Insomniac Player

By the time Damien made it back to Diamond Residential Complex, the sky had gone orange at the edges.

It had been a long day. A gate that had killed more players than he could hold in his head at once. A Demiboss he still didn’t fully understand. Four women he owed his life to, twice over now. He let out a breath. "...Home."

He showered off the dried blood and Ironfall dust in silence, water running rust-brown at his feet before finally going clear.

"...Better than orphanage water, at least." He almost laughed at himself for thinking it.

Twenty minutes later, towel around his waist, hair dripping onto the polished floor, he opened his system out of habit and found an icon he hadn’t noticed before.

[Contacts.]

He’d forgotten the old phone network was gone entirely, folded into the system along with everything else. Curious, he opened it, and a list unfolded that was bigger than he expected: old classmates, teachers, the grocer near Saint Mary’s, all of it apparently pulled straight from whatever his phone had held onto before the tutorials swallowed him.

Three names near the top stopped him cold.

John Jones. Rahul Modi. Imran Ali.

He smiled, small and a little unsteady. "So they really made it back."

He opened the messages tab, and three sub-tabs unfolded underneath it.

➤[Personal Messages]

➤[Regional Channel]

➤[Worldwide Channel]

"...Worldwide." He huffed a quiet laugh. Talking to the whole planet sounded like the last thing he wanted tonight.

He tapped into John’s name instead. Old conversations from before everything sat archived at the top, untouched for two years. He stared at them a moment before typing.

«Hey, Mr. John. I’m back. Can we meet?»

He hit send and watched it disappear into nothing.

No reply came. He told himself it made sense, John was a world-famous hero now, probably drowning in messages he’d never get through in a lifetime, and closed the chat before he could sit there refreshing it. If John saw it, he’d answer eventually.

He got dressed and caught his reflection in the mirror. Gray, plain, government-issue. "...No." Not his style at all. "New clothes," he said, and that settled it.

◇◇◇

The evening streets of Viremont were still wide awake, elves and office workers sharing the same sidewalk, a knight in full plate nursing coffee while scrolling news on a floating screen, street performers pulling actual sparks out of the air instead of tricks. Damien let himself walk for a while, no destination, taking it in.

"This place really is beautiful."

He found what he wanted a few stores in, simple, dark, nothing flashy, exactly his taste. As the cashier finished ringing him up, a chime sounded in his ear.

➤[Contract Received]

➤[Sender: Government of Viremont]

➤[Subject: Gate Rental Agreement]

➤[Duration: One Year]

➤[Monthly Compensation: 100 Gold Coins]

He skimmed the clauses, access rights, maintenance terms, and payment schedule, and it all read fair enough at a glance.

"...I’ll go through it properly tonight." He filed it away in storage. A hundred gold a month. Whatever he’d been worried about financially yesterday had quietly stopped mattering.

He took a detour on the walk home, toward the new orphanage, the one the system had built after the old one came down. It looked more like an academy than a shelter, gardens out front, a faint shimmer of wards along the fence line, kids laughing somewhere behind it.

He didn’t go in. He bought out most of a shopping center instead- candy, board games, toy swords, plush animals, more than he’d meant to- and left it all at the front desk with no name attached. "Distribute it evenly, please."

He watched from across the street as the gifts made it out to the courtyard, watched the noise that followed, kids fighting over toy swords, comparing stuffed animals, a couple of caretakers losing the battle to keep order. A few of the faces were ones he recognized, taller now, healthier than he remembered them.

He almost crossed the street. He didn’t turn back. Everyone here thought Damien had died somewhere in the higher tutorials, and showing up now would turn this courtyard into a headline before sundown. Not tonight.

"...Take care." He said it low, to no one in particular, and walked away.

◇◇◇

Night had fully settled by the time he wandered into a quiet park, just the cool air and empty paths.

There, a man sat alone on a bench under a wide oak tree, maybe thirty, a faint silver glow sitting on his skin like moonlight that hadn’t found anywhere else to land. Perfectly still. Eyes on the stars.

He seemed to be mumbling about something or perhaps, he was talking to himself. Whatever it was, he made Damien curious.

Damien frowned. "...Player skill like a lightbulb?"

He asked the nearest security guard, pointing towards his direction. "That man over there, who is he?"

The guard followed his finger to an empty bench. "...What man?"

"The one glowing."

"Sir, I’ve been standing here an hour. That bench has been empty the whole time."

Damien looked again. The man hadn’t moved, still watching the sky as if the conversation ten feet away didn’t concern him. "...You’re joking."

"I’m really not." The guard’s face shifted from polite to careful. "You feeling alright?"

"He’s sitting right there."

The guard took a step back. "Mate, I think you should see someone. A doctor. Maybe a psychiatrist." He didn’t wait for an answer, already walking off, muttering something about psychos under his breath. "I don’t get paid enough to deal with psychos too..."

The bench stayed occupied. The man stayed exactly where he was, glow and all.

"...How." Damien’s fingers curled at his sides before he noticed himself doing it.

He remembered the system, then, and pulled up Observe without looking away from the figure.

A window opened. Almost nothing in it. One word.

➤[Ghost]

His pupils shrank. "...Ghost?"

The man’s eyes drifted down from the stars, unhurried, and found his.

Then he smiled.