Shuri's lab looked less like the polished nerve center of Wakanda's technological empire and more like the wreckage of a storm.
Blueprints, sketches, and fragments of half-built inventions littered the floor. A holographic interface hummed overhead, casting blue light across a desk cluttered with tools that hadn't been touched in days.
And at the heart of it all sat Shuri, eyes bloodshot, posture stiff, her focus chained to the glowing virtual screen in front of her.
The world outside her lab might have demanded her brilliance—politics, medicine, engineering, the crown's endless burdens—but in here? None of that mattered.
Here, the only thing that existed was the game.
Her avatar, a blocky mirror of herself, stood atop a high precipice overlooking a city of her own design. Towers of steel and glass rose in pixel-perfect symmetry, shimmering with the neon glow of vibranium-powered systems. She had built it all—brick by digital brick—her own Wakanda, stripped of politics, stripped of diplomacy. Pure, unfiltered creation.
The game was supposed to have been a distraction. A playful indulgence to quiet her restless mind. But somewhere between the first block placed and the first machine built, it had turned into something else.
An obsession.
Every new mechanic teased another hidden layer. Every module whispered of deeper possibilities. She had meant to play for an hour. That was three days ago.
And now, standing in the middle of her digital kingdom, Shuri felt a thrill she hadn't felt since her earliest experiments in the Wakandan Design Group.
Her maglev line cut through the city like a silver vein, smooth and flawless, designed in less than an hour. She smirked at it—something that would've taken weeks, maybe months, in real life had come together effortlessly here.
The module responsible for it—"The Wakandan Tech Expansion"—was nothing short of genius. Not a hack. Not some lazy cheat. But an entire framework of physics, engineering, and material science that mapped onto her kingdom's real-world principles.
Whoever had built this game knew things they shouldn't.
The official tagline had flashed across her loading screen earlier that night, taunting her.
The Unofficial Guide to Creation.
She'd scoffed at the arrogance.
Now she wasn't so sure.
---
A ping broke her rhythm. She frowned, pulling up her interface.
[T'Challa]: Are you awake? We have a new project to discuss.
Her lips twisted into something between annoyance and guilt. She loved her brother, but his timing was cursed. The Tesseract questline blinked at her on the edge of the HUD, practically begging for attention.
Meetings about foreign relations versus unraveling the secrets of a cosmic artifact wrapped inside code? Not much of a contest.
Her fingers hovered over the dismiss button when another message appeared—this one not from her brother.
[Notch]: I hope you're enjoying the new tools. I have a feeling they'll come in handy for what's next.
Her chair squeaked as she sat straighter, eyes narrowing.
Notch.
The creator.
It wasn't the first time she'd seen their name—her entire lab had heard whispers of this mysterious figure in gaming communities—but a direct message? Personalized? It didn't feel like coincidence. It felt… like surveillance.
As though someone had slipped into her mind, tugged at her curiosity, and left breadcrumbs designed for her alone.
She typed a reply to her brother, quick and sharp, guilt flickering across her face before disappearing.
[Shuri]: Just finishing up some late-night research. I'll be in the meeting soon.
A lie. She wasn't going anywhere.
Her real focus was locked now, sharp and hungry.
Notch wasn't just a programmer. They were something else. Someone who knew her, who understood her.
And Shuri never ignored a mystery.
She wasn't leaving this lab until she tore the curtain back and found the truth.
---
The Observation Deck pulsed with new streams of data.
[Player Retention: 98%]
[Session Length: 14 hours, 37 minutes]
[Engagement Status: Obsession detected]
The glowing text shimmered in the void like stars, illuminating my weary face.
I let out a breath I hadn't realized I was holding and chuckled.
Obsession. That was the system's exact word. Cold, clinical—and exhilarating.
For once, it wasn't me dangling over the edge. Shuri was the one caught in the web.
"Hook, line, and vibranium sinker," I muttered, rubbing my temples.
But I couldn't let the thrill fool me. The analytics were spiking too sharply. Shuri wasn't just logging hours—she was dissecting my game with the precision of a surgeon, peeling away layers, probing for weaknesses.
The system confirmed it: a faint timer blinked at the corner of the dashboard.
[Curiosity Breach Estimate: 1 hr, 45 min]
If she tore through too much too quickly, she'd either lose interest… or worse. She'd find me.
I flicked open the creator's menu, staring at my dwindling balance of Gaming Points. Event triggers, modules, hidden seeds—they all cost currency I didn't have. But if I didn't act, the whole house of cards could collapse.
"What would keep a genius like her from getting too close?" I whispered.
