Insomniac Player

"Idiot, wake up."

"...Who is this dunce?"

Another kick struck Damien’s leg.

"Get out of the way, you stupid son of a bitch!"

Damien’s eyes snapped open, his body reacting before his mind caught up. He shot to his feet in a single motion, instinctively dropping into a defensive stance.

But no monsters were waiting for him. Just blinding sunlight bouncing off rows of towering glass buildings.

People streamed past him in every direction. The smell of roasted coffee had replaced the stench of goblin blood.

For several seconds Damien just stood there, no word escaping his mouth. His breathing turned uneven. He looked down slowly and realized he’d been lying in the middle of a busy road.

People walked around him, irritated. A middle-aged man clicked his tongue as he passed.

"Go sleep somewhere else. Don’t block traffic."

Damien stepped aside on instinct. "S-Sorry."

The man shook his head. "You youngsters..." He muttered something else as he walked off.

Damien turned in a slow circle, taking the street in. His fingers clenched. It all came back to him at once, the strange notifications, Earth-69, the departure, the anomaly, the deletion. This was Earth. This was home.

He glanced at the nearest street sign. The language was still English. The architecture looked different, yet familiar underneath it, skyscraper silhouettes, wide roads. "...Is this New York?"

The same middle-aged man, still waiting to cross, laughed loudly. "It used to be. It’s called Viremont now."

Damien blinked. "...When did they rename it?"

The man looked at him properly for the first time. "Around two years ago." Then he frowned. "Every kid knows that."

He didn’t wait for a follow-up question. He just kept walking.

Damien stood frozen, the number echoing in his head. His breathing grew heavier and he pushed himself onto the pavement, out of the flow of the crowd, until he reached a quieter corner and finally stopped.

His eyes lifted, and the first thing he saw was impossible to miss: a colossal crystal tower piercing the clouds, radiating a soft light of its own. It resembled the Class Change Towers the system had shown during the tutorial, only far larger than he’d imagined. People streamed in and out through its massive gates in a steady current.

Some wore suits. Others wore robes stitched with glowing symbols. A few carried swords bigger than they were. One woman in shining silver armor walked past eating ice cream, completely unbothered by her own outfit, as if this was simply what a normal afternoon looked like now.

Damien swallowed. "The world really changed."

He kept walking, and every few meters something else caught his eye. A group in matching crimson cloaks. A teenager dragging a staff taller than himself. A girl with fox ears laughing while she held her mother’s hand.

His eyes widened. "Mutation? Or a race?" He genuinely couldn’t tell.

Above the street, a handful of sleek, streamlined shapes drifted silently across the sky, riding on some invisible force rather than wings or engines, marked only by an occasional soft hum. He wondered what they were. He remembered private vehicles had been shut down by the system, replaced with some kind of train network.

His attention shifted again. People walked with transparent blue holograms floating above their wrists, typing in the air or watching videos on screens as thin as glass. A rare few carried actual phones, their designs strange and unfamiliar, another thing the system had supposedly banned.

Everything looked more advanced and, at the same time, stitched together with fantasy in a way that shouldn’t have worked and somehow did. The system hadn’t just replaced the old technology. It had reshaped it, folded magic and machinery into the same fabric.

Damien exhaled slowly and kept walking.

The city no longer resembled the New York he remembered. Massive gem inlays decorated buildings built in old, ornate styles. Floating advertisements drifted overhead, layered in with LED walls and digital billboards. Trees along the street glowed faintly, their leaves a soft blue. A few skyscrapers curved in shapes that looked almost alien, impossible by any ordinary engineering he knew, and people walked beneath them like there was nothing strange about it at all.

He reached a wide intersection ringed with enormous digital billboards. One advertised equipment. Another promoted class registrations. A third played footage of monsters being cut down mid-fight.

Then a face filled the screen. A familiar one. A huge man with an orange mustache and shoulders like a doorway, an enormous mace resting against one of them, smiling the exact way Damien remembered.

His eyes went wide. "...Mr. John?"

He said it under his breath, but the billboard was already spelling it out in gold letters above the man’s head.

— THE SHIELD OF HUMANITY SIR JOHN JONES —

A young man standing near Damien overheard him and lit up instantly. "What a man he is, right?"

Damien turned. "Who?"

"Sir John, obviously." The young man grinned, proud on his behalf. "He’s my role model."

