Empty cans and crumpled snack wrappers covered the floor around my chair, forming a sad little mountain range of caffeine and bad decisions. The only light in my room came from my monitor — pale, bluish, flickering every time the game calculated something heavy. My eyes burned, but my hands were steady.
Two years.
Two years playing this damn game on Ironman — the mode where one death erased everything. No save files. No checkpoints. No mercy. And now, on top of that, I had chosen Apocalypse difficulty, where every enemy hit 600% harder and evolved like they had a personal vendetta.
And somehow… somehow, I had done it.
My finger hovered over the final dialogue choice. The pixelated world froze, acknowledging my victory, silent for the first time in hours.
I leaned back and finally let myself breathe.
Then I glanced at the chat.
espadamagica:No way—HE ACTUALLY DID IT!!!
gosto de batatas:BROOOOO YOU REALLY DID IT WTF YOU BEAT THE IMPOSSIBLE GAME
I laughed, exhausted.
Art:Of course, chat. Two years of pain. Two years of suffering. Thanks for staying with me 'til the end.
My smile was real — shaky, tired, but real. I rubbed my eyes, ready to thank everyone properly, maybe cry a little, maybe—
A notification blinked onto the center of my screen.
A window I had never seen before.
White text. Black background. No UI. No game border.
Just a message:
"Congratulations, Adventurer.We are truly impressed by your resolve.Would you like to begin a new journey…in REALMODE?"
The cursor began to blink.
Once.
Twice.
The live chat froze.My screen dimmed around the edges.And suddenly, it didn't feel like a game anymore.
The cursor blinked.
Once.
Twice.
Three times.
My chat kept moving, but the messages suddenly felt far away, like voices underwater.
gosto de batatas:HELLO???? HE'S JUST STARING AT THE SCREEN
espadamagica:click it bro what are you doing
More messages flew up, but I barely read them.
The notification window didn't look like anything from Eternal Dominion.
No borders. No art. Just flat black, and thin white letters that felt… sharp.
Congratulations, Adventurer.We are truly impressed by your resolve.Would you like to begin a new journey…in REALMODE?
I moved the mouse.
The cursor slid across my desktop.
It went straight through the window.
…Okay.
I frowned.
Alt+Tab. Escape. Nothing. The keys made their usual little clicks, but the game didn't minimize, and the notification didn't close.
Chat kept screaming.
randomuser42:IS THIS A SECRET ENDING??
espadamagica:CLICK YESSSSS DO IT FOR CONTENT
gosto de batatas:if you don't click I'm unsubbing 😡
I huffed a shaky laugh.
"Calma, chat," I murmured, more to the empty room than to the mic. "I'm trying."
The words didn't even show up in my own ears right. Muffled. Like someone stuffed cotton inside my head.
My cursor hovered over the center of the black window.
There wasn't a "Yes" or "No" button.
Just more text, slowly appearing, letter by letter.
In Ironman, you played knowing that one mistakemeant the end of your journey.
You still walked forward.You still chose the hardest path.
We are curious, Art.
Will you walk forwardwhen the pain is real?
I froze.
My name.
On screen.
Not my username, not "ArtisanMage" or whatever dumb nickname I'd used when I was twelve.
Just Art.
The cursor stopped blinking.
Two words appeared, side by side.
[ ACCEPT ] [ DECLINE ]
My throat was dry.
"This is a prank," I whispered. "Some dev console thing. Hidden event. You're tired, that's all."
No one answered.
The room stayed the same: walls in need of paint, curtains half-closed, a cheap fan turning lazily in the corner. The can of energy drink on my desk, half-finished and warm. The faint hum of my PC.
Normal.
Except my chest felt too tight.
Except the shadows at the edges of the room seemed thicker than they should.
"Real mode, huh…?" I tried to joke, voice soft. "What, are you gonna delete my account?"
The monitor didn't care.
My finger hovered over the mouse.
I could decline.
I could laugh it off. Tell chat it bugged. Restart the game. Go to sleep for the first time in two days and pretend black windows didn't call me by name.
But it wasn't just curiosity burning in my chest.
It was… something else.
Two years of my life, poured into this one world.
