The funny thing about rock bottom is how fast you fall.
Just yesterday, I was at the top of the leaderboard, streaming to eighty thousand live viewers, sitting on a six-figure sponsorship deal, and pulling off impossible flick shots with the confidence of a man who knew he was untouchable.
I was a god in the FPS scene. Headshots were muscle memory. Twitch chat worshipped me. Esports orgs lined up with contracts like golden tickets. I was ranked #1 on DeadSector for six consecutive seasons.
And then the clip dropped.
A slow-motion feed of me tracking a cloaked player through a smoke grenade and deleting him with a pixel-perfect shot. Someone slapped on dramatic music, circled the kill in red, and added "EXPOSED" in flashing letters.
Today?
Banned. Doxxed. Canceled. Every clip I'd ever posted was under a microscope. Slow-motion breakdowns, pixel-by-pixel analysis, witch-hunts in every comment section.
"His crosshair snapped too fast. No human reflexes are that clean."
"He pre-fired through a wall—look at the angle!"
"Definitely using aim assist. Probably recoil scripts, too."
They called me a cheater. A fraud. The ban was instant. My sponsors vanished. "Cheater." "Script kiddie." "Human aimbot." Even my teammates turned on me.
And maybe they were right.
Because the truth?
I was hacking.
But that's a long story.
The important part is this: I was staring down the barrel of career death, fingers frozen above my keyboard. I tried to play again, to rebuild my reputation, when the screen glitched.
Not lag.
Not a crash.
An actual glitch—reality shattering, like a shot through a monitor. My entire setup went white-hot, then black. A line of code flickered across my vision:
[ERROR: SYSTEM BREACH – TRANSFERENCE IN PROGRESS…]
Then the world folded in on itself.
When the monitor exploded, I thought I was dead. Turns out, that would've been the easy option.
I woke up on a battlefield.
Not a virtual one. Real mud, real blood, real screams. A sky split by twin moons. A sword the size of a telephone pole embedded in the corpse of a tree the color of rust.
In my hands?
A bow. Floating status screen above it, glowing with stats and strange glyphs.
I'd never even held one before, unless you count that VR archery sim I rage-quit in five minutes.
Then came the voice.
"Player recognized:Avner Rhodes. Transfer complete."
A golden screen appeared, pixelated and twitching like a bad mod menu.
[CHEAT ENGINE™ - EARLY ACCESS BUILD]
[CLASS: Hack Saint]
[Starting Gold: 10]
[Cheats Available: Limited]
[Caution: Excessive use may destabilize local reality.]
A list scrolled before my eyes:
Aimbot.exe [Cost: 2 Gold] – All shots curve toward the nearest target's weak point
Wallhack.v2 [Cost: 3 Gold] – View enemies through walls
Auto-Dodge.macro [Cost: 5 Gold] – Automatically evade next fatal attack
Infinite Arrows (Trial) [Cost: 1 Gold] – Temporary quiver duplication
Below that:
Balance Remaining: 10 Gold
Warning: Gold cannot be regenerated naturally.
I just stood there, blinking. "This is a joke."
Then something roared in the distance—deep, guttural, and definitely carnivorous.
A red dot appeared on my minimap.
Something was coming.
Something big.
I fumbled with the bow. "I don't even know how to shoot this thing—"
Would you like to activate Aimbot.exe for 2 Gold?
[Y/N]
I hesitated.
And then, grinning like an idiot, I hit Y.
The world snapped into focus.
The bow raised itself.
I loosed the arrow.
It curved mid-air like a missile, punched straight through a tree, and nailed a charging beast between the eyes.
[HEADSHOT – +100 XP – Gold Remaining: 8]
I just stood there, shaking.
I had never fired a bow in my life.
But in this world, I didn't have to.
The beast hit the ground with a wet thud, steam rising from its cracked skull.
I didn't breathe for a full five seconds.
Not because I was stunned—though I was.
But because I half expected a ban screen to pop up.
"Violation Detected: Cheat Detected. Account Terminated."
But nothing came.
Instead, the cheat interface glitched again, like a bad console overlay.
[LEVEL UP – Rank: Hack Saint – Level 2]
[New Cheat Unlocked: SilentPatch (Removes aggro from enemies under level 5) – Cost: 1 Gold]
"Okay. So this is real."
The words came out of my mouth like someone else had said them. My hands were still shaking. I was used to adrenaline—but this wasn't some LAN tourney or ranked match. That thing could've actually killed me.
