Insomniac Player

Everywhere he ran, the army followed. But something strange started happening around him. The other players noticed the opportunity he’d handed them without meaning to.

The monsters weren’t fighting anyone anymore. They were chasing him. Which meant every single back was turned toward the rest of the battlefield.

"ATTACK!" a commander bellowed. "Forget formations! Kill everything chasing that man!"

Hundreds of players surged in from the sides. Swords cut ravagers down from behind, mages bombarded the packed lines, archers fired without pause, tanks caught anything that broke away, gunmen emptied full magazines into exposed flanks.

The whole battlefield reshaped itself around him. One terrified insomniac running for his life up front, thousands of monsters chasing him, hundreds of players cutting them down from behind.

"BEST TAUNT I’VE EVER SEEN!" someone screamed.

"I’M NOT TAUNTING THEM!"

"WHATEVER YOU’RE DOING, KEEP DOING IT!"

"I DON’T HAVE A CHOICE!"

An Ironhide Ravager burst out of a side street. He jumped straight onto its head. "Sorry!" Ran across its back, leapt off. A hammer came down on it a second later.

BOOM!

Someone else finished the job. He kept running, twenty-eight minutes now, stamina bleeding fast, breath ragged, sweat plastering his hair down under the mask.

A Razorwing dropped in dead ahead. He tried to cut sideways, too slow, another appearing on his right, a Ravager filling the gap on his left. "...That’s bad."

He backed up, something hit him from behind, and he went down, dagger skidding out of reach. A Razorwing landed over him, jaws already open, rows of teeth filling his whole field of vision.

It lunged.

BANG! Its skull snapped sideways in a spray of red, and it collapsed beside him, dead before it landed.

"...?" He recognized that shot. Far off, on the roof of a distant skyscraper, a small figure lay behind an oversized sniper rifle, blue hair whipping in the smoke-thick wind.

➤[Party Support Detected]

"...Delulu?"

She lifted her head off the scope just long enough for him to imagine the smug grin on her face from hundreds of meters out.

BANG!

Another Razorwing dropped.

BANG!

Headshot. He pushed himself up, and warm white light wrapped around him, ribs going numb, a fraction of his stamina bleeding back in.

A dry voice cut through it. "What the hell have you done."

He turned. Doctor Smoke, mechanical arm and all, and beside her, a woman with a lazy, dangerous smile.

"Heyyy, sexy," Naked Nun drawled, dragging the word out like she had all the time in the world despite the apocalypse behind her.

He managed a tired laugh. "Hi."

Salma lit a cigarette, dragged deep, and looked out over the battlefield, monsters everywhere, buildings burning, an eight-meter shape rising in the distance, and him standing in the middle of all of it.

She exhaled slow. "..." Her eyes narrowed. "Hapless."

He groaned. "Not now."

She actually giggled.

Then the Giant’s scream rolled through the city again. "MADHAAAAASH!"

Her smile dropped instantly, head turning toward it. "...Interesting."

He tightened his grip on the dagger. "What."

Doctor Smoke stared at the Giant, then back at him. "Why does that thing know you?" Quiet, careful.

"I don’t know!" A pack of monsters was already regrouping around him.

"Keep running. We’ll cover your sides. They’re only locked onto you."

He ran without another word. "...At this point running’s less a survival strategy and more of a full-time job," he muttered to himself.

A Razorwing screamed above him. A Ravager thundered behind. Two Grave Mantises scaled the walls on either side of the street.

And somewhere farther back, still bellowing.

"MADHAAAAASH!"

"I HEARD YOU THE FIRST TWENTY TIMES!" He jumped onto the hood of an abandoned car. The Ravager crashed into it a half-second later.

BANG!

The impact launched the whole vehicle forward. He rode the momentum into a jump, boots hitting the roof of a bus.

Ding.

A notification bloomed directly in his path. He nearly ran straight through it. "What now?!"

➤[Warning...]

➤[Host behavioural deviation detected.]

