Chapter 1: I Maxed Charisma. The Apocalypse Took That Personally.
Chapter 1: I Maxed Charisma. The Apocalypse Took That Personally.
The character creator gave me forty-seven minutes of pure, blissful control over my existence.
Outside my monitor I was twenty years old with no friends, no social calendar, and a sleep schedule that looked like abstract art. Inside Eternal Ascension Online I could become anyone.
So naturally I spent most of that time on cheekbones.
Priorities are like muscles. Mine had atrophied.
I’d downloaded the game on a whim. Every forum, every review, every breathless article said the same thing: Eternal Ascension is better with friends. The party system was legendary. Guild housing was apparently life-changing. People met their future spouses fighting sewer rats.
I had no friends. Therefore, I concluded, the problem must be my face.
In hindsight, I may have misunderstood how friendship works.
I sculpted a tall, lean male avatar with silver-white hair and features sharp enough to make marble statues feel inadequate. High cheekbones. Strong jaw. Eyes that carried what I hoped was mysterious intensity rather than the reality, which was chronic sleep deprivation.
Then the stat screen appeared, and I discovered the flaw system.
The tooltip explained it simply: players could accept permanent negative traits in exchange for extra attribute points. The warnings were bright red, aggressively noticeable, and clearly designed for min-maxers who understood the game’s combat mechanics.
I was not a min-maxer. I was a man who had just spent forty-seven minutes perfecting a digital nose.
[Frail Body selected.]
[Weak Constitution selected.]
[Mana Deficiency selected.]
[Poor Coordination selected.]
[Additional attribute points granted.]
Every confirmation box blazed crimson. Two separate confirmation windows appeared. I accepted both.
Then I dragged Charisma as far right as it would go.
[Charisma: 100 — Character Creation Limit]
My final status gleamed on the screen.
Name: Adrian Vale
Level: 1
Class: None
Strength: 3
Vitality: 2
Agility: 4
Intelligence: 8
Spirit: 5
Charisma: 100 — Character Creation Limit
I stared at the numbers. I had created a man beautiful enough to ruin marriages and physically weak enough to lose a fight against a heavy grocery bag. My avatar smiled back at me, elegant and utterly useless, and I laughed until my stomach hurt.
Then I clicked Enter World.
The beginner city materialized around me — gleaming towers, cobblestone streets, NPC merchants hawking starter gear. Players spawned in clusters, already forming parties, laughing at inside jokes I couldn’t hear, organizing themselves into groups with the easy confidence of people who had done this before.
I stood near the central fountain. Checked my menus. Adjusted my graphics settings. Examined my skill window, which was empty. Scrolled through the friend list, which was also empty.
Maybe someone will approach me. Maybe my ridiculous Charisma will attract attention.
Except Charisma only modified NPC reactions, dialogue checks, contract chances, and certain skills. It could not force the real people behind other avatars to approach me.
A group of three players jogged past, already in a party. A player wearing a guild recruitment tabard scanned the plaza, glanced at me, and moved on. A girl with a starter staff laughed at something her friend said and didn’t look my way.
Twenty minutes passed. I was still checking menus.
The silence felt heavier than it should have. Outside the game, loneliness was a familiar ache, something I’d learned to treat like background static. Inside the game, surrounded by thousands of players all connecting with each other, it suddenly became unbearable.
I logged out. Closed the game. Stared at my desktop wallpaper for a while. Then I went to bed and never opened Eternal Ascension again.
Two years later, the world became Eternal Ascension Online.
And my joke character became my real body.
❖ ❖ ❖
The apocalypse had been happening for fourteen days, and I was almost out of peanut butter.
That might sound like a small problem next to the monsters roaming the streets or the collapse of every government on Earth. It was not a small problem. It was the final stage of a much larger disaster: I was starving, I was alone, and my body was a work of art that couldn’t lift a chair.
I crouched in the corner of my apartment listening to something heavy drag itself along the road outside — a wet grinding sound, like a carcass being pulled across asphalt. My curtains were drawn. My door was barricaded with my desk, my bookshelf, and approximately seventeen hardcover fantasy novels that had finally found a practical use.
The electricity had died on day three. The water pressure had dropped to a miserable trickle on day six. My phone had become an expensive paperweight on day one, because apparently the Merge hadn’t prioritized keeping cell towers operational.
