The electric hum of servers filled Zeph's cramped bedroom as his fingers danced across the keyboard. Energy drinks littered his desk like monuments to his dedication, their empty cans catching the blue glow of his triple monitor setup.
"Come on, come on," he muttered, eyes bloodshot from twelve straight hours of grinding. The raid boss's health bar ticked down—98%, 97%, 96%.
Perfect. Just like every other night for the past three years.
His guild mates' voices crackled through his headset, coordinating the final phase. Zeph tuned them out. He'd run this encounter forty-seven times. He could execute his rotation blindfolded.
The power died without warning.
Everything went black. The servers' hum vanished. The AC stopped its gentle whir. Even the street lights outside his window blinked out, leaving him in absolute darkness.
'What the hell?'
Then light exploded back into existence.
But not from his screens. Not from anywhere he recognized.
A massive wheel materialized in the air before him, spinning with impossible colors that hurt to look at. Its surface rippled like liquid mercury, covered in symbols that seemed to shift and dance when he tried to focus on them.
At its center, a face smiled at him.
Not human. Not quite. The features were too perfect, too symmetrical. The eyes held depths that stretched beyond what should fit in any skull.
"Congratulations, Player," the face said, its voice echoing from everywhere and nowhere. "You have been selected for the Primordial Gacha System."
Zeph tried to speak. Tried to move. His body refused to obey.
The wheel began to slow, clicking past cards that flickered with images too complex to process. Burning swords. Crystalline armor. Creatures with too many eyes. Powers that made his brain itch just glimpsing them.
Click. Click. Click.
It stopped on a card that pulsed with gentle, golden light.
The face smiled wider. "Primordial Architect. How... fitting."
The card flew toward him, and for one impossible moment, Zeph saw what was etched on its surface. Not words or pictures, but a feeling. A sensation of breathing in starlight and exhaling possibility.
The image of glowing lungs burned itself into his retinas.
Then electricity arced through his gaming chair.
Pain beyond description tore through every nerve. His heart seized. His vision went white, then red, then—
Nothing.
---
Cold concrete pressed against his cheek.
That was the first thing Zeph noticed as consciousness crept back. The second was the smell—rust, decay, and something sickeningly sweet that made his stomach churn.
'I'm alive.'
The thought came sluggishly, wrapped in confusion. The last thing he remembered was...
The wheel. The face. The card.
'Primordial Architect.'
He pushed himself upright, blinking away the fog in his vision. This wasn't his bedroom. This wasn't anywhere he'd ever been.
Rusted rebar jutted from crumbling concrete walls. Moss and strange, luminescent fungi grew in the cracks between broken tiles. Somewhere in the distance, water dripped with metronomic persistence.
And he was small.
Zeph looked down at his hands. They were pale, thin, covered in cuts and grime. A child's hands.
'What the fuck?'
Panic clawed at his throat as he scrambled to his feet. He was maybe five-foot-six, wearing clothes that hung off his skinny frame like rags. His reflection in a puddle of stagnant water showed a face he didn't recognize—gaunt, hollow-eyed, maybe thirteen years old.
But the eyes. Storm-gray and filled with an intelligence that didn't belong in a child's face.
Those were his eyes.
Memory hit him like a freight train. Not his memories—someone else's. A different Zeph. A boy who'd lived in this broken world, who'd survived in these ruins since...since the Seattle Bastion fell.
Three years ago.
The memories were fragmented, incomplete. Flashes of running through rubble-strewn streets. Hiding from things with too many teeth. Scavenging for scraps in the skeletal remains of skyscrapers.
And dying. The other Zeph had eventually died when...
'When I took over.'
The realization settled in his gut like ice. He was a parasite wearing a dead boy's face.
A sound echoed through the ruins—something between a growl and a screech. Close. Too close!
Survival instincts that weren't originally his kicked in. Zeph moved without thinking, pressing his back against a wall and sliding toward a gap in the concrete that would hide his small frame.
'Think,' he told himself. 'Treat it like a game. New character, new world, figure out the mechanics.'
The growling grew louder.
This world ran on game-like rules. The memories were clear on that. People awakened to Systems at sixteen. Classes, Skills, the whole RPG package.
But he was thirteen. Three years to survive before he got his power-up.
'Unless...'
He thought about the card. Primordial Architect. The sensation of breathing starlight. Maybe that was his cheat?
Maybe he would be able to evoke a grand power that would instantly propel him into the legendary OP MC tag? But how would he activate this golden finger of his...
Carefully, quietly, he took a deep breath.
Nothing happened.
Another breath.
Still nothing.
'Great. Fantastic. I'm stuck as a powerless kid in monster-infested ruins with someone else's trauma and—'
The creature appeared around the corner!
It had been human once. Maybe. The basic shape was there, but stretched wrong. Its limbs were too long, joints bending in directions that made Zeph's stomach lurch. Its face was a ruin of exposed bone and hanging flesh, with eyes that glowed sickly green.
A Hollow. The memories provided the name, along with a surge of primal terror.
The thing's head snapped toward him. It smiled, revealing rows of needle teeth.
"Fresh meat," it whispered in a voice like grinding glass. "Been so long since fresh meat wandered down here."
Zeph didn't run. Running was what the old Zeph would have done. Running was what had gotten him killed.
Instead, he smiled back.
"Sorry to disappoint," he said, his voice steady despite the fear clawing at his chest. "But I'm more of a 'kill or be killed' kind of guy these days."
The Hollow laughed, a sound like breaking windows. "Big words for such a little morsel."
It lunged.
Zeph was already moving. Three years of survival had taught the original body things his gamer mind could never have imagined. He rolled left, came up with a shard of concrete in his hand, and drove it into the creature's knee.
Black blood sprayed across the wall.
The Hollow screamed, stumbled, and Zeph was already behind it. Another shard, this one longer, sharper. He jammed it up into the base of the skull where spine met brain stem.
The creature dropped like a puppet with cut strings.
Silence settled over the ruins.
Zeph stood over the corpse, breathing hard. The rush of combat faded, leaving him cold and empty.
'I just killed something that used to be human.'
And he had done it so easily at that. The thought should have bothered him more than it did. But survival was survival, and the rules here were simple.
Kill or be killed.
He wiped the blood from his hands on the creature's torn clothes and kept moving deeper into the ruins.
Three years until his System awakened.
Three years to survive until he could be strong enough to matter.
'Game on,' he thought, and disappeared into the shadows like the ghost he'd learned to become.
Behind him, something in the darkness began to feed on the Hollow's corpse.
The city of ruins never slept, and neither did its newest predator.