➤[Nightwalker Fragment Synchronisation: 10.2%]

His foot slipped. "Whoa!" He caught his balance a heartbeat before falling off the bus. "...Ten point two?" Last check it had sat flat at ten. Why was it climbing now? The Giant? The word Madhash? The gatebreak itself?

No time to work it out. A Grave Mantis leapt, and he jumped off the bus, its bladed limbs ripping through the roof right behind him.

SKRRRRAAAK!

He hit the pavement rolling. Before he could get up, another notification opened, and this one was wrong from the first frame. Letters blurred, flickered, half the window vanishing and reappearing out of order. The familiar blue bled into red for a second, strange symbols crawling underneath the system text before everything mostly steadied.

➤[Cl■■s-Bas■d Qu■st Detected.] ➤[Nightw■■ker Fragment Quest]

[Hollow Hunt]

Objectives:

1. Eliminate all 12 Hollow Giants.

2. Kill at least one Hollow Giant with your own hands.

Reward: Hollow Giant’s Echo

Failure Penalty: If either objective remains incomplete, one of the Host’s two active Nightwalker Skills shall be permanently removed. [Shadow Dash] or [Shadow Imitation]

Hint: Hollow Giant possesses one inherent skill. Predatory Adaptation: Every Hollow Giant develops a different ability depending upon the first player who seriously injures it.

He stopped dead. A Razorwing nearly took his head off in the same second.

BANG! Its skull went with it. Delulu’s shot again.

Her voice carried down from somewhere impossibly far above. "KEEP RUNNING, BESTIE!"

He snapped back and ran. "RIGHT!"

But his face had gone pale under the mask. Twelve. Not one, not two, twelve Hollow Giants, and the system wanted all of them dead.

Worse, he personally had to land the killing blow on at least one. "A Level Sixty." He looked at the dagger in his hand, then at himself, then at the distant silhouette still hunting him through the smoke. "...With my own hands?"

Was the system drunk. He was Level Fifteen. That thing was Level Sixty. There was a real difference between a hard quest and government-sponsored suicide.

Then his eyes hit the penalty line, and whatever composure he had left curdled.

Shadow Dash. Shadow Imitation. One of them, gone forever if he failed either objective.

"No." Those weren’t skills he could afford to lose. Losing either one would cripple everything he’d built his whole fighting style around.

He shared the notification with the party channel instantly.

➤[Important Gatebreak Information.]

Silence on the other end for a moment. Daria didn’t say anything. Delulu’s shooting paused for a full two seconds. Naked Nun’s eyes went wide somewhere off in the chaos.

Salma read it twice before speaking. "Twelve?"

He ducked a diving Razorwing. "Apparently!"

"That’s not the part that matters." Her voice sharpened. "Predatory Adaptation." A pause while she reread it. "Every Hollow Giant develops a different ability based on whoever first seriously injures it."

She got there before he did. "The one Noah hit."

His stomach dropped. Noah. First person to seriously hurt it. Not just any fighter, either, a man who could apparently turn an eight-meter monster into a launched drill bit with one punch.

Salma opened another line. "Noah."

A beat, then, breathless: "What?"

"Read this."

Silence while he did, then one flat curse. "...Shit."

◇◇◇

Several hundred meters out, the Hollow Giant rose slowly out of the wreckage, concrete sliding off its back, torso still bent wrong from where Noah’s Screwdriver had launched it clean through three buildings.

It stood there a moment, unmoving.

CRACK.

Its spine straightened out on its own. Noah, watching from below, went still. "...?"

CRACK! CRACK! CRACK!

Its whole frame started changing. Thin shoulders widened, muscle swelling under grey skin that had no business supporting that kind of mass. Its arms thickened. Its narrow chest broadened out. Veins rose thick and dark under the surface as it packed on weight at a rate that shouldn’t have been physically possible.

Then the skin itself changed, hardening, darkening, taking on the dull sheen of stone.

Noah’s expression slowly came apart. "...You’ve got to be kidding me."