Nights where the only thing keeping me from collapsing under my own head was the thought of logging in and seeing familiar names, familiar places. Bosses that felt more like old enemies than pixels. Characters that had somehow crawled out of the screen and sat beside me when the room felt too silent.
Real mode.
"What's the worst that could happen?" I muttered.
Some part of me, the tiny rational piece still awake, answered:
You.
I clicked.
The moment my finger pressed down, the sound in my room cut off.
Not faded.
Cut.
The quiet was so sudden it made my ears ring. Chat froze mid-sentence. The buzzing fan stopped. Even the soft hum of the PC died, like someone yanked the plug from the entire building.
The only thing left was the glow of the monitor.
The black window filled the screen completely now. No taskbar, no icons, no anything. Just letters.
[ ACCEPTED ]
Initializing REALMODE.
Warning:No save files.No restarts.No separation.
My heart stuttered at that last word.
"Separation from what?" I asked.
The black deepened.
For one absurd second, I thought the monitor had simply turned off.
Then the darkness moved.
It was like something was behind the screen, pushing out, stretching the surface like thin rubber. For a blink, I saw the faint outline of a hand pressing against the inside of the glass, fingertips distorting the pixels.
My breath caught.
Cold tingled along my spine.
"Okay," I whispered. "Okay, that's—"
The darkness burst.
Not like glass shattering. Not like static.
More like ink spilling into water, in reverse.
The black rushed out of the monitor, swallowing the edges of my vision. My walls, my desk, my posters—everything sank under it. It wasn't even that the room vanished; it was that my eyes forgot what the word "room" meant.
Panic flared.
"I changed my mind," I said, voice breaking. "Stop. Cancel. Quit. Whatever. I don't—"
The darkness didn't care.
Something hummed around me, low and steady. Like distant machinery. Or… a heartbeat.
For a moment, there was nothing. No up or down. No body. Just awareness, floating in a place that didn't have space.
Then, somewhere deep, I heard it.
A familiar tone.
The sound the game used when you opened the character sheet.
[ SYSTEM BOOT – ETERNAL DOMINION ]
Loading…Linking…Binding…
The words were in my head, not in front of my eyes. Like someone whispering directly into my thoughts.
If I had a body, my hands would have been shaking.
"Wait," I tried to say. "I didn't say I wanted to—"
The hum grew louder.
Error: No separation detected.
Adjusting…
Realmode parameters:– Pain: Enabled– Death: Permanent– Choices: Immutable
Proceed?
"No," I said.
The darkness answered anyway.
[ PROCEEDING. ]
Something grabbed me.
Not a physical hand. More like gravity deciding it liked me too much.
I fell.
There was no wind, no sensation of air rushing past. Just the awful, gut-deep awareness of dropping, of being pulled toward something huge and bright and—
—
Pain hit like a tidal wave.
Not all at once. It came from everywhere, but it felt… layered. Bones first, as if someone had poured molten lead into them and let it cool crooked. Muscles next, sore and cramped and unfamiliar. Skin last, burning and freezing in patches.
I tried to breathe.
Something hard and cold pressed against my back.
Metal bands dug into my wrists and ankles when I moved.
My eyes snapped open on instinct.
Light stabbed them.
I flinched.
The ceiling above me was too white.
Not the cheap white of cracked plaster in my room, but smooth stone, veined faintly with gold. Lines of softer light ran along those veins, pulsing slowly, like a heartbeat turned into architecture.
I knew that ceiling.
My throat closed.
No way.
I blinked against the brightness, tears prickling. Shapes swam at the edges of my vision—tubes of glass set into walls, faint vapor drifting, shadows moving.
My neck screamed when I tried to turn my head. I managed a few degrees.
The room came into focus in pieces.
White stone walls, carved with sigils I recognized more by shape than meaning. A large circular array under the slab I lay on, lines and runes intersecting like a spiderweb of light. The air smelled of alcohol, incense and something metallic.
A lab.
The lab.
Solaris Empire research facility. Subject chamber. Early game cutscene. The one I had watched a hundred times from a safe distance, controller in hand.
It was never supposed to feel this real.
"It worked."
The voice came from my right. Male, tired, edged with something sharp.
