The blue light of the monitor cast inhuman shadows across Riku Hanazawa's unshaven face, illuminating the three words that had become all too familiar over the years:
GAME OVER
Riku slammed his fist against the desk, sending an empty energy drink can clattering to the floor where it joined a small army of its fallen comrades.
His basement apartment, what his landlord had optimistically called a "garden level studio" was a monument to basically neglect.
Instant ramen cups formed towers beside his gaming chair.
Discarded takeout containers created a mosaic across what might once have been a coffee table.
"Bullshit," he muttered, running his fingers through greasy hair. "That was a perfect build. The drop rate on that shield is rigged."
At twenty-two, Riku had spent more time in Valeria than he had in meaningful human interaction.
The game world made sense.
In Legends of Valeria, he wasn't a college dropout with mounting debt and diminishing prospects.
He was Alistair Cypher, legendary Five Star Spellblade, feared in PvP arenas and coveted by elite guilds.
He glanced at his phone, three missed calls from his mother, two messages from his former university about outstanding payments.
He swiped them away.
Reality was the game he couldn't master at all, with rules that seemed designed to ensure he failed.
'Just one more run,' he thought, reaching for his last energy drink. 'I'll get the shield this time.'
The drink was warm, sickeningly sweet.
Outside, rain smashed against the single narrow window that sat at street level.
A puddle was forming on his floor from a leak he'd reported weeks ago.
Riku rubbed his eyes, glancing at the time, 3:47 AM.
He needed milk for his instant coffee to keep gaming.
The convenience store was just two blocks away.
Just a quick trip, then back to Valeria where things made sense, where he controlled his destiny.
The night air hit him like a slap, it was extremely cold and damp.
Traffic lights reflected in puddles as he walked down empty streets, his mind still half in Valeria, calculating the optimal skill rotation for his next dungeon attempt to get his shield.
He barely registered stepping into the crosswalk.
However, the screech of tires came first, a sound so alien to the quiet night that his brain couldn't even process it.
Headlights suddenly bloomed like twin suns, impossibly bright. The driver had been texting, hadn't seen the red light, hadn't seen Riku until it was far too late.
Time compressed. The metal screamed. His body lifted, weightless for one surreal moment.
Pain exploded across his entire consciousness, sharp, then dull, then nothing at all. As darkness rushed in, a single thought crystallized with perfect, bitter clarity.
'What a stupid, pointless way to die.'
And then nothing.
Awareness returned slowly like bubbles rising through dark water.
Riku existed, but didn't exist...? He had no body, no sensations….Just... consciousness, suspended in absolute nothingness.
'Am I dead?'
The thought echoed in a void so complete it seemed to swallow even the concept of sound. No heaven, no hell, just this cold, formless nothing.
Then, a presence. He didnt see seen, nor hear, but it was unmistakably there. It pressed against his awareness like a geometric proof, precise, perfect, and utterly inhuman.
It communicated not with words but with concepts that bloomed directly in his mind, complex and complete.
[SUBJECT: RIKU HANAZAWA.]
[STATUS: TERMINATED.]
[QUERY: PREFERENCE FOR PROCESSING?]
The Entity, he couldn't think of it as anything else, radiated detached analysis. It examined him with the clinical interest of a scientist studying a particularly unusual specimen.
'Processing?' Riku's thoughts felt small against the vastness of the Entity. 'What does that mean?'
The Entity's response came as a series of impressions: cycles, rebirth, continuity. It did not offer salvation but a transaction instead, a Wish and entry into something it conceptualized as the Reincarnation Cycle.
'I get a wish? Like... anything?'
[PARAMETERS EXIST. CHOOSE.]
Faced with infinity, Riku's mind grasped the only certainty he had known.
Not his family, not his future, but Valeria. The world where he understood the systems, where progress was actually possible even for a loser like him, where he had felt, for fleeting moments, truly alive.
'Let me live inside Valeria. For real this time. Not as a player, as someone actually born there.'
The Entity paused, processing. Then came a flood of images, continents stretching beneath impossible skies, cities glowing with magical light, the intricate Star Tier magic system that governed spellcasting.
Riku recognized it all from hundreds of hours of gameplay, but rendered with an impossible richness of detail the game could never capture.
[TERMS ACCEPTED. TRANSFER INITIATING.]
As his consciousness began to compress, Riku caught a flicker of something in the Entity's transmission, a fragment of data not meant for him.
A sense of irregularity.
This wasn't standard procedure.
This transaction obviously served some purpose beyond the Entity's stated function.
Alarm surged through him, but it was way too late. His awareness was yanked violently from the void, compressed to an impossible density, and fired like a bullet through dimensions he couldn't even begin to comprehend with his pea sized brain.
The last thing he registered was a sound, a faint, mechanical click that echoed through the cosmos. A system initializing.
Then light. Blinding, overwhelming light. Sounds crashed against his consciousness, voices, movement, and his own high pitched wailing.
Everything was too loud, too bright, too much. His limbs wouldn't obey him. His thoughts scattered like leaves in a storm.
The awareness that had been Riku Hanazawa drowned in the sensory chaos of his new existence.
He was alive, and he was crying.