The answer crystallized as soon as I asked it: a trail of breadcrumbs. Not enough to hand her the answers, but just enough to keep her chasing them. The illusion of progress.
The system hummed as I built the idea in my head, feeding it blocks of thought.
[New Questline: The Hidden Vibranium Archive]
Multi-stage puzzles. Esoteric crafting recipes. Underground vaults. A labyrinth designed to stretch days into weeks.
Frustrating enough to challenge her, rewarding enough to keep her hooked.
The system compiled the module, lines of code shimmering as it came to life. I caught my reflection in the Observation Deck screen—a blocky, grinning face looking back at me.
Not Alex. Not the terrified gamer stuck in the void.
Notch.
Creator. Trickster. Puppeteer.
And Shuri was on my stage.
"Not bad," I murmured. "Not bad at all."
---
Her avatar paused on the palace steps as a chime rang through the digital air.
A new quest appeared, framed in bold letters:
[Quest Unlocked: The Hidden Vibranium Archive]
Shuri's heart thumped. This wasn't random generation. The phrasing, the timing—it was deliberate.
Personal.
Her lips curved into a slow smile.
"Notch," she whispered, tasting the word like a challenge.
Whoever this person was, they weren't just some random coder. No one outside Wakanda could replicate their technology with such uncanny precision. No outsider could mimic her engineering language so seamlessly.
Which left her with two unsettling possibilities:
Either Notch had impossible knowledge…
Or he was watching her.
And that was a mystery she intended to solve.
With sharp eyes and steady hands, Shuri accepted the quest.
The hunt for the man behind the curtain had begun.
he Observation Deck rippled like water as I switched feeds, the streams of data warping into a new constellation of metrics.
[Player Excitement Level: Maximum]
[Projected Session Length: +12 hours]
[Obsession: Sustained]
I exhaled, shoulders slumping. The Archive had worked. Shuri was chasing the breadcrumb trail, exactly as I'd designed it.
For the first time since I woke up in this pocket dimension, I wasn't clinging to survival—I was ahead.
Every second she spent unraveling my carefully planted puzzles was another second she wasn't ripping apart my backend code, another second she wasn't inching toward my identity.
But the relief came with a sting.
[Gaming Points: -100]
The number glared at me from the corner of the dashboard like a slap.
I opened the ledger, my gut twisting tighter with each entry. Every module, every breadcrumb, every little toy I'd dangled in front of her had come with a price tag. The Wakandan Expansion. The Vibranium Pickaxe. The Archive itself.
My reserves were bleeding away.
And I wasn't just burning points—I was burning time.
Because sooner or later, the system was going to demand I pay the bill.
I rubbed my face, staring at the dim reflection of my avatar in the console's black sheen. Notch looked back at me, blocky and smug, his beard carved into perfect pixels.
But behind him was me—Alex. Pale. Exhausted. A man playing god with tools he barely understood.
"This is unsustainable," I whispered. "One genius princess is enough to break me. If anyone else logs in…"
The system chimed, almost mockingly.
[New Player Detected]
[Location: New York City]
[User Profile: Anonymized]
I froze.
The Observation Deck dissolved into static before resolving into a live feed. A familiar skyline appeared—New York, drenched in orange twilight, skyscrapers stabbing into the sky. And there, perched on the edge of a building with a greasy slice of pizza in hand, was a figure every corner of the multiverse would recognize.
Spider-Man.
My chest went cold.
His mask was tugged halfway up, cheeks puffed with cheese and sauce, legs swinging casually over the ledge as if gravity was just a suggestion. He chewed, pulled out his phone, and began scrolling.
Then, impossibly, a familiar pixelated icon shimmered on his screen.
The app. My app.
I whispered the words like a curse.
"Oh, hell no."
He tapped it.
The Observation Deck trembled as the system recognized him, data pouring into the console like a flood breaking through a dam.
[Player Registration Confirmed]
[Player ID: Peter_Parker]
[Influence Level: EXTREME]
Raw, chaotic streams filled the screen. Unlike Shuri's ordered equations and precise logic paths, Peter's data was… messy. Wild. A storm of improvisation and instinct. But underneath the chaos, it was alive in a way the system couldn't categorize.
[Module Created: Web-Slinger's Guide to NYC]
[Feature Added: Swing Physics – Adaptive Momentum]
[Feature Added: Wall-Crawling Mechanics]
[New Recipe: Web Fluid Dispenser]
I gawked. My voice came out hoarse.
"He's coding… by playing?"
It was impossible. Game mechanics weren't meant to bend like this. But Spider-Man wasn't just bending them—he was rewriting them in real time, molding my sandbox to his instincts as if reality itself had to accommodate him.
