In a cramped apartment swallowed by shadows, a young boy sat huddled in gloom. His oversized sweater and jogging pants hung loosely off a frame that had grown worryingly thin, the fabric worn and gray. His hair was a chaotic, unwashed mess, and his face—pale and gaunted—was dominated by deep, bruised eye bags that spoke of a chronic, bone-deep exhaustion
The silence of the room was heavy, a physical weight that pressed against the boy's thin shoulders. Even as the relentless *KNOCK* *KNOCK* *KNOCK* vibrated through the thin, cold door, he didn't flinch. He didn't blink. The world outside the apartment—the toxic air, the screaming sirens, the corporate drones—had long since ceased to matter.
Only when the knocking finally died away into a hollow echo did he move.
His trembling fingers tightened around a shattered picture frame. The jagged glass bit into his palm, but he didn't feel it. Through the cracks, he stared at the only color left in his world: a photograph of a beautiful woman with soft, shoulder-length brown hair.
Clinging to her arm was a younger version of himself, a boy whose face was bright and full, holding a melting ice cream cone in one hand while a smear of vanilla decorated his cheek.
The blinding light from the hallway flooded the apartment, a violent intrusion into the boy's sanctuary of shadows. Squinting against the glare, Satoru watched as a silhouette formed in the wreckage of the door. The figure was a teenager, but he carried himself with an eerie, polished confidence. He wore a crisp suit and a perfectly knotted tie—an outfit of the ruling class, completely out of place in this decaying slum.
He stepped over the splintered wood, his shoes clicking sharply on the grimy floor. Furthermore, he didn't look disgusted; he looked analytical.
"Hmm, it seems my little cousin needs some fixing," the teen said, his voice smooth and devoid of the rasp that plagued everyone else in the city. He stopped just a few feet away, looking down at the gaunt boy clutching the shattered photo.
"Hello, Satoru. Do not worry. I will help you see the logic to living." He reached out a hand, his fingers long and steady. "My name is..."
/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\
"What do you mean you're going to die??!!!!" he screamed, his voice raw with the panic of the boy in the dark apartment. "How? When? Where? What happened!"
Winding didn't look up. He kept his gaze fixed on the patch of golden flowers at the base of the throne—flowers that shouldn't exist in a world of toxic smog and steel.
"Satoru... do you know the first promise I made you?"
Momonga recoiled, the sudden shift in tone catching him off guard. He stayed quiet for a heartbeat, his mind racing. "Before we played and made the clan... you made me promise to not reveal that you're a high-ranking elite in society. What does thi—"
"That is right," Winding interrupted, his voice dropping into a heavy, melancholic register. "Because almost all the players in this game hate high-class elites. To them, a suit is just a target. A symbol of the world that took their sky away."
"But your company helps the lower class!" Momonga countered, his desperation turning into an argument for his older cousin's life. "You improve the lives that are neglected by the other elites! I've seen the positive reviews and reactions on the internet about your company. You don't need to hide it!"
"And be treated as the 'famed good elite' rather than a normal person?" Winding's avatar let out a hollow, bitter chuckle. "No. I don't want our friends to remember me as the only elite using his funds to treat the poor. I want them to remember me as me. As winding."
Winding finally looked up, his eyes glowing with a faint, dying light. "I digress. The point I'm making, Satoru, is that I stood out too much in a pool of sharks. Like a red drop in a white sea. My 'logic' was too different from the other Board Members. They didn't like my charity... and they didn't like my influence."
"It wasn't a 'natural' sickness, Satoru," Winding whispered, his avatar's hand reaching out to touch a golden petal. "It was a slow-acting neurotoxin delivered through my rig's maintenance cycle. A corporate 'clean-up' for a shark that wouldn't bite the right people. By the time I realized the if-else of their plan, the damage to my nervous system was irreversible."
Momonga felt the world tilt. It wasn't just a sickness. It was an assassination.
