Insomniac Player

Damien looked toward the crimson gate. ’Although it’s still open. It’s good nothing more is coming through it.’

The last of the smaller monsters were being cleared out street by street.

He caught Noah’s eye and gave a small nod. Noah raised his hand. "On my count."

The Giants started roaring, ten chest-mouths splitting open at once, voices merging into one sound, some of them still repeating the same word. "Madhash..."

His jaw tightened. Not the time. Later.

"Three," Noah shouted, and it carried across the whole district.

Mana erupted from ten different points at once. A sword turned to captured sunlight. A spear screamed with compressed air. Golden chains snapped taut under a rising hammer. Space itself bent visibly around another player’s outstretched hands.

"Two." The Giants fought their restraints, buildings groaning, roads splitting further. One tore an arm free, and its executioner kicked it straight back down. "Don’t fucking move."

"One." Ten strikes coiled at once. Noah’s hand dropped. "Kill them."

Tycho vanished under light.

BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!

Ten attacks landed in the same instant. For less than a second the system tried to keep up.

➤[Hollow Giant eliminated.]

➤[Collective Evolution Activated.]

Then another death registered. Then another. The messages started stacking faster than either of them could load fully.

➤[Hollow Giant eliminated.]

➤[Hollow Giant eliminated.]

➤[Hollow Giant eliminated.]

➤[Hollow Giant eliminated.]

Glowing particles searched for a body to inherit into. There wasn’t one left standing long enough to catch them.

➤[Collective Evolution attempting inheritance...]

➤[Searching for viable recipient...]

➤[Searching...]

➤[Searching...]

➤[No viable Hollow Giant detected.]

➤[Collective Evolution Failed.]

And... one final line opened across every player’s vision at once.

➤[ALL HOLLOW GIANTS ELIMINATED] ➤[GATEBREAK SUPPRESSED]

Nobody moved for a few seconds. Then Tycho city broke into noise, weapons raised, players collapsing where they stood, strangers hugging whoever was closest, someone firing a spell straight up into the sky just to have something to do with the relief.

"WE WON!"

"TYCHO HELD!"

"THE GATEBREAK IS OVER!"

He didn’t join in. The dagger slipped out of his hand.

Clink.

His legs gave out on their own, and he slid down the side of a wrecked building until he was just sitting in the street. "...Tired."

Daria walked over, looking about as worn down as he felt, one whole side of her green outfit soaked dark with blood that clearly wasn’t all hers.

"Still alive?"

"Unfortunately."

"Good." She dropped down beside him.

The celebration kept going around them while the smoke started clearing enough to show what had been underneath it the whole time. Bodies. A player pinned under a broken shield with half of him simply gone below the waist. Another being carried off on a stretcher, arms hanging wrong. Rows of civilians lying still under emergency sheets, one after another after another.

Collapsed apartment blocks. Entire buildings just gone. Ambulances packed every open street, and the first official numbers hit his vision a moment later.

➤[Preliminary Tycho Gatebreak Casualties]

➤[Players deceased: 175]

➤[Civilian fatalities: Estimated 4,000+]

➤[Injured: Calculating...]

Four thousand. The number stayed abstract right up until he spotted a small shoe lying alone next to an overturned bus, and then it stopped being a number at all.

His face went slack. This wasn’t a game. Levels made it feel like one. Skills, quests, experience, respawns, all of it had spent two years quietly teaching his brain the wrong lesson.

These people didn’t respawn. A hundred seventy-five players weren’t going to load back in somewhere safer. Four thousand civilians weren’t background characters filling out a scene.

They were just dead.

He looked toward the corpses of the Giants, still smoking in the wreckage.

’Nightwalker..... Madhash....’

Something out there had known him, not as Damien, not as Sleepless, specifically the class the system itself had once tried to burn out of existence.

➤[Host behavioral deviation detected.]

➤[Nightwalker Fragment Synchronization: 10.5%]

His fingers curled slowly. Maybe Nightwalker wasn’t just rare. Maybe it wasn’t just glitched, either. Maybe it was never supposed to exist inside this system at all. Or worse, maybe it belonged to something the system considered an actual enemy.

