The memory hit him with the force of a physical blow, more painful than the rot currently eating away at his undead limbs.
No one truly knew how Destiny Eternal began. There were no press releases, no multi-billion dollar marketing campaigns, and no CEO to hold accountable. One morning in 2437, the world woke up to find "The Stores" had simply appeared. These sterile, windowless structures materialised in the hearts of cities like Delhi, New York, and Tokyo overnight. Inside, game headsets—sleek, obsidian devices—sat on pedestals. There were no cashiers, only a stone counter and a price tag.
You put the money down. You take the headset. If you tried to steal it, the device wouldn't budge, anchored by a force that defied physics. The money simply vanished into the air once placed on the counter. It was a mystery that brought governments to their knees, but the mystery was quickly overshadowed by the addiction. The game was too perfect. The wind felt too real; the water tasted too sweet. It wasn't a game; it was a mass migration of the human soul.
Montu had been one of the billions left behind at the start. As an orphan scraping by on the fringes of Texas, the price tag of a headset was a fortune. It took him two years of starving himself, working three shifts, and saving every penny until he could finally walk into a Store.
He had an innate, almost terrifying knack for the game. Within a year, he had climbed the rankings, his name becoming whispered in the high-tier guilds. He wasn't poor anymore; he was a digital aristocrat. And then, there was Sara.
Sara Mills. She was the kind of beauty that felt like a glitch in the world—too perfect, too kind. She was a high-level spirit gunner, and together, they were a power couple in the game. He trusted her with his life. He trusted her with his secrets.
And that was his death sentence.
The memory shifted to the day the world ended. Montu had been returning to his small, newfound apartment, his arms full of groceries. He was humming a tune, thinking about the Mythic-tier item sitting in his digital inventory—the "God's Eye." He had found it in a ruin that shouldn't have existed, a place where the air felt heavy with the scent of ancient incense.
The eye was a strange, pulsating blue sapphire set within a black triangle. It had twenty uses, and it was the most broken item in the game. It could reveal weaknesses even of a God.
There was no way to gauge the power of monsters, demons, NPCs, and many players died gruesome deaths as they were unable to determine their opponents power and stas.
But this item, changed everything, it lets you view the detailed stats of anyone.
He pushed open his door, and the groceries hit the floor.
Three men stood in his living room. They weren't wearing armor; they were wearing tactical gear and holding silenced pistols. Montu's heart hammered a frantic rhythm against his ribs. He turned to bolt, his hand reaching for the door handle, but the room exploded with a muffled thwip-thwip.
A bullet tore through his right calf. The pain was white-hot, a jagged lightning bolt that sent him crashing to his knees. He tried to crawl, his fingers digging into the carpet, but the second shot caught his left thigh.
He collapsed, a choked scream dying in his throat as his face hit the floorboards. Blood, hot and sticky, began to pool beneath him.
"What... ha...ve I don... done to you?" Montu gasped, his voice breaking into a sob. Tears blurred his vision, dripping onto the floor. "Wh....y are you do.. ...ing this?"
"Ahh... my poor, sweet boy."
The voice was like silk. It was the voice he had fallen asleep to for months. Montu froze. He didn't want to look up. If he didn't look up, the lie could stay alive.
Sara stepped into his field of vision. She looked radiant, her black hair falling perfectly over her shoulders. She looked down at him not with love, but with the detached curiosity of a scientist looking at a dissected frog.
"You haven't done anything wrong, Montu," she said, her voice devoid of any warmth. "It's just that this world is wretched. The strong prey on the weak, and people like you... you just get played by the strong. You were a magnificent tool, but you're no longer needed."
The realization was a cold blade in his chest. He had only told Sara. No one else. He had shown her the item in a moment of pure, vulnerable excitement.
"Now, behave like a good child," Sara said, signaling to the men. They brought forward a specialized gaming rig—his own headset. "We've already tracked your last logout location. My team is waiting for you in the game. Login, open your inventory, and hand over the Eye. If you do, I might actually call an ambulance for those legs."
Montu looked at the gun barrels. He knew the rules of the Store. A headset was tied to brain waves and retinal scans. They couldn't steal his account; they had to force him to hand the item over in-game.
He looked at Sara, and for the first time, he saw the predator behind the doll's eyes. He knew he was going to die. Whether he gave them the item or not, he was a loose end.
A dark, hysterical laugh bubbled up in his chest. It started as a wheeze and grew into a full, jagged roar. He grabbed the headset, his hands shaking with a mix of blood loss and fury.
"You want it?" Montu hissed, his eyes wide and bloodshot. "Then come and get it."
Inside the Virtual Realm
The transition was instantaneous. One moment he was bleeding out on a dusty floor; the next, he was standing in the lush, hyper-real greenery of the forest. But the phantom pain followed him. The system couldn't simulate bullet wounds, but his mind was screaming, projecting the agony into his digital avatar.
Sara materialized a moment later, her high-level robes shimmering with enchantments. Around them stood a dozen elite mercenaries from the 'Black Hammer' guild.
"The Eye, Montu," Sara commanded, extending a gloved hand. "Now. Don't make this more pathetic than it already is."
Montu's fingers danced across the holographic interface with a speed born of desperation. He didn't navigate to the 'Trade' menu. He went to 'Discard.'
The God's Eye appeared in his palm, pulsing with a terrifying, celestial blue light. The mercenaries leaned in, their greed almost tangible.
"You think I'm a fool?" Montu rasped.
In one fluid motion, he flung the sapphire eye high into the air. Before Sara could even begin an incantation to catch it, Montu's bow was out. He didn't just fire a regular shot; he burnt every point of mana he had into his ultimate skill: [Sun-Piercer's Wrath].
The arrow left the string with a crack of thunder, trailing a tail of white-hot fire. It didn't miss. It struck the God's Eye at the apex of its arc.
The Mythic-grade item, designed to be indestructible by normal means, was never meant to take a point-blank focused blast from its owner. The air crackled. For a heartbeat, the world went silent.
CRAAAACK.
The eye shattered.
Fragments of blue stardust rained down over the forest, dissolving before they hit the ground. The triangle frame snapped and melted into nothingness. The item was gone. Deleted.
"Haha!" Montu screamed, falling to his knees as his avatar began to flicker—a sign that his physical body in the real world was losing its connection to life. "That's what you get, bitch! You want the Eye? Go and collect the dust!"
Sara's face contorted into a mask of pure, unadulterated rage. "Kill him," she hissed. "Kill this fucker!"
The last thing Montu felt was the bite of a dozen blades, and then, the heavy, suffocating darkness of the void.
Present Day: The Forest
Montu stopped walking. He was trembling. His undead hand reached up to touch his face, finding it dry. He couldn't cry anymore—zombies didn't have tear ducts—but the hollow ache in his chest was more painful than the bullets had ever been.
"Sara," he whispered, the name a curse on his rotting lips.
He remembered the voice in the dark as he was dying. 'Do you want another chance to live?' He had thought it was a hallucination. But now, he looked at his system interface.
He wasn't just back in the game. He was back before the disaster. He was the only one who knew what was coming. 'Sara and the Black Hammer guild, just you wait I'll make you beg for hell.'
"You wanted the God's Eye," Montu smirked, his skeletal fingers curling into a fist. "Now it's literally a part of my soul. And this time, I'm not breaking it."