My reflection stared back at me from the dead television screen. Even half-starved, bruised, and wearing the same shirt for three days, I looked absurdly good. The silver-white hair fell across my forehead in a way that suggested I’d styled it rather than simply not showered. My jaw was sharp enough to open letters. My eyes still carried that intensity I’d picked in the character creator, except now it wasn’t mystery — it was hunger and exhaustion and something close to despair.
Charisma 100. Couldn’t fight, couldn’t run, couldn’t cast magic.
But by God, I am beautiful while failing.
I touched the split in my lower lip. It was still tender. The bruise along my ribs had darkened overnight into a purple-black stain spreading across my side, and dried blood crusted near my eyebrow.
Yesterday. Yesterday had been educational.
❖ ❖ ❖
By day thirteen, hunger had stopped being a background ache and started being a presence.
I’d eaten everything. Canned soup. Stale crackers. A box of pasta I’d boiled over a candle flame because the stove was electric and the electricity was gone. The peanut butter had lasted the longest, scraped thin across every meal until the jar was nothing but smears and regret.
So I’d left the apartment.
The survivor shelter occupied what used to be a shopping complex seven blocks away. A neighbor had mentioned it before she fled — supplies, water, maybe a safe place to sleep. The walk took forty minutes because I had to hide twice: once from a pack of dog-sized things with too many legs, once from a flying shape that cast a shadow too large to think about.
The things we do for calories.
The shelter was a chaos of cots and battered civilians and armed guards who looked at me the way people always looked at me now — first startled, then suspicious. My face didn’t match my level. My face never matched my level.
Level: 1
Class: None
Most people glanced at the status window and lost interest. I was too weak to recruit, too useless to trade with, too decorative to take seriously. I shuffled through the crowd hunting for a ration line or a water station or anything that might keep me alive another day.
One man kept staring.
He was large — not tall, but thick, with shoulders that suggested he’d spent the Merge hauling concrete rather than hiding under a desk. Dirty face. Calloused hands. His status showed Level 9 and some low-grade physical class I didn’t recognize.
At first I thought he wanted to recruit me. That was optimistic.
He cornered me near the back wall where the crowd thinned and the guards weren’t looking. I’d bent to check a supply crate, and when I straightened he was there.
"Hey, beautiful."
His voice was low and rough. Thrilled.
Apparently maximum Charisma has finally attracted someone. Unfortunately, he has shoulders wider than my refrigerator and looks interested in clapping the wrong cheeks.
I stepped sideways. He stepped with me.
"The shelter’s got rules about strays," he said. His eyes moved down my body and back up. "Someone your level needs protection. I could help with that."
"I’m fine."
"You don’t look fine." He grinned. "You look hungry."
His hand closed around my wrist. Not painfully. Not yet. Just casually, like he’d already decided I belonged to him and was waiting for me to catch up.
"I’ll keep you fed," he murmured. "Keep you safe. All you’ve gotta do is be good company. Real good company."
Dear God. I’m being propositioned by a Level 9 construction worker during the apocalypse. There has to be a secret achievement for this.
"No," I said.
His grin didn’t waver. "C’mon, pretty boy. You’re not exactly swimming in offers."
He leaned closer, and I could smell sweat and cheap protein bars and the sour edge of a man who’d stopped caring about hygiene the moment civilization collapsed.
I punched him.
Strength: 3. My fist connected with his jaw and his head barely moved. He blinked. Then he laughed.
"My turn."
The blow caught me across the face and threw me into the wall. My lip split. My ribs screamed. The room spun sideways and I tasted blood, warm and metallic, flooding my tongue.
"I like ’em feisty," he said, reaching down.
I grabbed a handful of dirt from a broken planter and flung it into his eyes. He roared, clawing at his face. I kicked a supply crate into his path and bolted.
Agility: 4. He was faster, stronger, better fed. But I was desperate, and desperation knew that the maintenance corridor behind the old food court had a service opening barely wide enough for a starved Level 1 with bruised ribs.
I squeezed through. Fabric tore. Something sharp scraped my forehead, and warm blood ran down my temple and dotted the corridor behind me. I noticed the trail. I simply didn’t have the time — or the strength — to do anything about it.
Behind me, his fist slammed against the metal.
"I’ll find you, pretty boy!" His voice echoed down the corridor. "You hear me? I’ll fucking find you!"
I ran until my lungs burned, and I didn’t stop until I was back in my apartment, shaking, bleeding, and so hungry I could barely stand.
❖ ❖ ❖
Back in the present, I touched my swollen lip again.
