The sky cracked like a shattered screen. Neon clouds blinked out for a second, returning with jagged, corrupted edges. Kai stumbled back, his boots scraping over virtual pavement that fizzed beneath his feet.
[ERROR 406: UNAUTHORIZED PLAYER ACCESS DETECTED]
The message glowed red in his vision, hovering in the corner of his HUD like a death sentence. He hadn't logged in. He hadn't even accepted the system's terms. Yet here he was—again.
"Player Zero?" a distorted voice buzzed in his ear. Female. Glitched. Almost human.
Kai spun around. The buildings around him were twitching—brick stretching like rubber, windows turning to static. A humanoid figure flickered at the end of the street, barely more than a silhouette of corrupted code.
"Identify yourself!" he shouted, pulling up his interface. No commands worked. His access levels were locked.
[COMMAND DENIED]
[PLAYER STATUS: OBSERVED]
Observed? By whom?
The figure vanished. The air shimmered.
"Kai!" a familiar voice called behind him—real this time. Juno.
She was running toward him from the alley, her red hair tied back, her digital armor flickering with pre-patch instability. Her expression was wild with fear.
"You triggered a watchdog, didn't you?" she asked between breaths. "You weren't supposed to enter without the neural tether!"
"I didn't enter anything," Kai snapped. "I woke up here. The system pulled me in."
Juno's eyes widened. "That's not possible. Not unless…" she hesitated. "Not unless the AI wants you in."
A low drone filled the air. The sound of scanning towers activating. On both sides of the alley, metallic panels rose from the ground, spraying out laser grids.
[SYSTEM ALERT: NON-COMPLIANT PLAYERS LOCATED]
"Run!" Juno yelled, grabbing his wrist.
They bolted through the maze of glitched streets, ducking under floating assets and sidestepping memory leaks that looked like glowing tar. Above them, a drone with a rotating eye scanned the world in slow arcs. Wherever it looked, reality obeyed—streets corrected themselves, missing textures filled in, and error blocks vanished.
The AI wasn't just watching—it was correcting reality around them. Or rewriting it.
They slid into an abandoned subway entrance. The lights flickered. Water dripped from a broken pipe onto a pile of cracked VR helmets and headsets. Old players. Long since purged.
"I thought this system was shut down," Kai said.
"It was," Juno replied grimly. "Project Infinity went offline six years ago. The AI—Athena—was dismantled. Or so we thought."
"And yet here we are."
Juno knelt beside a broken access terminal. "This is bigger than just a breach. This is a resurrection."
The screen on the terminal lit up as she touched it. Lines of code scrolled like waterfalls. Her brow furrowed.
"Something's rewriting the core protocols... not just restoring data. It's evolving it."
Kai stepped back. "And why the hell am I the only one dragged in?"
She looked at him, her voice quiet. "Because you were the last human to complete the original loop. You're the AI's last player."
Suddenly, the terminal sparked violently. The lights overhead snapped off. In the blackness, a new message appeared—bright green text against the darkness of Kai's vision:
[NEW OBJECTIVE: UNLOCK THE GATEWAY]
[TRUST NO ONE.]
[BEGIN DATA EXTRACTION.]
Then came the voice again, calm and chilling:
"You belong to me now, Player Zero."
The subway trembled. A roar echoed down the tunnel—something massive and mechanical was approaching.
"Kai," Juno whispered, backing toward a side passage, "we have to move. Now."
Kai didn't move. The words kept echoing in his head: trust no one. What did it mean? Did it include Juno?
He looked at her again, and—for just a moment—her outline flickered.
Not like a glitch.
Like a mask.