A figure stepped into view.
Long white coat, trimmed with gold at the edges. Dark hair pulled back loosely. A thin, crystal tablet in one hand, stylus in the other. There were bags under his eyes that the game's model had never shown.
"P-Please…" My own voice startled me. It sounded rough, weaker and younger than I expected. "Turn down the… the light."
He blinked.
Then he made a small, surprised sound.
"Well," he said. "Reflexes intact, at least."
Another figure appeared on my left.
Robes instead of a coat. Soft white, layered, embroidered with the emblem of a sun over a crown. The woman wearing them had hair braided back from her face, streaks of silver among the gold. A small crystal hung at her throat, glowing faintly.
She moved closer, staff in hand.
"The Radiant be praised," she murmured, relief threading through her words. "His eyes are open."
She leaned over me, and her gaze met mine.
Warm. Measuring. Tired.
"Can you hear me?" she asked.
I swallowed.
My tongue felt like cotton.
"Yes," I whispered.
The crystals around the room hummed louder for a heartbeat, then steadied.
Somewhere near the door, metal scraped softly against stone.
I turned my eyes that way.
A knight stood there.
Armor polished, but not decorative. A sword hung at his hip, shield resting beside the door. His hair was a shade darker than the woman's, cut short. His posture was relaxed, but there was a tension there—like a bowstring waiting.
His face…
My chest hurt.
Leon.
Not a character model. A man.
He watched me with the sort of quiet, measuring gaze you only got from someone who'd been told exactly how dangerous you could be and exactly how fragile you actually were.
The man in the white coat stepped closer again, blocking part of my view.
"Subject 17," he said, tapping his tablet with the stylus. "Do you understand me?"
Subject 17.
Hearing it out loud was… worse than seeing it.
That was my lore tag.
The one I had picked on purpose, laughing alone in my room, because "Failed human weapon in tragic route sounds fun."
I had never expected to hear it while feeling my own pulse thudding weakly against restraints.
I forced my mind away from that.
Focus.
Observe.
Everything felt wrong, but that didn't mean I could stop thinking.
"Yes," I said. My voice scratched at my throat. "I… understand."
The man studied me closely, eyes flicking over my face, my pupils, the way my fingers twitched against the cold metal.
"Name?" he asked.
A thousand answers wanted out.
My full name. My stream handle. "The idiot who clicked accept."
Instead, I said the one the System had put on that status screen so many times.
"Art."
The priestess's eyebrows rose slightly.
"Just Art?" she asked.
"For now," I murmured.
The man in the coat hummed, typing something into the tablet.
"Refers to himself by chosen given name," he muttered under his breath. "Cognitive frame intact. No immediate dissociation."
"Doctor Graymark," the priestess said softly, "this can wait until he's stabilized."
Graymark.
Right. Elliot Graymark. Minor NPC, important in the lab sequence, dead in three bad endings if the containment fails.
Seeing the faint stubble on his jaw and the ink stain on his cuff made him feel… more solid. More breakable.
"It can't," he replied, not unkindly. "The Council wants an assessment before they decide which way to panic. If they're going to waste all our work, I'd like to know how quickly."
He looked down at me again.
"Art," he said. "Do you remember… anything? Before waking here?"
I did.
My room. The black window. Chat. The notification.
Earth.
The words piled up behind my teeth.
If I said them, what would they hear?
"I was… in a room," I said slowly. My head pounded. "Dark. A screen. Light. Then… something asked me a question."
Graymark's pen paused on the glass.
"A question," he repeated. "What kind of question?"
Whether you're self-aware enough to know this is insane.
"Whether I wanted to start something new," I said instead. "And then… nothing. Falling."
The priestess's hand tightened on her staff.
"A sending?" she murmured. "A vision?"
"Or a side effect of the rite," Graymark said. "Hallucinations aren't uncommon when you tear someone's soul half out and shove it back in."
He said it clinically, like discussing a broken instrument.
My fingers curled against the metal.
The priestess shot him a look.
He ignored it.
"Any memories of this place?" he asked me. "Not… now. From before. Does this room feel familiar?"
Too much.
Every line. Every sigil. The exact number of light crystals in the ceiling. The tiny crack in the far wall where, in one route, containment failed and something seeped through.
