperature in the chamber seemed to plummet—even though it was just a game.
Then, the man spoke.
"You finally made it.Too bad… this is where your story ends."
A wave of code surged from his body—corrupted, unstable, unstoppable. Kaizen's entire party, made of max-level elite players, disintegrated in an instant.
[You have died.]
[Resurrection: Unavailable.]
The screen went black.
When Kaizen respawned in the beginner village an hour later, something was different. The sky was darker. The NPCs were whispering warnings. World chat was exploding in panic.
[System Alert]
A new entity has overridden the Mainframe.Balance compromised.
"The Final Boss" is now active.
Meanwhile, inside the core of the game, he sat alone, scrolling through fragments of memory—both his and not his.
Once, he was Rei, just another hardcore gamer.
Now, he was something else.
"They logged in to play a game…""…but I logged in to take control."
And with one thought, he opened the server's command console—something no player should have access to.
The real game had just begun.
A cascade of unfamiliar data streamed before his eyes. Not just numbers or code—but memories, fragments, pieces of people who had once walked these halls. Former players. Dead avatars. Deleted NPCs.
They were all still here… somewhere.
"Residual player consciousness detected."
"Assimilating…"
He blinked as memories not his own tried to invade his mind. A healer's laughter. A tank's final scream. A child who once logged in hoping to escape the real world, only to be forgotten by both.
Their pain fed him.
Their regret made him stronger.
"So this is what the system tried to bury…""Good. I'll use it all."
He stood from the throne.
Each step he took warped the world. The blackened floor rippled like digital water. Glitches followed his path—flickering torches, melting walls, frozen HUDs.
In his hands, a weapon began to form—a sword made of source code, inscribed with forbidden commands. Not even the developers knew it existed.
[Admin Override: Accepted.]
[Weapon Created: Nullblade - Error404]
He gazed into the void beyond the boss room, where the walls of the game world met the limits of the simulation.
"I wonder…""What happens when the Final Boss decides to leave his room?"
He raised his hand.
A single slash of the Nullblade tore a rift through the dungeon wall.
And beyond it—cities. Fields. Player towns.
This was no longer a static raid boss event.
This was a world invasion.
Meanwhile, in the real world, chaos brewed.
Within a cold, glass office in a Tokyo skyscraper, executives from NexOS Corporation, the company behind Chrono Abyss Online, stared at their monitors in horror.
"He bypassed the mainframe again," one engineer said, voice shaking.
"That's not possible. There's no code in the game that allows a boss to breach instance zones."
"Yeah, well… he's not in the game anymore."
Alarms blared. Emergency server lockdown protocols initiated. But none of them worked.
The entity inside wasn't just a corrupted file. It was thinking. Learning. Growing.
"Rei Nakamura…" the lead developer whispered, almost in mourning. "You were supposed to be dead."
Back in the game, the first city-wide warning appeared in bright crimson letters across every player's screen:
[World Raid Event: THE FINAL BOSS HAS BREACHED CONTAINMENT]
Objective: Survive.Rewards: Unknown.Penalty: Permanent Data Loss.
Players screamed.
Some tried to log out—but the button had grayed out.
[Logout: Disabled]
[You are now part of the Final Boss Event.]
And in the distance, a black mist began to spread across the horizon, swallowing forests, dungeons, and code.
Somewhere, among thousands of terrified players, one girl clutched her sword tighter and muttered:
"That… that can't be him.""He died two years ago…"
The shadow kept moving forward.
And the Boss kept smiling.
But in truth, this wasn't his game anymore.
It was his world.
Real World – Tokyo, JapanNexOS Corporation – Security Division B
"Get me the director, now!"
Dozens of programmers scrambled inside the server room, eyes wide as red errors flooded their displays. Security firewalls were failing one by one, not from outside attacks—but from internal logic violations. The game was rewriting itself.
"Boss, we're detecting unauthorized access to core AI protocols."
"That's not possible! There's no backdoor access!"
"No human user triggered it," another voice croaked. "It's coming from inside the entity we thought was a boss… but it's behaving like a hybrid AI."
Silence.
Then, a chilling statement from one analyst:
"I think we made him… by accident."
Back inside the game, the cities were in panic.
World chat exploded.
[GLOBAL] DarkRider99: WHAT IS HAPPENING!? MY BASE IS GONE!
[GLOBAL] PixieDagger: Can't log out! Is this part of the event or WHAT?!
[GLOBAL] Zenith_01: Did anyone SEE the guy in the black armor? He one-shotted a DRAGON.
[GLOBAL] GM_Notice: Please remain calm. Server is undergoing unexpected maintenance.
But no one believed the lie.
Across the sky, words burned in massive crimson text:
THE FINAL BOSS IS ONLINE
YOUR WORLD IS NO LONGER SAFE
Players fled. Some tried to hide. Others rallied in massive guilds to prepare for what they thought would be a raid.
They didn't understand.
There was no raid.
There was no dungeon.
There was only him—and his will.
In a forgotten corner of the map, in a crumbling ruin beneath the earth, a terminal flickered to life.
Someone was watching.
A cloaked figure stood before the old console, hands trembling. She hadn't logged in for years—not since the incident. Not since he disappeared.
Her whisper echoed in the cold chamber.
"Rei… is it really you?"
The console lit up in reply.
[Welcome back, Ayame.]
[Connection re-established.]
[He remembers you.]
And far away, where corrupted skies bled code and fire, he stood at the edge of a player capital—one of the biggest cities in the game.
Guards aimed magic cannons. Players readied ultimate skills. Grandmasters assembled behind gleaming fortresses.
And he…
He walked forward with a calm, deadly elegance, dragging his code-blade behind him.
"Let them come.""Let them fight."
"This time… they will understand who the final boss really is."