The 8th Floor felt like it was fracturing, but it wasn't the code—it was Satoru's world. Because at this moment, Momonga didn't exist. There was no "Greater Hardening" for his heart, no "Emotional Suppressor" to force a green light and calm his nerves. There was only a young man, kneeling in the dirt of a digital garden, watching his only remaining family fade into a flickering wireframe.
"I-I'll find a way," Satoru stammered, his voice thick with unbridled, human sobbing. "The high-end medical rigs... the ones your company uses... we can hack the credits, we can—"
"Satoru," Winding interrupted, his voice like a gentle anchor in the storm. "Look at the logic. In the world out there, I am a 'Resource.' I am a 'Unit.' If the unit is damaged, the corporation deletes it. There's no need to be sad because that is the logic of our reality."
Satoru's head snapped up. His eyes, usually glowing with the pride of a Supreme Being, were now just raw, wet points of light.
"WHAT THE FUCK YOU MEAN I DON'T NEED TO BE SAD?!" he roared, the sound tearing through the chamber. "MY LAST FAMILY MEMBER IS DYING BECAUSE OF THOSE DAMN CORPORATIONS! THEY TOOK MOM FROM ME AND NOW YOU! AND NOW YOU TELL ME I DON'T NEED TO BE SAD? WHY ARE YOU SO CALM RIGHT NOW? WHY DO..."
He stopped. He looked at Winding's avatar. In the midst of the most terrifying news Satoru had ever heard, Winding looked... peaceful.
"Your... your satisfied right now..... WHY... WHY ARE YOU SATISFIED THAT YOU'RE DYING?!?!"
Winding leaned down, his skeletal hand resting firmly—not as a superior, but as a brother—on Satoru's shaking shoulder.
"Because for the first time in my life, I am not a variable in a profit margin," Winding whispered. "I spent my life in a boardroom where my 'value' was based on how many lives I could squeeze into a spreadsheet. But here? With you? With Peroroncino? With the 41?"
He looked over at Peroroncino, who stood frozen in the doorway, his wings drooping, his usual jokes silenced by the sheer weight of the tragedy. Even Sans had stopped snoring, the snot bubble gone, his socket-lights fixed on the two cousins in a rare moment of digital clarity.
"I'm becoming the code that protects the only people I ever loved," Winding said, his avatar's hand glowing with a deep, administrative gold. "That is why I'm transferring the title of Guild Leader to you."
A massive, system-wide notification window materialized in the center of the room, bathing Satoru's skeletal face in a harsh, clinical light.
[NOTIFICATION: GUILD LEADERSHIP TRANSFER INITIATED] Current Leader: Winding Successor: momonga Status: Awaiting Confirmation...
The air in the throne room felt thick, like a physical weight pressing down on Momonga's skeletal frame. Peroroncino stepped closer, his wings folded tight.
"Momonga..." Peroroncino's voice was low and heavy with a guilt he had been carrying for weeks. "The guys... we all knew. About the illness, I mean. Winding told us a while back. It was supposed to be a surprise for your birthday next week. He wanted the 8th Floor finished and the leadership transferred then—as his final gift to you. He didn't want the party to be about him fading away... he wanted it to be about you becoming the heart of Ainz Ooal Gown."
Momonga's head snapped toward the archer, his red eye-lights flickering in shock. "You all knew? Everyone? And nobody told me?"
"Because you're the one he cares about most!" Peroroncino's voice cracked. "He didn't want you to spend his last month mourning him before he was even gone. He wanted you to have one more week of peace."
Momonga turned back to Winding. The realization was a cold blade to his chest. To the rest of the guild, Winding was just a friend succumbing to a tragic, unavoidable sickness. They didn't know about the suit, the tie, or the corporate sharks. They didn't know that this wasn't a tragedy—it was an assassination.
"They think it's just a sickness," Momonga hissed, leaning in so only Winding could hear. "They don't know they're killing you."
Winding leaned in, his digital voice barely a whisper through the static. "And they never will, Momonga. If they knew the truth, they would try to fight the mega-corps. They would get themselves deleted. Let them believe the 'if' of a natural death. Only you... only you are strong enough to carry the 'else' of the truth."
