The cold hit first.
Not a surface chill. Not something I could shrug off by moving my shoulders or blowing into my hands. This cold cut straight through fabric and into bone, settling there as it had always belonged.
I dragged in a breath and flinched. The air gnawed at my lungs.
For a few long seconds, I just sat hunched on a plastic bench beneath a cracked bus stop roof while snow gently drifted sideways in front of me.
The street was empty. The light was too pale, too flat, like the city had been left on overnight and forgotten.
No helmet weight. No straps. No foam pressing into my cheeks.
Nothing between me and the world.
"Okay," I said.
My voice came out thin, drowned out by the wind. The sound didn't invite an answer. It just vanished.
I looked down at myself.
A dark winter coat, heavy and practical. Jeans. Boots. Thin gloves that were already losing heat. No logos, no familiar tags, nothing that anchored any of it to something I recognised.
When I shifted, the bench creaked like old plastic.
I pressed my palm against the metal pole of the bus stop.
Cold metal. A trace of rust. A greasy texture where posters had been torn away and left their ghosts behind.
The detail was too perfect. Too honest.
My stomach tightened as I lifted both hands to my face, half expecting plastic.
My fingers met skin.
I ran them over my cheeks, my brow, the bridge of my nose. Felt the sting where the snow melted and ran down my temple. Felt my pulse, quick and real, beating against the cold.
No headset.
My heart sped up like it had been waiting for permission.
"Menu," I said quietly, because my brain reached for the first lever it knew how to pull. "Open interface."
Nothing.
"Exit. Log out. Settings."
Still nothing.
"Status."
The wind pushed a fresh gust of snow through the shelter. Flakes landed on my eyelashes and melted, hot and cold in the same instant.
I closed my eyes and counted to five.
One. Two. Three. Four. Five.
When I opened them again, the street hadn't changed. The bus stop hadn't softened or pixelated or slid into anything else.
It stayed.
"Right," I said, my heart quickened a beat, because talking kept me from sinking into the silence. "So this is real."
I didn't like how easily the words fit.
Sitting still meant the cold would freeze me over. I shoved my hands deeper into my pockets, pushed myself up, and stepped out from under the shelter.
Snow struck me like a slap. My face reddened as the cold winds wrapped themselves around my figure.
Ahead, the road stretched wide: four lanes, a concrete divider, streetlamps casting pale islands of light onto asphalt. Buildings rose on both sides, glass and steel and concrete stacked into the dark. Some windows glowed warm. Most were dead.
Then the feeling hit.
Not a memory. Not a thought.
Recognition.
The kind that doesn't come with explanation, only with that sudden, sick certainty that you've stood somewhere before, except I hadn't. Not like this.
I turned my head slowly, taking it in.
The placement of the alley mouth. The corner store sign. The angle of a side street that disappears between towers.
Everything was in the right place.
The Southern Ridge. A small network of towns and cities at the edge of Advent's map. Far away from the conflict. This place was the starting town in the game, right next to the Academy, where people would playout the first half of the story.
As I realised that, it made my panic worsen.
I swallowed. My breath fogged thick in front of me.
I started walking.
Snow crunched under my boots. My coat rubbed the back of my neck, stiff with cold. The wind cut along the street as if it had practised this route for years.
My panic was rising. All I could think of was to move, to prove myself wrong by surveying my surroundings.
For a while, all I did was move and look.
The city was clean in a sterile way. There were almost no signs of life. The snow fell and stayed where it landed, undisturbed. It should have looked peaceful.
It didn't.
Most of the ground-floor lights were off. Behind a few windows, I caught silhouettes moving, someone crossing a room, a curtain shifting. One shape froze when it noticed me and didn't move again.
No one stepped outside.
I passed a café with chairs stacked inside, a closed bookstore, and a narrow alley that smelled faintly of trash and stale water. Snow softened the sharp edges of everything, like it was trying to make the city gentler than it was.
My body started to complain.
The cold was brutal. My fingers had gone numb. My toes were stiff in my boots. A dull ache settled into my thighs, like my muscles were arguing with the idea that this was normal.
I wrapped my arms tighter around myself and kept walking.
Blocks passed. The street opened into a plaza.
A frozen fountain sat at its centre, half-buried in fresh snow. Benches curved around it like ribs. The open space made the wind louder, sharper, more cruel.
No voices.
No footsteps.
Only the hiss of snow and the distant, muffled rise and fall of sirens somewhere far away.
As I looked at a towering skyscraper nearby, a holo banner flickered to life on its sides. I stepped into the plaza. Static crawled across it, then resolved into clean text.
CURFEW IN EFFECT: SOUTHERN REGION, THIRD DISTRICT
LEVEL 2 THREAT
CIVILIANS REMAIN INDOORS
AWAKENED REPORT TO LOCAL COMMAND
The message scrolled once, then held.
I stared at it longer than I meant to.
Curfew. Threat. Awakened.
The words landed in my chest with weight.
A faint shimmer glistened in my eyes.
Just a line of text, translucent and clinical, floating in the air ahead of me.
