Jakarta, 21:45 WIB.
The air inside the room felt unnaturally thick, as if the oxygen had been replaced by a dry, invisible residue of static electricity. Measuring barely three-by-four meters, the space was less of a bedroom and more of a cramped studio on the outskirts of Jakarta's bustling sprawl. Towering stacks of instant noodle crates and a chaotic web of tangled cables served as the primary décor.
In the heart of this dim sanctuary, a single source of life flickered: the cold, pale blue radiance of a 24-inch LED monitor. The light reflected sharply off Arlan's thick glasses, masking his tired eyes.
Arlan sat hunched over, his spine stiff and aching after nearly ten hours of being fused to his cheap, imitation gaming chair. On the screen, his avatar—a high-level knight named AzureBound—stood motionless in the center of the The Void Plains, a perilous high-tier map within the digital world of Destiny One Online. The twin blades in the character's hands were raised high, glowing with cascading blue particles that signaled the activation of an Ultimate Skill.
Victory was a mere second away.
But suddenly, the digital world collapsed. The vibrant particles surrounding AzureBound's blades didn't strike; instead, they shattered into thousands of raw, jagged squares—crude pixels that vibrated violently before dissolving into a corrupted, pitch-black texture.
"Damn it! Not now! Just one more hit!" Arlan hissed, his voice echoing in the silence of the night.
His fingers danced frantically across the mechanical keyboard, creating a frantic click-clack that filled the small room. He hammered the macro keys repeatedly, hoping his electronic commands could somehow pierce through the sudden server congestion. But his gaze flickered to the bottom-right corner of the screen. The ping, usually a stable 15ms, was skyrocketing into madness: 999ms.
The world of Destiny One Online froze in an agonizing stillness. Arlan leaned back, running a hand through his messy, unwashed hair in sheer frustration. He assumed it was just another monthly internet outage—a typical annoyance for a resident of Jakarta.
However, something far stranger was beginning to manifest on his wooden desk.
The status lights on the router in the corner no longer blinked their familiar green. Instead, the small LEDs suddenly flared with a deep, piercing crimson—a red so sharp it felt like a needle to his retinas. This red wasn't static; it pulsed slowly, rhythmically, synchronizing with the frantic thumping of Arlan's own heart. He felt a sudden, irrational shiver, as if the plastic device had grown a soul, becoming a biological organ that was feeding on the very air around him.
EEEEEEEEEEEEEE—
A sharp, high-frequency ringing pierced his eardrums. Arlan reflexively ripped his headset off, letting it clatter to the floor. He suspected a short circuit or a blown audio driver, but the sound didn't fade. The ringing wasn't coming from the speakers; it was exploding from within his own auditory nerves.
In the next second, his senses began to unravel. The comforting aroma of fried rice his mother was cooking in the kitchen—the familiar scent of garlic and sweet soy sauce—vanished instantly. In its place, Arlan was assaulted by the overwhelming smell of damp earth and the metallic sting of rusted iron. The sensation was so vivid, so visceral, that it felt as if he had been forcibly snatched from his bedroom and dropped into the center of a cold, abandoned factory that had been decaying for centuries.
"What is... what's happening...?" Arlan whispered, his voice cracking. He tried to stand up to check the router, but his body felt as heavy as lead. Gravity in the room seemed to have intensified tenfold, pinning him to his seat.
When he looked down at his hands, his heart nearly stopped. A madness was unfolding before his eyes. His arms, previously clad in a tattered grey cotton shirt, were slowly being "wrapped" by thin plates of copper-colored metal. The process didn't look like someone putting on armor; it looked like thousands of glowing light-pixels were drifting in the air, latching onto his skin, and solidifying into tangible matter.
Trembling, he touched his forearm. He felt the cold sting of metal and the rough, coarse texture of tanned leather—beginner-tier armor from a medieval era. It was real. It wasn't a visual glitch on a screen anymore; Arlan's reality was being overwritten by digital game assets.
"Arlan! Dinner is ready! Come out before it gets cold!"
His mother's voice drifted in from behind the bedroom door. But the voice that was usually warm and soothing now sounded distorted, as if played through a broken voice modulator underwater. There was a layer of cold, digital echo behind every syllable—the unmistakable, emotionless tone of an AI System.
"Mom...?" Arlan tried to call out, but his words died in his throat as he looked toward the window.
The familiar lights of the Jakarta skyline, the glowing skyscrapers of Sudirman that usually glittered in the distance, had vanished. In their place was a vast, dark purple sky stretching across a starless horizon. Two moons hung impossibly low in the sky, casting a pale, alien silver light over the world.
The concrete walls of his apartment began to crack and peel away like dead skin. Beneath the crumbling stone, massive blocks of moss-covered granite emerged—the walls of an ancient castle manifesting from the void. Jakarta's reality was undergoing a Global Overwrite.
Arlan grabbed his phone from the desk. The screen lit up automatically, displaying a flood of message notifications. But the alphabet melted like wet ink, swirling chaotically before rearranging into ancient, glowing blue runes that pulsed with electric light.
Is this a glitch? Or is the world truly being deleted? Arlan thought, his breath coming in short, panicked gasps.
He reached out to touch his computer monitor, desperate to force-quit the machine and end this nightmare. But as his fingertip brushed the glass, the surface was no longer hard. His finger sank into the screen as if it were made of cold, shimmering liquid mercury. The monitor rippled, sending waves of light cascading across the room, and a semi-transparent dialogue window materialized in the air before his face:
[ Dimensional Synchronization: 45% ]
[ Server Alignment: Completed ]
[ User Status: Identified as 'Anomaly' (Level 1) ]
[ Warning: Protocol 'Distraction' has been activated in this zone. Your reality is being reformatted. ]
Arlan stumbled backward in terror, his legs shaking until he hit the wooden door of his room. Without a second thought, he gripped the handle, desperate to run to his mother. He didn't care about the copper pauldrons now covering his shoulders or the greaves on his knees. He only had to ensure his mother hadn't turned into a pile of code.
But as the door swung open, Arlan froze in his tracks.
Beyond the threshold was no longer his small, warm living room. There was only a hollow darkness filled with falling lines of green binary code, drifting like digital snow. His home was gone, replaced by a massive, endless corridor of ancient stone, illuminated by torches flickering with eerie blue flames.
From the depths of that infinite hallway, his mother's voice echoed again: "Arlan! Dinner is ready! Come out before it gets cold!"
The voice was faint, repetitive, and hollow—the sound of an NPC stuck in a logic loop.
Arlan stared at his palms. A pair of thin, steel-plated gauntlets now fully encased his hands. A longsword with a black leather hilt had materialized at his waist, as if the system had just granted him a Starter Kit for survival.
"What is this...? Why is everything being pulled into a game?!" Arlan whispered, his hands shaking violently. He gripped the hilt of the sword; the metal felt cold and hungry for blood. "My world... my world is almost gone."
Before his eyes, the system window flickered again, delivering the first command that would change his life forever:
[ Tutorial Mission: Survive the Distraction Area ]
[ Objective: Find a way out of the Void Corridor with the 'Maid Woman' and reach the Safe Zone. ]
Arlan stared down the stone corridor, his gaze sharpening with a sudden, burning fury. "'Maid Woman'? You mean... my Mother?!"
Anger began to drown out his fear. If this system dared to treat his mother as a mere game asset, then Arlan would dismantle this system from the inside out. He unsheathed his starter sword, a blue glint sparking in his eyes—a sign that the Hardcore Player had finally awakened within this new reality.