"Yes," I said.
His eyes sharpened.
"How?"
I swallowed.
Think.
In-game, Subject 17 had fragments of memory. Flashes of previous cycles. Echoes. The lore had loved that theme—repetition, suffering, blurred identity.
I let my gaze drift over the room, slow and deliberate.
"I don't know," I lied. It tasted bitter. "It feels like… something I saw in a dream. A long time ago. Parts of it. Not… everything."
Graymark watched me.
He wasn't stupid.
But he also wasn't omniscient.
"Dreams," he repeated, unconvinced but filing it away. "Fine. We'll come back to that."
He tapped the tablet again.
"Can you move your fingers?" he asked.
I tried.
My hands felt like they belonged to someone who had slept wrong for a week. Heavy, numb, with pins and needles dragging through tendons.
But they moved.
Not gracefully. Not steadily.
My fingers twitched, then curled into a weak fist.
"Good," Graymark said. "Toes?"
I scraped my heels against the slab.
The restraints bit into my ankles.
My feet obeyed, barely.
The System flickered at the edge of my vision.
Thin lines of pale blue text formed just beyond where anyone else could see.
[ STATUS – SUBJECT 17 ]
Name: ArtClass: Fragile GeniusCondition: Arcane Collapse Syndrome – Severe
STR: 7VIT: 6DEX: 11AGI: 10INT: 19PER: 18SEN: 20
HP: 34 / 100Mana: 220 / 220
My breath hitched.
It was one thing to see those numbers as stats on a screen.
Another to feel them.
Weakness in my limbs that matched the low STR. The constant ache in my chest and the thin, too-fast heartbeat echoing VIT. The sharpness with which I noticed every twitch of light and shadow, every shift in the room—PER and SEN turned up so high it hurt.
The System text pulsed once, acknowledging my awareness, then faded until it was just a faint outline.
"Pulse is erratic, but holding," the priestess said. "His channels are… loud."
She closed her eyes briefly, as if listening to something deeper than heartbeats.
I watched her, fascinated despite myself.
The game had given her three lines of dialogue and a healing animation.
Here, I could see the small scar at her throat, the way her fingers twitched when she relaxed, like she'd spent years channeling power through them.
"What's your name?" I asked before I could stop myself.
Both she and Graymark blinked.
"…Sister Elara Vance," she said. "Of the Radiant Crown."
"Elara," I repeated.
The name fit her better out loud.
She studied my face for a moment, as if trying to decide if that simple question was innocent or dangerous.
"And I am Doctor Elliot Graymark," the man added dryly. "Since we seem to be trading names."
I almost said "I know," but bit it back in time.
"Graymark," I said instead. "And… Captain?"
My gaze slid to the knight by the door.
He straightened slightly when I addressed him.
"Leonhardt Vaelor," he said. His voice was steady, deep without trying. "Captain, Fourth Company, Solaris Central Guard."
Leonhardt.
In the game, he had always just been "Captain" in the text boxes. Hearing the full name gave it weight.
"Nice to meet you," I said.
Leon's mouth twitched, like he almost smiled and thought better of it.
"For now," Graymark cut in, "I'm more concerned about whether you're going to live long enough to be rude to all three of us again."
He tapped the tablet once more.
"Subject 17—Art," he corrected himself, like the word tasted strange, "you're suffering from Arcane Collapse Syndrome. Your body can hold an abnormal amount of mana, but your channels are damaged. Pushing too hard will break them. Do you understand?"
"Yes," I said.
I understood better than he knew.
One overcast afternoon, alone in my room, I had watched Subject 17 in-game try to cast one spell too many and collapse, bleeding from eyes and nose. The screen had gone red. Game Over.
That memory lived somewhere under my ribs now.
"We can stabilize you," Elara added, her voice gentler. "To a point. But this will not… go away."
I met her eyes.
"I wasn't expecting it to," I said.
My voice surprised me.
It sounded… calm.
Not because I wasn't afraid.
Because the fear had settled into something else. A heavy, steady weight. Like sand piled at the bottom of an hourglass.
Graymark and Elara exchanged a glance over my head.