He gestured one last time to the glowing [CONFIRM] button hanging in the air between them.
"Everyone is waiting, Momonga. They've already prepared for you to lead. They've already accepted the 'Logic of the Overlord.' Don't let my murder be the only thing that defines my end. Let your leadership be my legacy."
The heavy atmosphere of the meeting room thickened as the Supreme Beings processed Winding's words. The flickering light of the hologram illuminated forty-one faces—some skeletal, some demonic, all stunned.
"What do you mean, it already started?" Ulbert demanded, his voice echoing off the stone walls.
Winding didn't answer immediately. Instead, he stood up, his silhouette casting a long shadow over the round table. "The conquest was set in motion the moment the wish was granted," he said, his voice dropping to a low, chilling tone.
Just then, a shrill, piercing [System Alert] shrieked through the room. A massive holographic map of the Yggdrasil world materialized in the center of the table. In the middle of the surface bog swamp above Nazarick, a golden pulse—a "ping"—was radiating outward like a beacon.
"What is that?" Peroroncino leaned in, his bird-like eyes narrowing. "A tracking spell? Did an intruder tag us?"
"No," Winding replied, watching the pulse calmly. "That is the price of Ouroboros."
The room went deathly silent. They all knew the legend of the World-Class Item, but no one—except Winding—knew the hidden cost of its activation.
"For exactly ten hours," Winding explained, his eyes fixed on the map, "every player on every server can see exactly where we are. I used the wish to reshape our future, but in exchange, the world was given a map to our front door."
The hologram zoomed in on the swamp. Small dots—scouts from rival guilds who happened to be nearby—were already converging on the ping. They weren't "intruders" by accident; they were the first vultures arriving at what they thought was a feast.
"They think they've found a treasure," Winding whispered, a dark smile playing on his lips. "They don't realize they've just walked into the graveyard of the world."
The golden pulse of Ouroboros had vanished as quickly as it had appeared, but its resonance lingered like a dying echo across the server. The damage was total. High above the hidden threshold of Nazarick, the Grenier Bog Swamp—usually a graveyard of stagnant water and silence—was crawling with desperate life.
Clusters of scouts from the server's premier humanoid guilds slunk through the waist-deep muck, their eyes gleaming with the frantic, jagged greed that only a World-Class Item could provoke. A group of elven pathfinders moved with practiced grace, their boots barely disturbing the surface of the reeds, ghosting through the mist. Suddenly, the lead scout's foot landed on a patch of earth that felt far too solid, far too cold.
A sharp, mechanical click shattered the quiet of the bog.
The sound triggered a cascade. The concealment magic masking a nearby thicket hissed and dissolved like burnt parchment, revealing a rival group of dwarven scouts huddled in the shadows. For one heartbeat, the two groups stared at each other in paralyzed shock. In the next, the swamp erupted. Steel clashed against shields and high-tier spells hissed through the sulfurous air. What had begun as a "secret" reconnaissance mission spiraled into a chaotic skirmish, each faction desperate to slaughter the competition before they could even set foot in the tomb.
Amidst the carnage, the luckiest—or perhaps the most cursed—managed to locate the massive, weathered stone doors. Slipping past the threshold, they entered the First Floor of Nazarick. The air inside was a suffocating weight, a chilling contrast to the humid chaos of the swamp above.
The descent into the tomb's depths was a masterclass in high-level infiltration, a silent invasion executed by the server's most elite specialists.
The Shadow-dancers moved with a fluid, haunting grace, their bodies stretching and folding until they merged seamlessly with the flickering torchlight that danced across the vaulted walls. To any observer, they were nothing more than shifting silhouettes cast by the flame. Nearby, Assassins flickered in and out of the material plane like dying embers; their forms were invisible to the naked eye, and their very heartbeats were muffled into nonexistence by high-tier silence spells.
Across the wider hall, Monks tapped into supernatural reservoirs of ki, their movements becoming a series of blurred distortions. They transitioned between cover with such terrifying velocity that they seemed to vanish from one hallway intersection and reappear at the next in the blink of an eye. Above them all, the Druids had abandoned their physical shells entirely; they drifted through the hairline cracks in the masonry as a thick, sickly fog, an unnatural vapor that seeped through the ceiling like a spreading poison.