Every new line of code siphoned more of my dwindling reserves.
[Gaming Points: -5]
[Gaming Points: -20]
[Gaming Points: -15]
I slammed my fist against the console. "This isn't fair! He's not even supposed to know what he's doing!"
The Observation Deck echoed with my frustration, a hollow clang that bounced off the obsidian walls.
I'd thought Shuri was the worst-case scenario. The scientist who could pull the threads of my design apart with surgical precision.
But Peter Parker?
Peter Parker was chaos incarnate. And chaos was infinitely harder to contain.
---
I flipped to Shuri's feed, desperate for stability. Maybe she was still buried in the Archive's labyrinth, still distracted.
Her avatar was deeper underground now, pushing through the labyrinth's redstone puzzles with the precision of a surgeon. She wasn't stumbling—she was dissecting.
Every line of code I'd hidden, every mechanism I thought would stump her for hours, she was slicing through like it was child's play.
And then, the worst notification I'd ever seen appeared across the dashboard in burning red text.
[Cross-Session Resonance Detected]
[Warning: Player Shuri interacting with Player Peter's Module]
My heart stopped.
Two feeds appeared side by side. On the left: Shuri, armored in her pixelated vibranium, her Wakandan city gleaming behind her. On the right: Spider-Man, swinging through a skyscraper skyline he had literally just coded into existence.
And their paths… were converging.
[Gaming Points: -50]
The system siphoned another chunk of my life away just to process the collision of their realities.
I leaned forward, hands trembling against the console, desperate for some switch, some lever to slow the crash.
The chat window blinked.
[Peter_Parker]: "Hey, you're smart, right? Want to help me figure out who's pulling the strings here?"
Her reply was instant.
[Shuri]: "I was thinking the same thing."
The air left my lungs like I'd been punched.
They were comparing notes.
Not distracted. Not fooled. Aligned.
The princess of Wakanda and the friendly neighborhood Spider-Man had just teamed up against me.
And I was broke.
The Observation Deck quaked as their combined influence rippled through the game. Code bent into unreadable streams, modules twisted into shapes that shouldn't exist, whole mechanics fused together in ways that made my carefully structured system groan in protest.
The console screamed with warnings.
[Warning: Creator Identity at Risk]
[System Integrity Failing]
I pressed my forehead to the cold metal, eyes squeezed shut, breath ragged.
I wasn't the puppeteer anymore.
The game wasn't mine.
It belonged to them.
The Observation Deck wasn't a room anymore.
It was a storm.
Light fractured across the black walls, data streams collapsing into jagged waves of green and gold. The floor shuddered beneath my boots as if it were alive, as if the system itself were trying to throw me out of my own throne room.
I clung to the console like a shipwreck survivor.
[System Integrity: 42%]
[Creator Access Level: Compromised]
My heart hammered in my ears. The numbers were falling too fast.
Across the feeds, Shuri and Peter had already moved past polite introductions. They were collaborating now, talking in shorthand, ideas pinging back and forth faster than the chat window could translate.
Their avatars were meeting in a borderless void — a space that shouldn't exist, a no-man's-land between the Wakandan modules and the new Manhattan Peter had conjured.
And right there, between the skyscrapers and the golden palaces, a shimmering bridge of code was forming.
I didn't build it.
They did.
The bridge pulsed with raw energy, jagged blocks and silk-thin threads of light weaving into a structure neither Minecraft nor any sane game engine should support.
[Warning: Unauthorized Module Fusion]
[Result: Dimensional Cross-Lattice Formed]
I felt sick.
"This is impossible." My voice cracked. "They're building a server-spanning gateway. That's… that's my proprietary feature set—!"
Another notification hit like a bullet.
[Gaming Points: -100]
My reserves were circling the drain. I'd been bleeding points since Shuri logged on, but Peter's arrival turned the leak into a hemorrhage.
And now the hemorrhage had a heartbeat.
The bridge rippled again. On Shuri's side, the interface blossomed into Wakandan glyphs of purple and gold. On Peter's side, sticky strands of digital webbing shot outward, anchoring each new piece in place.
They weren't just crossing over—they were fusing their realities.
I flicked through every console command I had, desperate for a stopgap. Disable module, quarantine player, sever connection—nothing worked. Each line of code vanished before execution, overwritten by some higher priority I didn't recognize.
"What the hell is rewriting my commands?" I hissed.
The console answered in an uncharacteristically flat tone.
[Priority Override: Player Collaboration]
[Creator Commands: Deferred]
Deferred. Like I was a guest in my own house.
I slammed the heel of my palm into the panel, but the system didn't even flicker. My god-mode was slipping.
