Kai Tanaka was halfway through writing a game loop when the power cut out.
He barely had time to register the smell of burning plastic, the flicker of his monitor, and the way his custom-built rig sparked like it was possessed. Then came the flash. White-hot. Instant.
Silence.
No pain. No falling. Just the sound of a fan spinning down into nothing.
When he opened his eyes, the world looked… familiar. But wrong.
Skybox. Flat textures. Grass that repeated every few feet like it had been tile-pasted by a lazy developer. Which made no sense—because Kai had used this grass texture. Two years ago. In a prototype he'd scrapped.
He stood up, dizzy. His hands looked normal. No HUD. No health bar. Just… a wide field, a broken castle in the distance, and a glitching rabbit stuck halfway into a rock.
"This is a dream," he muttered.
The rabbit jittered and let out a static screech before vanishing in a burst of polygons.
Kai didn't dream. Not like this.
Then something popped up in front of him.
[SYSTEM MESSAGE: Welcome, Patch #042]
Initializing WorldState…
Loading Behavior Trees…
ERROR: AI_Control_Nodes Missing
Proceed Anyway? [Y/N]
He blinked. "What the hell?"
Auto-confirmed. Proceeding.
Reality shuddered.
The trees shifted positions. The sky flickered. Something in the horizon stuttered like a corrupted video file.
Kai reached for his phone. It wasn't there.
His wrist buzzed instead. A device was strapped to it—a watch? No, a UI node. A tiny screen displayed a single line:
OBJECTIVE: Survive Initialization.
Then the sky opened, and the monsters fell out.