Each of them moved with the quiet confidence of a predator, certain that their specialized arts rendered them untouchable.
Then, the silence of the tomb was shredded.
A visceral, blood-curdling scream tore through the corridor, ending in a wet, choking gurgle. The hidden scouts froze in their tracks. In the center of a wide, shadowed gallery, a level 84 scout—a veteran of a hundred raids—was hoisted high into the air. A massive, ornate lance had punched through his chest, pinning him against the cold stone like an insect in a display case.
He was a ruin of a man; his left arm and right leg had been torn away, leaving jagged, bloody messes where limbs should be. As his health bar plummeted into the black, his blood didn't hit the floor. Instead, it was being violently siphoned upward by an unseen force, swirling into a dense, vibrating sphere of liquid crimson that hovered hungrily above his dying form.
The initial, paralyzing shock lasted only a heartbeat before the gallery exploded into a desperate, fragmented chaos. These were veteran players, their eyes darting to the floating crimson text hovering above the entity's head.
[Floor Guardian: Shalltear Bloodfallen]
The title sent a fresh wave of terror through the ranks. This wasn't just a powerful mob or a roaming boss; she was a sovereign of the tomb itself.
"Damnit! It's a Floor Guardian!" one of the warriors roared, his shield vibrating as he stepped into a defensive stance. He lunged forward, his blade glowing with a desperate radiant strike. "Support me! If we don't break her stance now, we're all dead!"
A few mages began chanting high-tier spells to back him up, but the formation was already crumbling. The scouts who had been hiding in the shadows saw the level 84 veteran pinned to the wall like a common insect and made a cold, instantaneous calculation.
"Help us! Don't you dare run!" the warrior screamed, glancing back as he saw the flicker of cloaks disappearing toward the exit archway. "We can take her if we stay together!"
"To hell with that!" a shadow-dancer hissed, his voice echoing from the darkness as he neared the threshold of the second floor. "Look at the combat log! She's shredding through legendary-tier armor like it's paper! Why should I risk my life for a suicide charge?"
"You coward! We're a guild!"
The retreating scout let out a sharp, mocking laugh, his form blurring as he activated a high-tier speed buff. "Don't worry! If I'm the one who gets the World Item, I'll be sure to find your new accounts and give you a head start! Consider your deaths a noble sacrifice!"
The betrayal stung worse than the cold, stale air of the tomb. As the 'cowards' fled toward the transition to the Second Floor, the remaining attackers turned back to Shalltear, their faces pale and sweat-streaked.
The blood ball above the dying scout pulsed with a rhythmic, sickening thud, growing larger and more vibrant with every passing second as it siphoned the last of his life force. Shalltear didn't even acknowledge the men swinging swords at her; her glowing red eyes were fixed on the backs of the runners. A predatory, elegant smile stretched across her face, as if she found their belief in "escape" to be the most delicious joke she had ever heard.
Shalltear looked down at her missing limb. Her expression didn't shift with human emotion, but her artificial intelligence registered the massive loss of HP. Her head tilted at an unnatural, twitching angle—a scripted reaction to receiving a critical hit.
The massive, vibrating sphere of siphoned blood hovering above her responded instantly to her programmed combat logic. With a mechanical flick of her remaining wrist, the blood ball collapsed inward, surging into the jagged wound at her shoulder in a violent, crimson torrent.
Through his [Life Essence] view, the warrior's eyes widened in horror. Her health bar didn't just crawl up; it slammed back to the maximum in a single pulse. In a sickening display of high-tier regenerative coding, the muscle and bone of her left arm knitted together instantly, the limb regrowing from the shoulder in a flash of red light until it was perfectly whole again.
She stood perfectly still, her red eyes devoid of life or mercy, staring blankly at the mages who had just exhausted their best spells.
"No way..." the mage stammered, his staff trembling. "A full heal... from a single skill? She's just a puppet, but she's invincible!"
