The holographic transmission with Valerie abruptly terminated. Sebastian's cramped apartment was left bathed in the flickering green light of his desk terminal.
He stared at the empty space where the terrified heiress had been projecting just seconds before. He had given her the coordinates to the industrial warehouse district. He had given her the ultimatum!
Now it was entirely up to her whether she became an asset or just another digital statistic in the real world grinder.
Sebastian turned away from the terminal. His bare feet stepped softly against the freezing floor. The air in the room felt incredibly heavy and thick with a strange static charge. It made the hairs on his arms stand on end!
The acid rain continued to drum a relentless beat against his single cracked window. But the sound was changing. It was no longer just the hollow tapping of water on glass. It sounded thicker and heavier.
Tap. Tap. Splash…
He walked over to the window and wiped away the condensation with his hand.
The megacity of 2077 was usually a sprawling ocean of neon advertisements and dense smog. But right now the city was visibly dying.
The smog choking the upper atmosphere had shifted from its usual toxic grey to a deep angry crimson. It looked exactly like the skybox of the Valley of Echoes right before the Doom Howl Wolf had spawned!
Down in the streets forty stories below his apartment block, the city was falling apart. The steady hum of hover traffic was punctuated by the sharp CRUNCH and BANG! of vehicle collisions.
Sirens wailed in the distance. It was a disorganized chorus of panic that was quickly being drowned out by something much worse.
Sebastian moved back to his terminal and aggressively tapped the console to bring up the local emergency broadcast networks.
The screen flickered as it struggled to maintain a connection through the mana interference bleeding into the Earth's atmosphere.
When the visual feed finally stabilized it displayed a local news anchor. Her pristine corporate cybernetic implants were twitching erratically. Her perfectly styled hair was a mess. The professional veneer she was paid to project had completely shattered into pure panic!
"We are receiving widespread unconfirmed reports of mass casualties across the lower sectors," the anchorwoman stammered. Her eyes darted off camera as if looking for someone to save her from the broadcast. "Authorities are still classifying this as a coordinated biochemical terror attack but the footage is horrifying."
The feed cut to a shaky handheld camera recording from a pedestrian overpass.
It showed a crowded commercial intersection. People were screaming and trampling over each other in a desperate bid to escape. But they were not running from gas or soldiers. They were running from the shadows!
Out of the grated sewer drains lining the streets a swarm of creatures was pouring out like a biblical plague of locusts.
They were roughly the size of large dogs. They were covered in matted black hair with elongated snouts filled with serrated yellowing teeth. Their eyes glowed with a faint red light.
"Demon Rats," Sebastian murmured, leaning closer to the projection. "Level 1 trash mobs. High reproduction rate and aggressive pack mentality. Weak to blunt force and basic fire magic."
On the screen a businessman in a tailored suit tripped over a discarded briefcase. Before he could even push himself up three of the giant rats were on him.
The camera captured the horrifying reality of a Level 1 monster interacting with a baseline human. The rats did not just bite. They tore!
One locked its jaws around the man's calf. SNAP! The sickening crunch of bone breaking echoed through the poor audio feed. Another burrowed directly into the man's stomach. Its claws frantically dug through the expensive fabric and into the soft meat beneath.
The man's screams were absolute agony. It was a shrill bubbling sound as blood sprayed across the asphalt in violent arcs.
"They are calling them rabid animals," the anchorwoman's voice returned. She was now openly weeping. "Please barricade your doors if you are in the lower sectors. Do not try to fight them. The military is deploying automated—."
BZZZT!
The feed abruptly cut to black. The emergency broadcast tone whined for a second before the terminal completely shorted out. It emitted a small puff of smoke.
The power grid was failing!
Sebastian stood in the dark. The only light in his apartment came from the bleeding crimson sky outside his window and the faint violet glow pulsing through the veins in his own hands.
The synchronization process was accelerating. The game logic was violently overwriting the physics of the real world. Humanity was entirely unprepared for the patch notes!
"Right on schedule," Sebastian whispered.
He did not feel fear. He did not feel the creeping dread that was currently paralyzing billions of people across the globe. He felt a deep and terrifyingly calm focus.
He had spent years in this apocalypse. He knew the smell of it. He knew the rhythm of it.
THUD.
A sudden sharp thud echoed from the hallway outside his apartment.
