Insomniac Player

Everyone froze as glasses toppled off the table, one shattering against the marble floor. The lights flickered.

Damien looked up. "...That doesn’t sound good."

Another impact.

BOOOOOOOOOOM!

Closer this time. The wall trembled, dust sifting down from the ceiling.

The ministers shot to their feet. "What was that?!"

"An attack?"

"Security!"

Military players drew weapons on reflex. Noah forgot his own shame long enough to plant himself in front of Damien. The Iron Marshal stepped clear of the table entirely, and his whole bearing shifted in the same motion, the politician arguing a minute ago gone, replaced by a Level 338 combat veteran with nothing left to say.

Mana filled the room instantly. Damien felt the pressure of it right away, heavy, tightly controlled, and unmistakably dangerous.

"Defensive positions." The general’s order landed, and the guards obeyed without hesitation. Another sound rolled in from outside.

BOOM!

Then another.

BOOM!

Something was cutting straight through the building toward them. Walls cracked somewhere past the meeting hall. Screams echoed down the corridor.

The President stepped back. "What is happening?"

Noah’s eyes narrowed. "Someone’s breached the Secretariat."

A minister went white. "That’s impossible."

BOOOOOOM!

The doors themselves shook. Every head turned. Silence sealed every mouth in the room.

KNOCK.

Everyone blinked, Damien included. Someone had actually knocked, after apparently steamrolling through half the security network to get here. Nobody moved.

KNOCK. KNOCK.

The Iron Marshal raised one hand. "Stay behind me." Mana gathered fast around his arm.

Damien watched the doors. The hinges bent slowly inward, the whole frame bulging.

"...Uh."

The doors exploded.

BANG!

One massive wooden panel launched straight at the President, who stood frozen a beat too long. The Iron Marshal moved instead, his hand snapping out.

BOOM!

The panel disintegrated mid-flight, wood scattering into thousands of fragments. Dust rolled through the room. Weapons came up everywhere.

Noah stepped fully in front of Damien. The Iron Marshal dropped into a lower stance. "Identify yourself!"

Footsteps came through the dust, and a shape filled what was left of the doorway. Big, nearly wall to wall. Broad shoulders, a substantial gut, the general silhouette of a retired heavyweight fighter who’d somehow also become everyone’s favorite uncle.

The dust cleared further. Ginger hair, thinning fast on top. A truly magnificent ginger mustache doing most of the work up top instead.

The Iron Marshal’s eyes went wide. Noah stopped breathing entirely. Several ministers went pale, the President’s expression cracking along with them.

Damien just stared. "..."

The huge man stepped over the wreckage of the door, boots crunching splintered wood, dust caked into torn clothing, one sleeve ripped clean through at the shoulder. His eyes swept the room, the soldiers, the ministers, the general.

Then they landed on Damien, and everything about him changed at once. His whole face softened into a warmth Damien hadn’t seen aimed at him in a long time, the kind that existed before any of this became a game.

"Damien."

His throat closed up for a second. Two years for the world. Barely any time at all for him.

"Hello, Mr. John."

John’s smile widened. "There you are."

Noah stepped aside without being asked. Nobody in the room seemed willing to say a word. John crossed toward Damien, slow, eyes fixed on his face the entire way, almost like he needed the extra few seconds just to confirm this was real.

Damien managed a smile of his own. "You got fatter."

John stopped dead. The whole room stayed dead silent along with him. His mustache twitched once. "You little rascal."

Damien laughed, and John did too, loud and genuine, and for one brief second the meeting hall stopped feeling dangerous at all.

Then John’s eyes drifted down to Damien’s hands, and the laughter died on the spot.

Damien followed his gaze. The cuffs. Blue system symbols still glowing along his wrists.

John went completely still. Whatever warmth had been on his face vanished entirely, and his head turned, slow, deliberate. He looked at Noah first, and Noah’s eyes dropped instantly to the floor.

Then the guards. Then the ministers. Then the President.

The air itself changed before John had even moved. Damien felt it happen, mana surging outward, marble cracking under his boots.

Crack.

A glass on the table shattered on its own. Then another. The lights flickered once. A minister stumbled back a step without meaning to.

Damien’s eyes widened. He’d felt the Iron Marshal’s pressure earlier, and that had been enormous on its own. This was something else entirely.

John took one step toward the table.

CRACK!

Fractures spread out under his foot in a spiderweb. The Iron Marshal watched, tense, and didn’t move to attack. More telling than that, he didn’t say a word about calming down either.

John’s eyes stayed locked on the President. When he finally spoke, his voice came out quiet and gentle, which somehow made it far worse than shouting.

"Who..."

Mana erupted.

BOOOOOOM!

Every window in the room shattered at once. Curtains snapped violently in the sudden wind, papers ripped off the table and scattered. A few ministers triggered defensive skills purely on instinct.

His mustache stirred in the storm of his own power as he pointed at Damien’s cuffs. "...did this."

Nobody answered. His eyes hardened.

"I asked." The whole fifty-first floor shook under the words. "Who put cuffs on this kid?"

Everyone in the room felt it, the sheer scale of pressure rolling off John Jones. The man who’d just walked through the Secretariat’s entire defense network like it was tissue paper. The man whose name filled history books, ranking boards, documentaries that got replayed on loop. The man who’d vanished from public view for years and never once stopped being exactly this dangerous underneath it.

He stood in the center of the room, and everyone in it understood, in one single moment, the difference between a strong player and something wearing a human face.

The pressure wasn’t wild. It wasn’t leaking out of him because he couldn’t hold it in, the way a normal high-level player’s mana usually did. Every drop of it belonged to him on purpose, held exactly where he wanted it, no further. The floor cracked under his own boots, and the people standing closest to him stayed completely untouched by any of it, aside from the ones he’d chosen to press down on directly.

The ministers gasped for air. One clung to the table for balance, another sat down hard on the floor without meaning to. Even Level 70 military players couldn’t stay upright, knees buckling under the weight of it. Noah went down with the rest of them, the same man who’d shrugged off a Level 60 monster’s full swing without flinching.

Damien watched all of it, and slowly realized something. He wasn’t going down with them. The weight was there, unmistakable, pressing on the whole room. It simply never touched him at all, a thin, invisible layer sitting between him and everything John was releasing.

Not armor. Not any visible skill. Pure, deliberate control, extended around Damien on purpose and nowhere else. His eyes narrowed slightly at that. The gap between them wasn’t just large. It was almost frightening.

The Iron Marshal stayed standing, barely, marble cracked beneath his own boots from the effort of holding his ground. He stepped forward anyway. "Sir John." A title he clearly reserved for very few people, and John got it without question.

His voice held steady despite everything. "This was a misunderstanding."

John’s eyes cut toward him, and the pressure climbed another notch. The general’s jaw tightened. "We were only interrogating him."

"Interrogating." The word came out heavier than it should have been able to. "On whose order?"

Nobody answered. John took another step forward. "On whose order did you put restraints on this boy?"

The President’s face had gone completely bloodless. Every minister in the room found something else to look at rather than meet John’s eyes directly.