Daria glanced over. "Sleepless?"

He didn’t answer. Just kept looking out over Tycho, over the fires and the bodies. So many of the fighters out there had been kids, barely players a few months, thrown into the deep end at levels that never should have put them anywhere near this. Thousands more, non-combat players, civilians, had never signed up for any of it in the first place.

Then a colder thought surfaced underneath the grief. If these things had walked through already knowing Nightwalker’s name, something bigger might already know it too.

He picked the dagger back up, hand shaking from pure exhaustion. He hated how weak that shake made him feel. Hundreds of people had bled today for monsters that had come specifically for him.

Next time, Noah might not be there. Daria might not be there. Salma, Hamari, hundreds of strangers who happened to be standing between him and something that wanted him dead, none of them guaranteed.

He closed his hand around the dagger. "I need to get stronger."

Daria heard it and said nothing.

He looked toward the dying gate, its edges already thinning. Not curiosity anymore. Not levels, not becoming some legendary name on a leaderboard. Something a lot simpler and a lot colder: if the system really was against him, he needed to be strong enough to still be standing whenever it stopped pretending otherwise.

◇◇◇

Tycho was still standing. Technically. He wasn’t sure that counted as good news anymore.

➤[Tycho City Damage Assessment: 21.3%]

He stood at a wrecked intersection and looked at what twenty-one percent actually meant up close. A whole apartment block had come down across the road. Three more had holes punched straight through them, floor to floor. Windows gone for blocks in every direction. Expensive flying cars lay crushed under rubble. Water ran black from broken pipes, carrying dust and blood down into the drains together.

Government crews were already everywhere, hundreds of them, orange rescue gear and white protective suits moving between the wreckage. Earth-class players cleared collapsed concrete by hand. Water mages worked the last fires down to nothing. Support players combed the ruined buildings floor by floor for anyone still breathing. Medical tents had gone up on every corner that still had room for one.

And the bodies. He stood there and watched two government workers lift a dead player onto a stretcher, armor caved in, skull broken, one eye hanging loose from a socket that no longer held its shape. One boot missing. A sword still locked tight in a fist that hadn’t let go even after everything else had stopped.

His stomach turned over, and he went down on his knees and threw up right there in the street. Someone covered the man with a black sheet a second later and carried him off without a word.

Another body took his place. Then another. Then another. A few had died whole. Most hadn’t.

Nearby, a temporary identification station had gone up, weapons, phones, equipment, anything that could put a name to a face too damaged to recognize on sight. He looked away from that too.

Behind a government barrier, civilians pressed in against the tape, scanning casualty lists on a projected screen. A woman screamed somewhere in the crowd after finding a name she’d been hoping not to find. A man sat down on the curb and just stopped moving entirely. A little girl clung to an emergency worker’s hand, asking over and over where her father was.

Nobody had an answer for her.

His hand curled into a fist. Four thousand kept circling back through his head, over and over, and every single one of them had had a name. Someone waiting up for them. Someone expecting them home tonight.

"You okay?" Salma’s voice, from behind.

He glanced over. She sat on the hood of an ambulance in a borrowed government medical jacket, her own coat gone, treating a young player’s arm with one hand while somehow still keeping a cigarette balanced between her lips the whole time.

He read the sign taped to the ambulance door. NO SMOKING NEAR MEDICAL OXYGEN.

Then back at her. "...You genuinely have a problem."

"Mind your own business, Hapless."

Daria sat near them, no longer looking anything like Madam Marvel, staff already gone back into her inventory, drinking water off a chunk of broken concrete. Hamari lay flat on her back beside her, sniper rifle resting across her stomach. "I’m never moving again. Ever."

Naked Nun sat with them too, unusually quiet for once, despite having killed more of the smaller monsters than anyone out here besides the executioners themselves.

He tugged the edge of his mask down where it had ridden up during the sickness, and looked out at the skyline. The crimson gate was gone entirely now. Just ordinary clouds left where it had been.