「Disco Elixium」― The Path of Dynasty
◆ 第１章 エリュシオン ／ Chapter 1 — Elysium
In hindsight, maybe it was inevitable.
It didn't start with chosen ones and it didn't feel fictional from the start. No system message blinking into existence. No divine wheel turning in some ancient sky. Just silence. No sirens. No trumpets. Just a humid-ass Tuesday, thick with rain, the kind that made your skin itch like it knew something you didn't.
Sxmmjrs stood in his kitchen, shirtless, microwaving two day old spaghetti. The hum of the microwave felt louder than the rain. Outside, droplets crawled down the window like dying gods bleeding in slow motion.
Outside, the streets were quieter than usual, trying to pretend it was normal. A quarantine van hummed by, followed by two drones. No big deal. Just another update on the newsfeed.
"Sickness is still spreading, but only affecting adults," the news reporter said, trying to sound chill. "Youth under twenty-one remain mysteriously untouched." People were starting to ask if teenagers were carriers. Others said maybe they were the cure. The government said nothing and did even less.
People stopped asking why.
Nobody believed it would happen to them. Until adults started disappearing from homes. Full chaos in a few months. Just blink. Gone. Millions of orphans. Nobody talked about it too loud, like saying it out loud would make it real. But everyone knew someone who knew someone who'd left.
Daji (Sxmmjrs' real name) didn't care. Or, more accurately, he was too tired to care.
School was canceled. The internet was flooded with edits, Kobe TikToks, tons of conspiracy videos — and for the first time there wasn't a 2K game that year.
Social media was melting into chaos and nihilist shitposts. One week you were arguing tier lists, the next you were seeing your username show up in some "next to vanish" Reddit thread.
He messaged Jah: "u seen that vid? the one w rhea ripley disappearing mid fight"
Jah responded instantly: "another fine shyt gone to the virus"
Somewhere across the world, Liu Yuwei paused mid-makeup tutorial, her hand shaking as she looked past her ring light. There was no one there. But the mirror reflected a shadow that didn't belong to her.
Amirai closed his messaging app and whispered something under his breath. Something not meant for this world.
Yama gripped his controller too tightly while playing Tekken with Justin, unable to shake the sense that someone was standing just behind him, breathing through his skin.
Justin was alone on the game with Yama, scrolling TikTok with a cracked phone, when his dog started growling at empty air.
Tyzelr stared at the broken sword nailed to his bedroom wall. His mom said it came from a flea market. He dreamed it had a name, dreamed of being like Luffy one day, as he was recording content for his failing YouTube channel.
Crocy had headphones blasting pop music, drawing fan art in his sketchpad like it was muscle memory.
Sxmmjrs ignored all of it. He was used to ignoring things. The sickness, the silence, the static in his dreams.
He turned off the microwave, pulled out the soggy spaghetti, and sat back down at his desk.
Someone pinged him in the group chat with 8 of his friends: "yo have y'all been okay recently"
Lately the group chat had been dead. Only 7 members talking but they'd ignored that.
Jah messaged: "yo don't click that. sketch af."
It began as a blur.
Static. First in his headphones, then behind his eyes.
Not a moment of hype, no heavenly light nor infernal tremor to transcend the descent — just pain. Glitching pixels. Warped laughter that sounded like cries of children filled their ears. The world folded, pixel by pixel, like it was buffering.
His mouth filled with a taste he couldn't describe — like old metal and burnt sugar.
And then the reflection in his monitor moved without him.
He didn't scream.
He didn't get the chance.
—
Sxmmjrs woke with blood in his mouth. Not his own. It tasted sweet, too sweet. Metallic candy coated in old rot, black with hints of gold.
His limbs twitched against broken stone a building's collapsed husk, grey as ash but subtly pulsing with colors that shifted when not directly looked at. A mural that breathed.
It was night eternally. Impossibly night.
A black sky hung above, neither cloudy nor clear only void, the stars flickering like dying fireflies. Wind whispered in a language he couldn't parse, not quite sound, not quite thought. His fingers closed around gravel no, not gravel. Teeth. Molars. Still warm, filled with stench.
