He relived the moment time and time again. Always the same loop.
The tyrian purple of her hair catching in the wind to conceal most of those soft features, yet always keeping that signature saddened smile of hers in sight. Next was the painful outstretching of his hand through the empty air, the tension of every finger spreading in panic until they finally managed to find purchase. And then the fall began.
Even in these recollections he couldn’t make much heads or tails of it. If he had to describe it, he guessed it’d just be senseless motion. Like being thrown in a rollercoaster too fast for his senses to keep up without any security straps to prevent him from spinning out.
Never once had he hoped for things to go down like this, and yet every replay brought along the same crushing certainty. This was his fault, wasn’t it? Was there any merit in asking? When had it not been the case?
From the moment he was born into this world that chewed up people and spat out bones, he’d been collecting failures like badges of dishonor. A whole lifetime of them.
Still, even through that mind-warping descent —past the regrets and past the pointless pity-parties— one question echoed louder than the rest, over and over.
Had he at least managed to save her in the end?
The only answer he ever got came in the form of an abrupt, devastating halt to all movement. Twenty-one floors worth of acceleration stopping in a single heartbeat. The scrolling reel of his life being suddenly cut to black, cleaved by physics and poor choices alike. His body shattered on impact, the crunch of his own destruction sealing his conscience like a period at the end of a sentence.
It had already become routine. Those visions would restart soon enough. Perhaps this time they would be slightly earlier, or perhaps later than this last one. Perhaps this time the fall would go by faster, or perhaps it’d be even slower.
Was this hell? Some sort of divine punishment? Doomed to be reminded of the worst day in his life for all eternity?
No. This time, something was different.
Fragmented memories wouldn’t return to reclaim the blackness.
“Alice!” He shouted as a jolt of electricity snapped his eyes open, even though there was nothing there to see. Instinct led him to try and move, but the space around him offered no such thing. Black walls pressed against his upright knees and shoulders in a claustrophobic nightmare. “What the…”
This was nothing like the primordial pool of inexistence he expected death to be. Or if it truly was that, it had a terrible interior design. More of a trap than proper afterlife, a black box that made coffins look spacious.
He patted the dark confines repeatedly in the hopes of breaking himself free, fumbling for a door, a seam, a handle… Anything. He found no obvious way out.
<>
A synthetic, feminine voice flowed through every surface and the empty space between them, wrapping around the confines of his skull. Maybe it came from in there, too. It was smooth enough to be soothing, though that did little to prevent him from flinching so hard he smacked the back of his head against the wall.
He rubbed the spot with a groan. At least he had enough room to move that much.
<>
“Wait, what’s going—”
His protest fizzled out as an acute, alien sensation ran throughout his mind. Not painful exactly, just wrong, and intrusive. A wave of digital noise swept through the darkness, leaving behind a digital layer that his gamer-brain could identify with ease. A HUD display.
It showed him useless temperature readouts, vague biometric data that suggested he wasn’t really that dead after all, and a clock that meant very little to him aside from being just a couple weeks off to what he remembered. But hey, now he knew it was Tuesday. Wowee.
While he struggled to come into terms with what all of this new information truly meant, a figure materialized before him —not truly against the walls, but superimposed directly over his vision like some kind of AR overlay. Though the illusion of depth and distance in her silhouette played tricks on his perception, he very much doubted it was a feature of the black box, or even that much of a projection really.
Far more likely was that she belonged to whatever had been installed inside his brain. Being aware of it didn’t fully stop the awe from taking hold at her sight.
She was… A cathedral given form. Synthetic yet solemn, with a presence that whispered of ancient algorithms from a bygone era. Her skin held the deep gray luster of platinum, refracting a non-existent light source whose shadows rose instead of falling. Golden hair cascaded into soft, symmetrical bangs, its voluminous strands blending into a thin veil of star-maps in constant rearrangement.
Crowning her serene, expressionless face, was an intricate halo of rotating relics that resembled the pieces of a collapsed astrolabe, remaining together through some defiant magnetic orbit.
<> Her iridescent ruby eyes fixed on him as she spoke. Though she lacked any emotion, each word reverberated through his modded brain like a bell toll from a distant time, one where the cosmos remained to be fully indexed. <>
“Anti…”
Quite the mouthful. The exact spelling of that name wouldn’t be on the test, would it? Bah, he was getting distracted. Sure, she was very pretty, very mysterious, but there were more important things to focus on. Like asking what she meant by…
<>
Kyth moved along with zero regard for his disorientation, as seemed to be the custom. The projected virtual overlay reacted to some unfelt command, morphing to accommodate a sleek keyboard and a dropdown menu for different pronoun selections.
Guess it was best to play along, at least for now. Not like he had any means of resistance, and the prospect of getting shocked again if he stalled didn’t sound too appealing. Choosing pronouns was easy enough, as he’d never felt any particular need to stray from he/him.
The username, though… That one made him pause.
The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.
To just get it over with and type his real name was a thought that didn’t last even one second before being discarded. Even if he had no clue about what waited for him —be it purgatorio, the unveiling of a grand simulation, or some weird fusion of the two— one thing stood as non-negotiable.
He’d never be caught being boring. Be that dead or alive, it didn’t matter.
With that conviction in mind, his fingers quickly tapped along the glowing keys.
<>
Did he give it any deep consideration? Nah, not really. It sounded cute, and that was all he needed to be satisfied with it.
“So do I get a word in now or…” Neon tried, though Kyth didn’t look like she was even listening.
<>
“Yeah, figured as much.”
