Eloy double-tapped the macro key a millisecond after his thumb hit the spacebar. The boss's greatsword clipped through his avatar's shoulder, missing the hitbox by a single pixel.
"Frame-perfect dodge." He didn't look up from the screen. "Buffer the roll right when the animation locks. That skips the second phase entirely. Easy peezy"
The chat on his second monitor was moving too fast to read. Emotes stacked so deep the application hitched.
[Slayer_007]: GOD GAMER
[PraiseTheSun]: HE ACTUALLY DID IT
[TrollKing99]: I WAS HERE
The boss health bar vanished. The victory screen triggered. Eloy let out a long, ragged exhale and let himself sink into the back of his chair. Two hours and forty-one minutes. A new personal best for the Any% run of Chronicle of the Fading Crest.
"That's the run, guys." His throat was dry enough that the words scratched. He picked up a crushed energy drink from the desk and banked it off the rim of the trash bin. It missed. "World record pace. We submit the VOD tomorrow."
He saved on the final permitted frame. Habit. He'd done it so many times his thumb moved before he'd decided to.
The chat kept climbing: donations, emotes, usernames dissolving into more usernames. He'd watched that vertical smear every night for three years. He knew the shape of it the way he knew the layout of his apartment.
"Stream's over." He rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands. "See you all tomorrow! Goodnight."
He hit End Stream. The second monitor went dark.
The silence was immediate and complete.
His joints popped when he stood. Five steps to the bed. On bad nights that walk felt like fifty. Tonight it felt like five.
He dropped face-first onto the mattress in his day clothes. His phone sat dead on the nightstand, screen dark, his mother's name somewhere near the top of an unread thread six months old.
The PC fans slowed to idle.
Eloy Vance's chest did not rise again.
Then a shove.
A physical force struck his sternum and knocked him backward. He hit the ground hard, palms scraping across wet grass, and pulled a lungful of air that smelled like rain and crushed pine needles. He coughed violently, curling onto his side, fingers digging into actual soil.
Soil.
He opened his eyes. The light was blinding. He squinted, raising a dirt-streaked hand to shield his face. The ceiling of his apartment was gone. The LED lights were gone. Above him stretched a sky of fractured, impossible blue, cut by the towering spires of a white stone castle.
Eloy scrambled backward until his back hit a cold stone wall. The architecture was impossible to mistake. Obsidian gargoyles perched on the parapets. The vast, manicured courtyard structured like a gladiatorial arena.
The Royal Academy. Central hub world of Chronicle of the Fading Crest.
Eloy sat up and pinched his own cheek. He twisted the skin hard enough to leave a mark.
"Ouch!"
He didn't wake up.
A translucent blue rectangle materialized in front of him, floating at eye level as naturally as a monitor.
[ WELCOME TO AETHELGARD ]
He passed his hand through it. The pixels rippled and snapped back.
[SYSTEM BOOT COMPLETE.]
[USER: Eloy Vance.]
[STATUS: Deceased (Earth) → Transmigrated (Aethelgard).]
He read the third line twice.
Deceased.
Back in his apartment: the monitors dark. The locked door. His phone on silent on the desk, unanswered for weeks. His mother's name sitting at the top of an unread thread six months old.
No one was looking for him.
If he was dead on Earth, he was completely, utterly erased.
[ PRIMARY DIRECTIVE: Achieve 100% World Completion. Beat the World Record. ]
[ REWARD: Permanent resurrection. ]
[ WARNING: Failure or death results in soul deletion. ]
[ Do you accept? ]
Two buttons. YES.NO.
Eloy stared at them. He'd clicked YES on a thousand in-game prompts: loot confirmations, binding agreements, irreversible character choices, and had never once hesitated. His thumb was already moving.
He made himself stop. He read the warning again. Soul deletion was not standard tooltip language.
He sat with it for four full seconds, long enough for the wet grass to soak through his pants.
Then he pressed YES anyway.
[ Class Unlocked: The Speedrunner ]
The notification collapsed. A narrower window docked itself to the bottom-right edge of his vision, and white text began to scroll upward: fast, frantic, instantly familiar.
[br0kenctrl]: wait the stream is back?? bro go to sleep
[TrollKing99]: THESE GRAPHICS LOOKS SICK DUDEE
[Slayer_007]: is this a NEW GAME??????
[Sable_RNG]: the render distance on those castle walls tho
Eloy froze. Every single username matched his Earth regulars.
Before Eloy could open his mouth, a red system prompt overwrote the chat box.
[ Chat will accompany you on this journey. Keep them entertained and they will benefit you. ]
[ DO NOT MENTION YOUR CURRENT SITUATION. CONSEQUENCES WILL FOLLOW. ]
The red text vanished.
Years of streaming instinct overrode everything else, even his panic. His brain didn't consult him; it simply produced the smirk, shaped his mouth around the standard intro, began composing a bit about a hyper-realistic VR rig he was supposedly beta-testing. His audience had seen him do it with new games a dozen times. He knew exactly how to play this.
The chat got there first.
[IsoldeSimp47]: WAIT. WAIT. Is Isolde in this game? She HAS to be here
[PraiseTheSun]: ISOLDE ROUTE WHEN
[LMAO_cat]: chat we need to make him go talk to her RIGHT NOW
[TrollKing99]: GO TO THE LIBRARY
[IsoldeSimp47]: FIND HER
[Slayer_007]: HE OWES US THIS
Eloy's smirk died.
Isolde.
Isolde Reichenbach. Daughter of the imprisoned Dark Lord, principal antagonist of the official game trilogy, the character whose magic targeted and erased the player's save file on contact. The developers hadn't coded a romance route for her. They had coded her as a kill condition wearing a face.
A poll materialized at the top of the chat window, clean and blue and already loaded.
FIND ISOLDE IN THE LIBRARY — 94%
The timer read: 0:02.
His mouth was still open around a word he hadn't finished saying.
0:01.
Somewhere in Aethelgard, Isolde Reichenbach sat in a library, unaware that four hundred strangers had just unanimously decided her afternoon.
[ VOTE COMPLETE. CHAT HAS DECIDED. ]
Eloy closed his eyes.
I am going to die again.