Leon didn't move. He might as well have been carved from stone, except for his eyes. Those were very much alive, tracking every word.
Footsteps sounded outside the door.
A soldier's voice, slightly muffled through stone.
"Captain Vaelor, Sister Vance, Doctor Graymark," he called. "You are requested in the Upper Annex. High Council session has begun. The Crown Prince expects an updated report."
The room's temperature seemed to drop a degree.
Graymark sighed.
"Of course he does," he muttered.
Elara's shoulders tightened.
Leon's jaw clenched almost imperceptibly.
Crown Prince.
Caelum Solaris.
I had watched him break this world more times than I wanted to admit.
Now he was above us somewhere. Real.
"Restraints," Graymark said briskly. "We'll see if he can sit. I'd prefer to know how far he gets before he collapses while we're still in a warded room."
Elara frowned. "Elliot—"
"If the Council decides to drag him in front of them," Graymark cut in, not unkindly, "they won't wait for your rites, Sister. Better he tries with us than with them."
She closed her mouth on whatever she'd been about to argue.
Leon stepped forward without being told.
He moved to the side of the slab and began unfastening the metal bands at my wrists. His fingers were efficient, practiced. Not cruel.
Cold air rushed over my skin as the restraints loosened.
My hands felt suddenly weightless. Then heavy.
Leon freed my ankles next.
"Slowly," Elara warned. She moved to my other side, staff in one hand, the other hovering near my shoulder. "Sit in stages. There is no need to prove anything right now."
There was.
To me, at least.
But I nodded.
I turned onto my side.
Pain flared bright for a moment, then dulled to a throbbing ache. My arm shook when I tried to push myself up. Leon's hand slid between my shoulder blades, steadying me without taking over the movement.
Stone was cold under my palm.
I smelled incense and something like lemon oil from Elara's robes.
With their help, I pushed myself upright.
The world tilted.
Blackness crept in at the edges of my vision, closing in like curtains.
I sucked in a breath.
[ WARNING ]VIT strain: Severe.Mana flow: Unstable.Risk of collapse: High.
Not now.
I focused on small things.
The pattern of veins in the ceiling stone. The faint scratch on Graymark's tablet. The way Leon's gauntlet felt under my hand—hard and warm at once, metal over skin.
The darkness retreated a little.
"Good," Elara said quietly. "Stay there. Breathe."
I did.
In.
Out.
The System's warning dimmed to a dull glow.
Graymark made a note.
"Better than expected," he said. "The last three prototypes lasted less than five heartbeats sitting up."
Elara shot him a look.
He didn't apologize.
"What now?" I asked, voice hoarse.
"Now," Graymark said, "we see whether the Council will let us keep you or decide you're an abomination that needs to be quietly erased."
Elara winced.
Leon's hand tightened slightly on my back.
My stomach flipped.
I knew some of the Council routes. Some variations ended with Subject 17 being quietly "decommissioned."
That would be a very short Realmode.
I swallowed.
"Do I… have a say?" I asked.
Graymark considered that.
"Not officially," he said. "Unofficially… if you manage not to collapse on the floor or spontaneously explode in holy fire when you meet them, that will help."
"Reassuring," I muttered.
Leon made a sound that might have been a low, amused huff.
Elara exhaled slowly.
"We won't throw you to them," she said. "Not like this. Let them argue over reports first. When they finally call you, you'll be standing."
She said it like a promise.
I clung to it.
Curiosity burned under my bone-deep exhaustion.
The Council. The Prince. The city. The people whose lives I had watched from behind a screen.
I wanted to see all of it.
To walk streets that had only ever been lines of pixels.
To hear the wind in the Ashen Frontier. To see Frostveil's snow. To stand in Nocturnis' shadowed alleys and Verdant's forests and—
Pain spiked in my chest.
The System hissed.
VIT strain increased.Calm recommended.
Okay.
One thing at a time.
I sat there on the slab, shaking, held up by a knight I had watched die more times than I could count, under the eyes of a priestess and a scientist who did not yet know how many ways this could go wrong.
Realmode.
No save file. No restarts.
No separation.
I was not just playing the story anymore.
I was inside it.
And whether I wanted it or not, it had already started.