He coughed and rolled over; his vision pulsed double. Somewhere in the distance, something moved. It didn't walk. It moved. The sound was like flesh dragging across metal—a thousand ribs groaning open.
---
Sxmmjrs crouched beneath an awning twisted from steel and brass. Rain fell in beads; it wasn't water but condensed fog, slimy and iridescent. It sizzled on contact with his skin, leaving behind marks that glowed faintly.
"I can't just sit here," he told himself. He pushed upright, limbs twitching like someone else's nerves were borrowing his. Nearby: slanted buildings layered over each other, defying gravity—staircases leading to nowhere, doors floating in midair. Every window was smeared from the inside, as if something within had tried to escape. The glass bulged outward, veins pulsating under the surface.
He whispered, "Where the hell am I?" and the world answered back: "𝕰𝖑𝖞𝖘𝖎𝖚𝖒."
The voice made him shiver. The cold wasn't normal—it settled into his bones and sharpened his paranoia. He could hear something crawling beneath the cobblestones.
Jah ran.
It didn't matter where. The alleys here looped in fractals; architecture collapsed inward like spirals. Graffiti bled from walls, inked eyes watching his pass. His breath fogged the air in short bursts.
A humanoid figure lurched from the shadows a thing without a face, only a vertical jaw from brow to chest and a wingspan twice the size of any human tongue, covered in eyes.
When it screeched, it wasn't a sound.
It was a feeling.
It reverberated inside his skull, pressed into his organs. He saw himself in the scream—dying, twisting, breaking. His knees buckled and his hands sparked with light, unbidden and wild. Something within him answered—not instinct, but being. It was euphoric. Terrifying.
It wasn't strength. It was understanding.
The creature paused. Jah remained calm as cards spun around him in a calming, glowing, angelic light; he mouthed the words:
sihir-on->-synthesize-light-element->-generate-bow-and-arrow-shape->-mind's-image->-apply-set-limit-property.
Then the light shot forth.
---
Justin stood in the open near a tower bent like a once-powerful figure reduced to dust. Beneath him, the stone pulsated like flesh. His boots left impressions that bled not red, but shimmering black. He touched the wall…and it touched back.
His mind buzzed.
A voice whispered his name not aloud, not in any tongue. It was his name before he knew it: his first memory, his true self. He staggered back.
Justin sat back, hanging sideways from a bent streetlight, upside down and grinning like it made sense. For a moment, it did. Then it didn't. Then it did again.
Yama, nearby, vomited.
"Where the hell are we?"
Justin jumped, surprised and shocked before calming and shaking his head. "A dream, I hope…"
"Then wake me up from this bullcrap."
They looked at the stars. One blinked. It blinked back.
---
Tyzelr crouched with Liu Yuwei beneath the wreck of a hovering tram. It levitated above broken pillars like it was suspended on forgotten willpower. Liu reached toward a broken mirror embedded in the tram's shattered frame. Her reflection lagged—smiling before she did. Tyzelr touched the hilt of a sword that appeared in his hand without permission. It whispered back.
"Don't trust reflections," it muttered. Tyzelr thought to himself, "I think they're real here."
Mari stared at her reflection in a cracked window. It smiled back.
A distant scream ripped through the dark—present, urgent. Their skin itched. Their hearts beat faster.
Light shimmered faintly around their hands: colors no human eye should perceive. Symbols flickered in and out of vision, etched along the buildings and crawling along their veins. No one could speak of it—not yet. But they felt it. In their chests. In their thoughts.
A warm, haunting sensation.
Like discovering your soul had always been a locked door and now it was forced open.
Later, scattered and shaken, none of them would remember exactly how it began. Only that it didn't feel like a beginning. It felt like waking into something they'd never left.
The voices of others, the chaos, the being alone—everything.
Before they could think about turning back, they were forced to accept that this reality was both their present and their future: their wonderful, everyday descent down the rabbit hole.