Without a word, Shalltear's hand rose toward the archway leading to the second floor. Her movements were fluid and precise, the perfect execution of an elite combat script. [10th Tier Spell: Purifying Javelin] materialized in her palm—a lance of brilliant, holy light.
She hurled it. The projectile moved with the speed of a falling star, bypassing the warriors in front of her to target the high-speed runners. It pierced through the back of the shadow-dancer who was inches away from the transition zone, pinning him to the stone threshold. His avatar flickered violently before disintegrating into a shower of white pixels.
The remaining scouts frozen in the room realized the truth: the NPC wasn't "playing" with them. She was simply processing a "search and destroy" command with horrifying efficiency.
The realization hit the raiding party with the weight of a death sentence. As they scrambled away from the silent, regrowing horror of Shalltear, the guild leaders looked frantically through their quick-slots and inventory logs, their faces turning ashen.
"We don't have anything!" a veteran rogue shrieked, his voice jumping an octave. "There's no priest in the vanguard! No holy relics, no blessed consumables—nothing!"
"Damnit! Who planned this raid?" another scout roared, stumbling over the uneven stone. "We came for a stealth extraction, not a siege against a True Vampire! We have zero holy affinity weapons! We can't out-damage her regeneration if we can't bypass her undead resistance!"
The panic was absolute. In Yggdrasil, fighting a high-level undead without holy-elemental gear was like trying to put out a forest fire with a cup of water. Every bit of physical damage they dealt was being mitigated by her natural resistances, and whatever small wounds they did manage to leave were instantly erased by the blood she siphoned from their fallen comrades.
"Run! Just run to the exit!"
They abandoned all pretense of a fighting retreat. Warriors threw away their heavy shields to gain a few extra points of agility; mages burned their remaining mana on [Haste] and [Greater Teleportation]—only to find the space around them suppressed by the tomb's natural wards.
Shalltear watched them flee. She didn't move with the frantic energy of the living; she simply drifted after them, her crimson dress fluttering in the wake of her terrifying speed. To her, they weren't enemies anymore—they were just fleeing health pots.
As the panicked group bottlenecked at the archway, shoving and screaming at each other to get through, a shadow stretched out across the floor, looming over them. The heavy silence of the NPC was more terrifying than any battle cry.
High above in the meeting room, the 41 Supreme Beings watched the feed in grim fascination.
"They're completely unprepared," one of the guild members remarked, leaning back in his stone chair. "They brought top-tier DPS and stealth, but they forgot the most basic rule of dungeon crawling: always bring a way to kill what's already dead."
Winding didn't look away from the screen. "They didn't forget," he said coldly. "They were just so blinded by the greed of the Ouroboros ping that they didn't take the time to prepare. Their greed has stripped them of their logic."
The screams from the holographic feed reached a crescendo as the massive stone doors of the First Floor groaned shut, sealing the fate of the remaining scouts. In the meeting room, the silence was heavy, broken only by the flickering light of the display and the low hum of Nazarick's magical systems.
All eyes turned away from the slaughter and toward Winding, the former Guild Master.
Momonga, his skeletal fingers gripping the edge of the round table, leaned forward. "Winding... you knew this would happen. The Ouroboros ping, the lack of preparation from the humanoid guilds... what is the true goal here? This isn't just about defending the tomb, is it?"
Winding didn't answer immediately. A low, sharp smirk tugged at the corner of his mouth—a look of cold, calculating satisfaction that made even some of the other Supreme Beings shift uncomfortably in their seats.
"The goal," Winding began, his voice smooth and devoid of empathy, "was never just to kill a few dozen scouts. Those players out there are the messengers. By seeing the 'location' of a World-Class Item they would naturally will trie to take it first nad this accomplish two things"
He gestured to the scrolling battle log, which showed the names of the dead players being wiped from the server's active list.