Sebastian slowly turned his head toward his front door. He had patched the hole he punched through the concrete earlier with a generous layer of duct tape.
Thud.
It was not a knock. It was the sound of something heavy and uncoordinated dragging itself against the cheap drywall.
Scratch. Scratch. Scratch.
Fingernails or something much harder than fingernails dragged down the length of the metal door frame. It was followed by a wet gurgling sound. It sounded like someone trying to breathe through a throat full of thick oatmeal.
Sebastian walked silently across the floor. His movements were incredibly fluid and balanced. The 1 percent physical synchronization had rewritten his muscle density. He felt perfectly calibrated!
He stopped just inches from the door and tilted his head slightly to listen.
"Higgins?" Sebastian asked. His tone was conversational and laced with a faint hint of dark amusement.
Through the thin metal of the door, a low, rattling growl responded. Grrr…
"Open," a voice wheezed from the other side.
It did not sound like his grumpy overweight neighbor anymore. The vocal cords were heavily distorted. The syllables were pushed out through a larynx that was rapidly decaying.
"Hungry. So hungry."
In the Ethereal Plane when the Void corruption leaked into civilian areas the NPCs did not just die. The dark mana hijacked their biological processes and aggressively mutated them into low tier fodder to overwhelm the players.
They were the Infected! They were the ultimate insult to injury. The game forced you to butcher the people who had sold you bread the day before.
It seemed the system was perfectly happy to apply that exact same logic to the real world population.
"You were always a shit neighbor, Higgins," Sebastian said, his eyes going flat. "You bitched about the noise when I walked. You stole my delivery packages. And now you have the absolute balls to try and eat me?"
SMASH!
The apartment door buckled violently inward. The cheap locking mechanism shrieked as the deadbolt was forcefully ripped from the doorframe.
A massive grotesque figure shoved its way into the entryway.
Higgins was no longer just an overweight man in a stained tank top. His physical body had violently rejected the game integration. His skin was mottled and grey. It was stretched taut over muscles that were aggressively growing in real time.
Dark necrotic veins pulsed black sludge just beneath the surface. His jaw was hanging open at an unnatural angle to accommodate a set of teeth that were sharpening into jagged predatory points!
[Monster: Infected (Tier 0)]
[State: Frenzied]
He was a Tier 0 Infected. He was essentially a zombie but he was driven by a magical insatiable engine rather than a biological virus.
Higgins let out a roaring hiss. Spit and thick yellow bile flew from his lips. He lunged forward with his massive bloated hands reaching out to grab Sebastian's throat.
Sebastian did not retreat. He did not look around for a kitchen knife or a heavy blunt object.
He planted his feet. His mind instinctively reached out into the digital ether that was now bleeding seamlessly into his reality. He needed a weapon.
His Ethereal Plane inventory was locked behind the full integration but he could feel the connection. The 5 percent synchronization was a two way street. If the game could push monsters into the real world he could pull the game into the real world.
He visualized the heavy Level 5 Iron Broadsword he had looted from Viper's headless corpse. He envisioned its weight and its density and its specific line of code.
He extended his right hand forward with his palm open.
"Manifest," Sebastian commanded.
The air in front of his hand violently warped. A blinding flash of blue data particles erupted in the dim apartment. They swirled like a localized hurricane!
The system protested and screamed in his mind as it tried to render a digital object into a physical space without a proper anchor.
To bridge the gap the system pulled from the surrounding environment. The concrete dust from the walls and the iron from the exposed rebar and the very dirt on the floor all violently gravitated toward his open hand. It wrapped around the digital wireframe of the Ethereal weapon.
With a heavy resounding thud a massive blade materialized in Sebastian's grip.
It was no longer just the polished Iron Broadsword. It was coated in a dense hardened shell of jagged concrete and slag and earth fused together by raw mana.
It was an Earth Sword. It was a brutal heavy and absolutely lethal manifestation of his synchronized power!
Sebastian gripped the hilt with both hands. He felt the incredible and impossible weight of the weapon. His newly enhanced biological muscles did not even strain.
Higgins was entirely mindless and driven only by the hunger of the Void. The monster threw his bloated body forward with his jagged teeth snapping inches from Sebastian's face.
"Let's test the hitboxes," Sebastian whispered.
He swung the Earth Sword. The heavy slag coated blade cleaved through the air with a terrifying low pitched hum.