[CONDITION: MILD COLD STRESS.]
[RECOMMENDATION: SEEK SHELTER / INCREASE ACTIVITY.]
I flinched hard, almost stumbling back.
This sensation, my mind was tingling. As I looked at the hollowed-out transparent text floating in front of me, I reached out. My finger passed right through it, as if it were some sort of illusion.
Yet I knew it wasn't.
This strange warning, it was unmistakable.
As my focus sharpened on the words, a pressure stirred behind my eyes. Not pain, something closer to a click, like part of my mind had woken up and started labelling things.
I blinked. I knew this effect.
It was [Insight]. Or rather, a variation of it.
"Insight..." The word lingered on my tongue, and my thoughts settled in place.
I had chosen insight before I began my new playthrough to carry it over. I knew I had.
But
I peered down at my hands, the cold was too fierce, my breath fogged as I exhaled slowly, watching mist dissolve into the air. Finally, I looked back at the line, it flickered, then faded.
The wind answered by cutting straight through me.
"This...is not a game."
I knew it by instinct. As a man who'd played Advent at the highest immersion setting, there was simply no way I wouldn't recognise it. But this place? These sensations, these things that I saw?
They were all real.
My heart dropped. I felt sick to my stomach, and the panic that had faded jolted back in place. A heat rushed up my chest. It felt wrong.
I moved again, choosing a narrower street away from the open plaza. The buildings closed in, cutting some of the wind. My boots slipped once where snow hid ice, my foot skidding before I caught myself against a wall.
Concrete burned my palm with cold.
I held it there anyway, just to be sure it was concrete. Just to feel that sting and let it settle in my head like a nail.
Real.
The longer I walked, the more my thoughts tried to split into two tracks.
One reached for explanations that kept me safe.
The other kept counting details like evidence.
No cars on the main road. No music leaking from apartments. No clatter from kitchens. Even under curfew, a city wasn't supposed to sound like this.
It sounded held.
Like something had pressed a hand over its mouth.
I turned another corner.
The street narrowed again, older buildings on both sides, fewer windows, buzzing streetlamps that looked offended by winter. Snow collected in gutters and along doorframes.
I stopped without meaning to.
The emptiness hit properly then.
Not just quiet.
Expectation.
As if the district was waiting for something to arrive.
My fingers stung as blood tried to hurry through them. My chest tightened.
"Stop," I told myself under my breath. "Stop. Don't spiral."
I forced a breath in and out, counted three heartbeats, then moved again.
My boots made small, lonely sounds on the snow.
Another sound slid under the sirens.
A deep, distant rumble.
A flurry of snow gusted down the street and vanished around the next corner.
My hands were shaking. I jammed them deeper into my pockets and hunched my shoulders like it would make me smaller.
My thoughts finally lined up into something usable.
Shelter. Heat. Information.
Those were the three things I needed.
I needed a building. A lobby. A stairwell. Anything that got me out of wind and out of sight. Somewhere I could sit, breathe, and gather myself.
But first.
If the thing I saw really was insight, that meant I could use it again.
I looked down at my hands once more. My eyes narrowed.
"Insight," I didn't need to whisper, but the word had crawled to my lips regardless. As if it were out of habit.
Something tightened behind my eyes. Not pain. Not yet. More like a lens twisting into place. The air in front of me shimmered, and a panel unfolded cleanly, as it had always belonged there.
-
[NAME]NOAH REED
[GIFTS]
INSIGHT: RANK EX
HERO: RANK F (DORMANT)
[SKILLS]
-None-
[CONDITION]
OVERALL: 74%
COLD STRESS: MODERATE
FATIGUE: HIGH
MINOR BRUISING: PRESENT
RECOMMENDATION: WARMTH, REST, FOOD
-
I stared at the line that mattered.
INSIGHT: RANK EX
Then I looked at the other categories. I had no skills, and my condition was worsening. I also had the [Hero] gift, but frankly, it was useless unless I was actively fighting a demon. What I didn't know, however, was why it was marked as (Dormant).
I had never seen that before.
My feet started moving before I finished the thought. The information in front of me disappeared.
I was still a bit shaken, and so I kept walking.
Two more turns. A side street. A short jog past a fenced construction site where snow collected on half-finished walls.
For the first time since I woke up, I started to believe this might be manageable. That I could find a door. A place to hide. A moment to think. Use my [Insight] to find a way.
Then a voice cracked across the street behind me.
"Hey!"
The word hit like a thrown stone. Sharp. Close.
I spun.
Two figures stood at the mouth of the street I'd just come from, silhouettes against the glow of the larger road beyond. Heavy coats lined with neon trails. Straight backs. Stillness that wasn't casual and a subtle set of armour that was marked with a symbol.
Something about the way they held themselves made my stomach drop before I even saw their faces.
The air around them felt different. Dense. Pressurised. Like the space itself had decided to pay attention.
The nearer figure stepped forward, boots crunching in the snow.
"You," she called, voice carrying cleanly down the narrow street. "What are you doing out during curfew?"