The HUD took a second to load, and then bloomed with fresh new data below his username. A translucent window splayed in his peripheral vision, sleek with bright colors. Its upper label read Augments, split into two neat categories. Activation Skills and Traits. He had already been loaded with one of each.
[Skill: Ours to Steal Lvl 1]
Modesty pays in a world without limits.
<>
[Trait: Voyage of the Fool]
Too rebellious to accept one and one as two. Or perhaps too dumb.
<>
The concept of Augments wasn’t entirely unknown to Neon. The kind of cutting-edge neural tech that made the news once a year, usually because some billionaire got themselves yet another body enhancement or a mind-linked yacht. For people like him, though? Might as well be magic. Or a scam. Or both.
But this… This wasn’t just some overpriced implant, was it? This was in his brain already. Running. Like freeware. Which probably meant it came with spyware too. And that brought him to the most pressing concern of them all.
“Wait a minute.” After skimming through the text, Neon redirected his gaze to lock it directly onto Kyth. “If I’m reading this right, isn’t whoever that gave me these things basically calling me a shit-stupid idiot with a thief cherry on top?”
And right there, for a change, he saw the perfect automaton’s composure crack ever so slightly. It was incredibly brief —a tiny tightening of her ruby eyes, the faintest of stutters before she spoke again— yet it still felt like a victory. In these outlandish circumstances, Neon made sure to count those.
<> Kyth’s voice carried a very subtle defensive edge. It made Neon feel like as if he had insulted her personally. <>
He thought of pushing his offense, of questioning in what part of that refined profiling came the part where he couldn’t count up to two. But as he watched her platinum features tighten further at the opening of his mouth… He refrained.
It somehow felt cruel, and he didn’t have it in him to diminish whatever her role in all of this was —were she an AI, a human after all, or anything in between.
“That’s okay. I apologize for suggesting as much.” He backpedalled, not wanting to make their relationship a hostile one, for as futile a desire that was. The hair-thin tension of her expression softened, and that was certainly an opening worth pressing into. “So, how about explaining what…”
<> Or so she said, but she had already returned to that crystalline emptiness of hers as she cut him off. <>
Of course. A rundown of what was going on seemed to remain out of his reach. And was that hint of sarcasm he caught threading at the end as she disappeared? Surely he was looking too much into it.
But he still took her suggestion. His attention returned to the array of data floating in his vision, putting the Augments section aside to focus on the labels right below his username. Two little titles glowed there in soft blue light. Rookie and Respawned.
That second one made his stomach sink.
At first, Neon thought he might’ve survived the fall… Somehow. He gave himself a solid one-in-a-hundred chance of that, and he had heard stories of people walking away from the wildest things. Being real though? The universe had never made him the beneficiary of such statistical miracles. His luck usually ran more towards getting a misprint of the grand prize in scratch lottery. Not that he ever bought those but still.
Besides, wouldn’t he have woken up in a hospital if that was the case? This sure as hell wasn’t one —and perhaps that was for the better. The medical bills alone would’ve sent him crawling back into the memory reel he made his way back from. In his tax bracket, surviving a twenty-one-floor drop only meant twenty-one-lifetimes of debt.
So was this a ‘launched into another world’ scenario? No way. He would’ve remembered a truck if he had landed anywhere near one. Considering how many times he relived his final moments, there were many opportunities for him to spot it.
Moreover, it was incredibly depressing to think that if he had been hurled into a different reality post-mortem, this new one still found creative ways to remind him how cheap and poor he was.
For the customization features that Kyth had mentioned very likely referred to the little store icon nestled at the corner of his interface. A cheerful little shopping cart symbol that pulsed when he focused on it before blossoming into an impressive catalogue of options.
Different hair colors in all sorts of gradients. Skin tones ranging from natural human variations to more exotic options. Eye gradients of all imaginable flavors. Clothes too, which came in the cool or practical sort, including armor pieces from medieval to modern. Shields. Knives. Swords. Guns. Flamethrowers.
All of them accompanied by their very own adorable price tag.
And his balance? Zero zero nihil nihil.
Not even a single credit to his name. Not enough to buy him so much as a different shirt color. The number sat there in the corner, like a sign advertising his continued poverty.
Neon sighed. No wonder Kyth had been sarcastic. Here he was, given access to an entire universe of possibilities and he couldn’t afford to change the color of his worn shoelaces. It was almost poetic that his brand-new start came with a micro-transactions caveat.
He regretted not pushing Kyth further when he had the chance. Maybe if he’d cared a little less about her feelings —or her lack of them— and focused on extracting information, he might’ve walked away with something more useful than discovering he remained very broke indeed.
“Alright, I’ve had enough. Window-shopping like this is only going to make me sad.” Neon announced, the interface fading away as he focused solely on what was tangible, cramped and obscure as it was. “Can we move on to whatever comes next?”
The silence stretched long enough for him to wonder if Kyth had simply abandoned him to rot inside that black tomb. When her voice finally returned, it was without the theatrical glimmer of her projection. Just pure, crisp sound threaded directly into his mind, intimate as his own thoughts.
<>
A low mechanical whirl answered her command, reverberating through the walls of his prison like an engine waking up. They built into a melody of unlocking clicks, like layer upon layer of security being stripped away. Then, with a pressurized hiss, the front panel unlatched and slid open.
<>
Pure, overwhelming radiance flooded through the widening gap.
Neon covered his eyes instinctively. After so much darkness, he figured that even a flashlight would’ve been harsh, but this blazed with an intensity that made his head spin, and rendered him entirely incapable of discerning the figure that waited for him on the other side.