"Think, Alex. Think."
I forced myself to breathe. If brute force wouldn't work, maybe misdirection would. I'd hidden traps inside the Archive for Shuri. I could plant something in Peter's modules too—something chaotic enough to blow up their bridge before it stabilized.
But as soon as I reached for the build tools, another warning flared:
[Warning: Trap Insertion Detected]
[Countermeasures Activated]
The build menu froze. My cursor jerked, moving without my hand on the controls.
"No. No no no—"
My own system was boxing me out, hard walls slamming down like iron shutters.
Across the feeds, the avatars of Shuri and Peter stood shoulder to shoulder now, staring up at their half-finished bridge.
Peter's chat bubble popped first.
[Peter_Parker]: "If we stabilize this, maybe we can trace the admin."
Shuri's appeared right after.
[Shuri]: "Already on it."
A thin line of sweat rolled down my temple.
Trace the admin. Trace me.
I had seconds at best.
I stabbed at the only button still glowing green. Emergency Protocol. It wasn't elegant, but it was nuclear. It would collapse all active modules, dump every player back to the login screen, and hard-lock the server for twenty-four hours.
It would also cost me everything I had left.
[Confirm Emergency Protocol? Y/N]
I hovered over Y.
A faint voice whispered from the back of my skull: if you pull the plug now, they'll know you're scared.
I pressed my lips into a thin line. That voice was right.
If I nuked the system, Shuri would come back with countermeasures. Peter would come back with curiosity. And when they returned, they'd be twice as fast and ten times as prepared.
They weren't just players anymore—they were hunters.
I needed something subtler.
I backed out of the protocol window and flipped to my hidden cache—a dusty corner of code I hadn't touched since the early prototypes. It was a relic from when the game wasn't a game yet, when it was just my experiment in world-building physics.
The code was unstable, unpredictable, and entirely mine.
I could inject it into the bridge. It might crash the module, it might crash me, but it wouldn't look like an admin kill-switch. It would look like a glitch.
My fingers hovered over the sequence.
Another notification landed before I could press Enter.
[Trace in Progress: 67% Complete]
I swore under my breath. Too slow.
The feeds zoomed in on Shuri's avatar. She'd built a device in her pixelated hands—a staff-like scanner pulsing with violet energy. Every sweep sent numbers cascading across her screen.
On Peter's side, strands of digital web tightened around the bridge, locking it down like a spider wrapping its prey.
[Trace in Progress: 74%]
I could see it now, the inevitable outcome. The bridge stabilizing. The scanner finishing its pass. The reveal.
They'd find me.
The real me.
And I wasn't ready for that.
I jammed the unstable code into the pipeline and hit execute.
The Observation Deck erupted in light.
The bridge across the feeds buckled, every block and thread warping into wild colors. The Wakandan glyphs turned white-hot, Peter's webs snapped taut like overstrung cables, and the air between them rippled like heat haze.
[Warning: Unstable Module Injected]
[Effect: Unknown]
Peter's chat bubble blinked.
[Peter_Parker]: "Uh… Shuri?"
Shuri's bubble popped a half-second later.
[Shuri]: "I see it. Hold the link steady."
The bridge convulsed again, shattering into hundreds of fragments that hovered midair like a frozen explosion.
But instead of collapsing, the fragments spun.
Then they aligned.
My stomach dropped.
They weren't breaking. They were absorbing the code.
The bridge re-formed in an instant, bigger and brighter than before, its core now glowing with a pulsing white light—the mark of my unstable prototype.
[Trace in Progress: 89%]
"Oh God," I whispered. "They're using my own glitch to power their trace."
The Observation Deck went dark except for the console.
[Trace in Progress: 94%]
I clawed at the controls, trying to rip the plug, but the system ignored me.
[Trace in Progress: 97%]
I could almost feel their eyes on me now, peering through the digital veil, closing the distance between avatar and admin, between creator and prey.
[Trace Complete: 100%]
The console beeped.
[Target Acquired: Alex / Notch]
A new window blossomed on the screen—a live chat, but this one wasn't from inside the game. It was direct. System-to-system.
[Shuri_Panther]: "Found you."
A second later:
[Peter_Parker]: "So… wanna talk?"
My breath came in ragged gasps. My hands trembled.
They knew.
They knew.
The Observation Deck began to fracture, black glass splintering outward, the star-field of metrics shattering like a window hit by a hammer.
And from the other side of the cracks, light poured in. Not code. Not pixels. Light.
I took a step back.
Something was coming through.
Something I hadn't coded.
The last notification burned across the console in bright red letters.
[Warning: External Entity Breaching Server]
Then the screen went black.