I knelt next to the beast's corpse. Scaly. Four fangs. Two eyes on either side of its head. Maybe a monitor lizard. Maybe a dragon's dumb cousin. Whatever it was, it bled red.
I was in a real world. With real monsters.
And my only advantage?
A pay-to-win cheat menu and 8 gold left to spend.
I turned to see a pack of beasts, moving like shadows with teeth—six-legged, lean, eyes glowing that same icy blue I'd come to associate with very bad things. Three rogues held the line, blades flashing, arrows flying, coordinating like pros.
But it wasn't going to be enough.
I saw her the moment she stumbled into view.
A hooded girl, maybe seventeen or eighteen, crouched behind the crumbling half of a stone pillar. Her bow lay shattered beside her—snapped clean down the middle. She was trying to pull a dagger from her belt, hands shaking, breath uneven.
And the beast stalking toward her was twice the size of the others.
It was playing with her.
I didn't think.
I just whispered, "Screw it."
Would you like to activate Aimbot.exe for 2 Gold?
[Y/N]
Y
Balance Remaining: 6 Gold
Warning: Gold cannot be regenerated naturally.
Time slowed again, the same unnatural calm that came with the cheat.
The bow lifted. The string pulled itself tight. I let the arrow fly.
It curved through the trees like a guided missile—dodging two fighting rogues and three smaller beasts—and drilled straight through the charging monster's eye. A burst of blood, a wet crunch, and the thing collapsed mid-lunge, sliding to a stop inches from the elf girl.
[HEADSHOT – +100 XP – Gold Remaining: 6]
For a moment, silence.
Then she shouted, "Thank's Elias!"
What?
I froze, still holding the bow. The heat of the shot hadn't even faded from my fingertips.
Who's Elias?
Was she talking to me? No one looked surprised that I was there. Not the girl. Not the other rogues still locked in combat. Not even the one dragging a wounded teammate back behind cover.
One of them—a tall guy with a twin-sword loadout and a jagged scar across his neck—called back, "Nice one, Elias! That's two saves today. You're getting sloppy!"
Sloppy?
I just saved her life with a literal cheat code. And you're telling me this isn't even my first time?!
The girl—hood half-fallen, silver hair streaked with blood and dirt—scrambled to her feet and ran over to me. Not cautiously. Not suspiciously. Like she knew me.
"Where the hell have you been?" she asked, half-laughing. "We needed that shot two minutes ago."
I blinked. "I—uh…"
She stopped. Her smile faltered.
Her eyes locked on mine. And I saw it—confusion. Subtle. Like someone looking at their best friend and realizing something is off by just a fraction of a degree.
"Wait…" she said slowly. "You're not…"
Before she could finish, the minimap flared red again.
[New Threat Detected – Class: Aberrant]
[Estimated Difficulty: ??? – Engage at Your Own Risk]
A distorted growl rippled through the clearing.
The remaining beasts stopped fighting. Heads snapped toward the ridge. The rogues froze.
Even the wind went still.
And then it stepped out from the tree line.
Tall. Wrong. Like a wolf had been shoved inside a man's frame and then set on fire from the inside. Its body shimmered with static, like low-resolution textures failing to load. Its eyes weren't eyes—they were two white-hot error symbols blinking rapidly.
[ERROR: ENTITY NOT RECOGNIZED BY SYSTEM]
What the hell?
I felt the Cheat Engine tremble—actually shake, like something was pressing against the interface. Trying to break in.
[Gold Exploit: LOCKED]
[All Cheats temporarily suspended]
"No—no, no, no, come on—"
I tapped the interface, but it was frozen. Glitched. A swirling icon in the center blinked:
"CHEAT ENGINE RECALIBRATING…"
I was blind.
The beast raised its head and let out a howl that glitched halfway through—cutting off with the sharp buzz of corrupted audio.
And still, the girl didn't run. She stepped in front of me, pulling the broken dagger from her belt.
"You're not Elias," she whispered. "Even if you're a Usurper... you're stuck with us now."
Then she turned to face the monster.
And despite every instinct screaming at me to run, to hide, to vanish back into a corner of this world and never come out—
I knocked another arrow.
I had 6 gold left.
No cheats.
No backup.
No clue what the hell I was doing.
But if this world thought it could throw corrupted nightmare-bosses at me?
It was about to learn what happens when you piss off a banned FPS god with nothing left to lose.