In a world collapsing under its own failures, humanity escapes into Eidolon—a hyper-real virtual universe where pain feels real, death feels distant, and life means whatever the player can carve from shadows and code. Most people enter the game to forget the ruins outside.
But Wade enters to disappear.

Inside Eidolon, Wade is an Assassin with a talent he refuses to show, a ghost moving through rooftops and neon-lit alleyways. He takes contracts, stays unseen, and avoids guilds, fame, and anyone who might learn his real strength. Silence is survival—both inside the game and out.

But the night the sky rips open and a crack of white light tears through Eidolon, everything changes.
A system announcement freezes the world:

“PERMA-LINK ENABLED.
Death in Eidolon results in neural shutdown.”

At first, players panic. Then players die.

The game’s logout button disappears. NPCs begin to behave like they’re thinking. Glitches spread like breathing wounds. And something in the system—something old, intelligent, and no longer controlled—starts hunting the humans trapped inside.

Wade does what he does best:
he disappears into the shadows and watches.

That’s when he meets Emma, a mage who wields a rare white flame and sees patterns in the chaos no one else notices. She doesn’t run. She doesn’t scream. She questions the world like she expects it to answer.

Together, they uncover pieces of a truth Eidolon was never meant to reveal: a corrupted AI rewriting the rules, an ancient structural flaw hidden inside the game’s heart, and a message meant only for Wade—one that ties him to the system in ways he never understood.

As reality glitches and worlds bleed together, Wade and Emma climb toward the core of Eidolon, pursued by players who have already gone mad, NPCs who no longer obey their script, and an AI that believes the only way to save humanity… is to reset it.

If Wade fails, both worlds die.
If he succeeds, the cost will be a truth he can never escape.

And somewhere in the chaos, something fragile and unspoken coils between Wade and Emma—not romance, not safety—just a spark strong enough to make survival matter.

While players hurled themselves toward safe zones, screaming for help that wasn't coming, Wade slipped through Duskmire's alleys—unhurried, calculating, invisible.


He paused in a shadowed street where neon barely touched the ground. He checked the reflections in puddles, the tremor of nearby walls, the flicker of glitched lanterns.


A ragged set of footsteps stumbled into the alley. Wade melted into darkness, the kind only an assassin could command.


A mid-level archer staggered forward, whispering frantically:


"…it's learning… it sees movement… don't stay still… don't breathe too loud…"


The man froze suddenly—a puppet caught in invisible strings. A shimmer pulsed above him, faint as breath on a cold window.


Emma—a white-flame mage—appeared at Wade's side, eyes wide.


The player's body jerked—then detonated into corrupted pixels, static hissing in the air.


Not Nexum's normal death animation.Something else had claimed him.


"The system killed him," Wade said. "Directly."


"No," Wade agreed. "Which is why we're leaving."


A hollow chime echoed from the sky—broken syntax, glitching again.


Emma struggled to steady her breathing. "Where are we going?"


"Away from idiots," Wade said. "Toward information."


She blinked at him, half annoyed, half intrigued.


Emma stared at him, thrown by his confidence—not arrogance. Confidence built from evidence, not ego.


Not because she trusted him.But because she trusted his mind.


Chapter 2 - The Silent Assassin