"First, they will spread the information to any higher guild that wants to het ouroborus for them self, Second, is to test the fortitude of our fortress, and its seems the top floor testing is a succes, and we can also reap the equipment of the one that have fallen to their graves"
Five weeks had passed since the first drop of blood was spilled in the Grenier Bog. The poison of misinformation had worked perfectly. Driven by reports of a "vulnerable" tomb holding the ultimate World-Class Item, a relentless tide of mid-to-high-ranking guilds had battered themselves against the gates. None had made it past the 4th Floor.
In the meeting room, the atmosphere was thick with the scent of victory and boredom. Momonga looked at the piles of legendary-grade loot being inventoried by the logistics NPCs.
"Winding," Momonga began, his voice echoing in the stone chamber. "Is this the whole plan? To just sit here and farm drop loots? We are the strongest guild on the server, yet we've become a glorified meat grinder."
Winding started to answer, his eyes fixed on a map of the lower floors. "Just... wait. The big fish haven't—"
He was cut off by a violent, racking cough. It wasn't an in-game sound effect; it was the raw, wet sound of a human being struggling for air behind a microphone. The 40 other Supreme Beings froze.
"Winding? You okay, man?" Peroroncino asked, his voice losing its usual playful edge.
Winding raised a trembling hand toward his camera sensor, signaling them to stop. "It's nothing... just need a few hours of sleep. I'll be back. I just need... to rest."
As Winding's avatar began to fade, Momonga's composure finally shattered. He stood up so abruptly his chair screeched against the floor. "Rest?! You're going to 'rest' while your lungs are turning to liquid?"
Peroroncino reached out to steady him. "Hey, Momonga, chill out. Winding said it's curable. He probably just has a bad case of the flu or—"
"He's lying!" Momonga roared, his voice cracking with a grief that didn't belong in a video game. He turned to the room, his skeletal avatar trembling with a very real rage. "He's been lying to all of you for months!"
The room went deathly silent. Even hero-hero leaned forward, "Momonga, what are you talking about?"
"He's my older cousin," Momonga whispered, his voice trembling with a hollow despair that the game's emotion suppressor could barely handle. "I promised I would never reveal his identity, but I won't let him fade away while you all believe he's just 'tired.' He isn't sick. He is being murdered."
"Murdered?" Touch Me slammed his fist onto the obsidian table, the sound echoing like a thunderclap through the hall. "By whom? Why would anyone target him?"
Momonga's avatar looked down at his skeletal hands, the jewels on his rings catching the dim light. "The Mega-Corporations. Winding has... certain ideals. Views on how things should be. They don't like the way he thinks, and in their world, having the wrong ideals is a terminal defect."
A heavy, suffocating silence fell over the room. The Supreme Beings—titans of a digital realm—sat paralyzed by the realization of their own helplessness in the face of the real world's cruelty.
"They've been feeding him a slow-acting neurotoxin for months," Momonga continued, his voice cold and jagged. "It's designed to mimic natural respiratory failure, something the authorities will overlook in the smog of the city. There is no cure for what they've done to him. They are erasing him because they find his existence inconvenient to their order."
Touch Me gripped the edge of the table so hard the stone began to crack. "What do they gain by this? Why kill an innocent man just for his beliefs?"
"Because to them, a man who can't be controlled is a threat," Momonga dropped the final bomb. "And according to the last medical scan he shared with me... he only has three weeks left. Twenty-one days until his heart stops."
The room was deathly quiet until a shrill, piercing [System Alert] tore through the grief.
The holographic map of the surface flickered into life, pulsing with an aggressive crimson light. The Grenier Bog was no longer a quiet marsh; it was a sea of steel and magic. Over 1,500 players—the combined vanguard of the server's top three alliances—had gathered at the entrance. The "Kings" had finally arrived, lured by the breadcrumbs Winding had spent his final weeks laying out.
"They're here," Ulbert whispered, his demonic eyes glowing with a sudden, feral intensity. "They've come to scavenge the legacy of a man who is worth more than all of them combined."
"They think they're raiding a tomb," Momonga said, standing tall as the Guild Master's mantle flowed behind him. "They don't know they've just walked onto the funeral pyre of the only man who cared about this world."