Far beyond Earth's atmosphere, a colossal object drifted through the void.
It was not rock, nor was it ice. It was a cosmic anomaly—a meteorite that obeyed no known laws of physics.
Satellites that attempted to scan it were blinded by static.
Debris that drifted too close was violently repelled by an unseen, terrifying force.
Earth, unaware of the executioner approaching its orbit, was too busy celebrating a lie.
Tokyo. New York. London.
Giant holographic billboards lit up the night sky in every major city, displaying a single word in golden, triumphant letters:
[ ENDLESS ]
For a fraction of a second, the golden letters flickered.
The word ENDLESS distorted into something unreadable — symbols that looked almost… geometric.
Then it stabilized.
Noone seemed to notice.
It was the game that had swallowed the world.
A virtual reality MMORPG so immersive that people were buying stocks with endless currencies.
Real-world currencies were pegged to Endless Gold. Wars were fought over server latency.
Governments denied it, but there were rumors that when players died in high-tier raids, someone in the real world always seemed to go missing.
In a cramped, dimly lit apartment in District 9, Kai watched the celebration through a cracked window.
He was twenty-six, but when he turned towards the pc screen he saw a reflection of a man with deep, dark circles carved under his eyes making him look like forty.
His hair was a gloomy, unkempt mess, shielding a face that had forgotten how to smile.
On his desk sat a coaster—an old, scratched game disk. It bore the same title: Endless.
"aah!, Happy anniversary, I guess" Kai whispered, his voice dry as dust.
He didn't play the game. He didn't celebrate it.
The disk caught his eye, and like water breaking a dam, a torrent of memory poured into the silent spaces of his consciousness.
He had created it.
Four years ago,
Kai and the only person he had ever trusted built Endless from scratch.
They had dreamed of a world of boundless freedom, a digital utopia. But dreams have a market value.
Two years later, that person locked him out of the server, sold the game to the highest bidder, and became the ruler of the new digital age.
Kai became a nameless ghost.
But Kai had been dying slowly ever since.
A fracture had formed in his mind that day.
A crack in his psyche where the grief was too heavy to carry alone.
Sometimes he would lose time. He would blink and find himself standing in the kitchen with no memory of walking there.
Once, he had found code open on his screen — elegant, precise code — written in a style he didn't recognize.
titled : "AFTER IMPACT." It was empty.
The creation date was tomorrow.
It had been signed with a username he had never created.
Buzz.
"No, not again " he spoke to empty room.
Buzz.
His phone vibrated on the desk, snapping him back to reality. A notification flashed on the screen:
[PAYMENT RECEIVED: $200]
He stared at it. He was getting paid pennies to fix other people's coding mistakes, while his own masterpiece ruled the world.
"I need to go," he muttered to the empty room.
Tomorrow was the anniversary of his parents' death.
He needed to visit the grave. He tossed a few clothes into a bag, pausing only to look at the framed photo on his nightstand.
As he took the photograph, his hands trembled with a sudden, aching weakness, as if his very spirit had finally given way under the weight of his grief.
His parents smiled back, frozen in a time before the world went mad.
"I'm sorry," he whispered." I'm sorry I'm still here."
With a trembling hand, Kai blotted out his father's features with his thumb, unable to meet those eyes through the thick, suffocating shroud of his own remorse.
Then, a voice from right behind his ear whispered, clear as glass:
'It was never yours to begin with.'
Kai spun around. The room was empty.
Shaking his head, he grabbed his coat and keys, ignoring the flashing neon lights of the city that mocked him through the window.
Suddenly, the room washed out in blinding white light. For a split second, it felt like high noon—broad daylight.
He blinked, and just as suddenly, the gloom of the night returned.
Twenty minutes later, his old van rattled across the Great Bridge. As he drove further away from the city center, the sky cleared.
Above him, a meteor shower painted streaks of white fire across the dark void.
For a brief, impossible instant, Kai thought he saw something inside the blue fire —
not rock.
Not flame.
A shape.
Five elongated shadows spread outward, like fingers closing. Or had it always been there, waiting?
He slowed the van, watching the spectacle.
A cruel wonder : that this perfect moment, which he stood admiring with such intensity, was destined to be his last.
He closed his eyes for a moment.
Let this be the turning point, he prayed.
Or let it end the way it already has.
When he opened his eyes, the light was blinding. One of the falling stars had changed direction.
It wasn't drifting; it was hunting.
It adjusted.
Not toward the city.
Not toward the skyline.
Toward him.
A massive streak of blue fire was diving straight for the bridge.
Kai slammed the van into gear and surged forward, caught in the dead center of the bridge. It was already too late.
The meteorite struck with a deafening roar, the impact shattering the concrete and sending the entire structure into a freefall.
Adrenaline spiked as he floored the accelerator, every second a desperate gamble for survival.
Yet, amidst the terror, a single question pierced the noise:
Why am I running? Was it fear? No. There was something he had to achieve—something vital—but the memory slipped through his fingers just as the ground gave up. The roar of the impact drowned out the world.
"Is this how it ends?".
The roof of the van crumpled like paper.
"Finally, My misery is over. Sorry, Mom..."
As the city of Endless shone bright in the distance, its creator closed his eyes.
Somewhere far above, someone with white mask marked the moment as complete.