Level 9. The bastard wasn’t a famous player. Wasn’t a guild master. Wasn’t a legendary hunter. He was Level 9, and I had been completely helpless.
The anger rose suddenly, hot and bitter, flooding my chest until my hands shook.
If that bastard had been even a few levels lower, I would have broken his jaw. A pause. Probably. Maybe. At the very least, I would have insulted him from a much more confident distance.
I imagined going back. leveled up. Powerful. Walking into that shelter with stats that made people flinch and finding his smug, dirty face, and the fear in his eyes when he realized the pretty boy from the supply crate wasn’t helpless anymore.
The fantasy felt good. Then my ribs throbbed because I’d clenched my fists too hard.
Even my revenge fantasies have physical consequences.
The anger didn’t fade. It sank deeper, settling into my bones alongside the hunger and the fear and the cold knowledge that before the Merge nobody had noticed me, and after the Merge people noticed my body and ignored the person inside it.
Charisma 100. No friends. No allies. No class. Just a beautiful face and a growing list of people who wanted to own it.
I stared at the ceiling.
"Can I seduce hunger?" I asked the empty room. "Is that an option? Because I’m open to negotiation."
No System window appeared. The interface did not answer questions.
After a while, I checked my remaining supplies. Half a bottle of water. Two stale crackers wrapped in plastic. One empty peanut-butter jar, scraped down to the molecular level. One canned item without a label, which might be beans and might be dog food, and which I was saving for rock bottom.
I scraped the peanut-butter jar again anyway. Nothing. I stared into it.
Perhaps disappointment contains calories.
Scientific testing suggests otherwise.
Something heavy dragged itself along the street outside, closer this time. I heard glass crunch.
Tomorrow. Tomorrow I would have to leave. Try another shelter, another supply run, anything. If I stayed here I would starve. If I left, monsters would kill me. If I went back to the shopping complex, that Level 9 bastard might find me again.
I checked my status one more time, as if the numbers might have changed.
Strength: 3
Vitality: 2
Agility: 4
Intelligence: 8
Spirit: 5
Charisma: 100
Still beautiful. Still useless. Still dying.
I leaned against the wall and let my eyes close.
So this is how it ends. Not fighting a dragon. Not protecting humanity. Just starving in a shitty apartment while possessing the most beautiful face in the goddamn city.
I didn’t have the energy to laugh.
Time passed. I don’t know how much.
Then the monster noises stopped.
Not faded. Not moved away. Stopped, like someone had pressed a button and muted the world. The wind died. The distant sounds of the city — gunfire, screaming, the occasional roar — cut off. A raindrop froze in midair outside my broken window, just hanging there, suspended, glittering in gray light.
Hallucination. Has to be. Starvation plus despair. The brain does weird things.
Golden-violet light bloomed in the center of my apartment. I squinted against it.
And then a barefoot woman stepped out of empty space.
She was — beautiful didn’t cover it. Neither did gorgeous or stunning or any adjective I’d ever used in the character creator. She was impossible. Luminous. Her hair fell past her shoulders in waves of color I couldn’t name, violet and gold shifting like liquid sunset. Her dress — if the fabric could be called a dress rather than a deliberate absence of fabric — clung to her body in ways that made my starving brain forget about food entirely. Full breasts. Narrow waist. Hips that curved with the kind of mature, luxurious confidence that made breathing a conscious decision. Her bare feet touched my dirty floor without collecting dust. Golden-violet eyes swept the room with lazy contempt.
Then she saw me.
She froze. Her eyes widened. Slowly — so slowly I could watch the flush rise in her cheeks — she smiled.
"Oh."
One word. Whispered. Hungry.
She walked toward me, unhurried, hips swaying with a rhythm that felt like a heartbeat.
Finally. Divine salvation. A goddess. My hidden cheat has arrived.
Every protagonist story I’d ever read, every anime I’d binged at three in the morning, every game protagonist who’d ever stumbled into ultimate power — this was it. The turnaround. The moment everything changed.
She crouched in front of me. Her scent was floral and warm and made my chest ache in ways that had nothing to do with my bruised ribs. Her fingers touched my chin and tilted my face upward.
"You poor, beautiful little thing," she murmured.
Her thumb brushed the dried blood beneath my lip. Her smile deepened.
"Who left something this pretty all alone?"
For some reason, I’m beginning to miss the monster noises.
Why does divine salvation look hungry?