Damien stayed quiet, thoughts racing. He couldn’t just start asking questions outright, that would draw attention fast. He needed information without looking like he needed it. He forced a small smile. "Really?"

The young man crossed his arms. "I know practically everything about him."

Damien let out a small chuckle. "Bold claim."

"It’s not a claim. It’s a fact."

"Funny, because I admire Sir John too." He glanced up at the billboard. "Let’s see who actually knows him better."

That lit something up in the young man immediately. "Oh? A quiz?"

Damien shrugged, easy. "Why not."

The stranger laughed. "You’re on."

It went exactly as Damien hoped. If the man thought this was a competition, he’d hand over information freely instead of wondering why a grown adult knew nothing about the most famous person in the city.

"First question," the young man announced.

"No." Damien smiled. "I challenged you. You go first."

The man rolled his eyes. "Fine." He cleared his throat like he was about to give a speech. "Sir John Jones is one of humanity’s first-generation players. Entered the tutorials two years ago."

Damien’s fingers twitched. Two years. He’d been unconscious for two years.

"And?" Damien kept his tone casual.

"He cleared the Sixteenth Tutorial." The young man said it like it was obvious.

Damien nearly forgot to breathe. Sixteenth. John had actually made it that far.

"And?" Damien smirked, like he already knew.

"He came back with a Legendary Class." The young man pointed at the billboard. "The Dread Bastion. An offensive tank build, the strongest shield humanity’s first generation ever produced."

Damien lowered his head. Warmth spread through his chest, thick and sudden.

That loud, ridiculous, big-hearted uncle had actually become a legend.

Pride settled in first, real and solid. Then something quieter slid in beside it. Envy. He’d collapsed before the Third Tutorial had even started, while John had climbed sixteen floors without him.

He clenched his fists and smiled anyway. "He deserved it."

The young man mistook Damien’s silence for defeat. "Ha. Told you I know everything."

Damien tried another angle. "What about the man who entered with him?"

The young man’s face brightened again. "Oh. You mean Damien."

Damien’s heart stopped for a second. "You know him too?"

The stranger nodded, easy, like it was common knowledge. "Sir John brings him up in almost every interview. He always says Damien was smarter than everyone in their entire twenty-player team combined."

Damien’s throat tightened as the man kept going.

"’If he hadn’t disappeared, he would’ve surpassed all of us.’" The young man shrugged. "He vanished after the second tutorial. Most historians think he died somewhere in the higher ones."

Damien stopped hearing the rest of it. John remembered him. Two years later, and he was still saying his name out loud to strangers with cameras pointed at him.

His chest tightened. Relief, gratitude, sadness, and something that felt uncomfortably close to guilt, all pressing against the same spot at once.

The young man kept talking. "Some people still think he’ll come back one day, because his name’s still on the legendary ranking list. Usually a dead player’s name gets wiped automatically."

Damien stepped back, his breathing suddenly uneven. The world tilted at the edges, too much arriving all at once. John was alive. The world had moved on two years without him. He’d been declared missing, maybe dead.

His family. The orphanage. What had happened to them while he was gone.

"I..." He turned away. "I need to go."

Before the stranger could react, Damien ran.

"Hey!" the young man shouted after him. "I still had more! You didn’t even answer one question! I’m calling this my win, asshole!"

The voice faded behind him. Damien didn’t slow down.

He ran through crowded streets, past towering buildings and hundreds of strangers who didn’t spare him a second glance, his thoughts growing more tangled with every step. Eventually he found a narrow alley between two buildings and ducked into it, finally stopping.

He leaned back against a cold concrete wall, breathing in sharp gasps, heart hammering. "...Calm down."

He shut his eyes. "One problem at a time."

First, he needed to find out if anyone from the orphanage was still alive. Second, he needed to understand what had happened in the two years he’d lost. Third, he needed to figure out why the system had sent him back alone. And last, he needed to know why it had tried to delete his class in the first place.

He already had a good guess on that last one. Nightwalker. Uncommon rarity, no other class option ever shown to him. It was the only piece of this that pointed anywhere.

Damien opened his eyes. For the first time since waking up, the full shape of it settled on him. The old world was gone. The new one had already moved on without leaving space for him in it.

Standing alone in the alley, he looked up at the distant class change tower cutting into the sky, and quietly said to himself, "Looks like I have to start from the beginning again."