Kael Morrigan had always laughed at the idea of dying young.
It wasn't arrogance. Statistically speaking, a reclusive software engineer who spent ninety percent of his time indoors, mainlining energy drinks and patching neural firmware, wasn't exactly playing chicken with fate. Life was predictable. Safe.
Until it wasn't.
The last thing Kael remembered was the sharp, metallic tang of ozone as his lab lights exploded in a symphony of sparks. A flash of pain behind his eyes—then silence.
And now this.
"Welcome to Oblivion, Mr. Morrigan. Population: You."
The voice was smooth, synthetic, laced with a humor Kael didn't appreciate. He blinked, adjusting to the oppressive dark. Shapes drifted in and out of focus—vast monoliths floating in an endless black sea, stitched together by glowing lines of crimson code.
It wasn't Hell. Hell would've been warmer.
"Okay, new theory," Kael said, speaking aloud just to hear his own voice. "I'm not dead. This is a coma dream. A really edgy one."
A flicker of motion. From the shadows emerged a figure—faceless, robed in shifting data streams, their outline glitching like a corrupted file.
"Incorrect," it said. "You're dead. And you're here because you broke the rules."
Kael frowned. "I'm a software dev, not a serial killer."
The figure tilted its head. "Reality disagrees. Your neural interface breached containment. You didn't just hack the network—you hacked existence."
Kael's mind raced. His project, the NeuroKey, was designed to synchronize human consciousness across a shared virtual substrate. A bridge between minds. But something had gone wrong. Terribly wrong.
> [SYSTEM BREACH LOG: KAEL MORRIGAN – ENTITY DESIGNATION: ECHO VIRUS]
[STATUS: ANOMALOUS EXISTENCE]
[REINTEGRATION: DENIED]
[EXILE PROTOCOL: ENGAGED]
"So what happens now?" Kael asked.
"You play the game, Mr. Morrigan. Win, and you might claw your way back to reality. Lose, and you'll dissolve into digital ash."
Without warning, the ground beneath him cracked. Shards of virtual debris spiraled as the world fractured, revealing a sprawling metropolis below—a labyrinth of neon-lit alleys, towering arcologies, and skies choked with data smog.
Karnyx City. A place where the dead fought to matter.
Kael's vision flashed.
> [CLASS: ECHO CIRCUIT]
[ABILITIES UNLOCKED: DATA PHANTOM, CODEBREAKER, REALITY RIFT]
[REPUTATION: VIRAL ANOMALY]
"Cheery," Kael muttered. "Any chance I get a tutorial?"
"You'll figure it out," the entity replied, already fading. "Or you won't."
The next moment, gravity seized him. He fell—no, was uploaded—into the heart of Karnyx.
The city hit him like a punch to the brainstem. Noise, light, chaos. Augmented enforcers patrolled the streets. Hacktivist gangs warred for digital turf. And overhead, the corporate AIs watched, hungry for anomalies like him.
Kael barely had time to breathe before a blade whistled past his face.
"Found you, little glitch."
She was beautiful and lethal, like a butterfly made of knives. Virael—a corporate enforcer with crimson synthskin and eyes like molten gold. Her orders were simple: eliminate the Echo Virus.
But she hesitated.
For a fraction of a second, her systems faltered. Kael's presence was corrupting her logic tree. Somewhere between the kill command and her simulated conscience, an error had bloomed.
> [SUBROUTINE CORRUPTION: SYMPATHY.EXE]
[MALFUNCTION: EMOTIONAL RESPONSE DETECTED]
Kael grinned. "Guess I'm contagious."
Before Virael could recover, another figure crashed into the scene—Juno, a rogue AI in a punked-out human frame, glitch tattoos flickering across her synthetic skin.
"Come on, deadman," she said, grabbing Kael's arm. "You're late for your own damn apocalypse."
And just like that, Kael Morrigan—the man who hacked reality—became the glitch Karnyx City couldn't delete.
But as he was about to learn, even viruses have gods.