Chapter 1 - Summer Breeze

“YEES!” a shout bellowed through the room, the word CLEARED reading on the screen. Leaning back on his chair, he felt good, finally he had cleared the new dungeon after 5 hours of continuous playing.

In a relaxed stance, a sigh of contentment left him as he alt-tabbed out of the game and onto a chat room. A notification on the site popped up instantly, ‘KOALABun#3485 requests a call’.

‘Accept’

“Yo Mark, your name is first again, nice man! Can you teach me how you keep clearing the new dungeons before everyone else? HAHA! So good!” Without a chance to speak, the voice kept speaking to him.

“No”

With one word, the voice died down, and Mark left the voice chat. He then went back to his friends’ channel, where he spends most of his days talking about games and animes. As he joined the channel the voices all began intervening.

“Oh, hey Mark. Wanna play some League?” a guy noticed Mark’s gamer id popping up and invited him. People in the chat were currently in the midst of a 5v5 ranked in the game League of Legends. The person asking is Mark’s main duo partner in ranked matches.

“Sorry SLT, but I won’t be joining you for some time, I’m taking a break. I just beat the new dungeon.” The shine his glasses was not visible to the others, but it shone with his pride.

“The new one? Didn’t the new update just come out a few hours ago? How come you managed to beat it so fast!”

“And I heard this new update would contain the hardest dungeon ever made in this game! Seriously, he beat it already?”

Momentarily, people were stunned about his achievements, but they merely lasted a moment. For this friend of theirs, this was just what occurred all the time. He almost always beats new games first. Or rather, when it came to MMORPG’s, he was the best, even in the professional world he stood above all.

“Who cares about that old game anyway? Didn’t you hear about the new game coming out on Stym? Seriously, it’s so good it got a 9.5/10 IGM!!”

“Is that possible? The last game that got that sort of review was Takkan 7! It must be amazing. ^-^”

“I saw the trailer, it’s another of those Jap MMORPGs -_- “

“Wait, that’s great news! Hey, Mark, are you gonna buy it? We could all form a big group together! With you, it would just be smooth sailing for us others Haha!”

“Uh...yeah, sure, it’s on Stym right? How much does it cost?”

“I checked yesterday, it said it would cost 49.99€”

“Oh, not f2p huh? Welp, let me check, I’ll be back in a sec ¯\_(ツ)_/¯”

“Cya!”

With that, Mark opened up Stym and tried to go to the store page. After waiting for a few dozens of seconds, an error shows up, saying that “The Stym Servers Are Currently Unavailable or Too Busy”. After considering for a sec, Mark realizes that even if he manages to buy the game, downloading it would take a couple of days with that amount of internet traffic going on.

Annoyed, he checks the time only to find out that the games shop is going to close in 14 minutes. Quickly adapting a solution to the problem, he puts on his jacket and prepares to rush out of the house when he realizes that all of his money has been transferred to Stym.

Stopping for a couple of seconds to find a way around this obstacle, he decides to stealthily enter his sister’s room and “borrow” from her hidden money pouch that he had detected a few weeks ago while searching for a game she had stolen.

After having exchanged the real money with some fake 20€ tickets, he remembered that he didn’t have much time left. Rushing once again out of the house, he starts running through the streets, zigzagging the pathways, and avoiding the cars while ignoring the traffic lights. However, he doesn’t realize that the temperature around him slowly starts dropping.

A few minutes later, he starts feeling a chill passing through his body and while at first he ignores it, he then thinks back and reminds himself that even though it’s late at night, the current season is still summer, so it shouldn’t be cold outside, rather, there should be a warm breeze grazing by his skin.

While he was in the process of thinking all these ideas, the temperature around him quickly dropped as much as thrice as low as it was just seconds before. In mere milliseconds, his motion was slowed down to the point that moving his finger would require great effort.

“Wh...what the hell? What’s going on? Who’s doing this?”

A few heartbeats later, the entirety of his skin was covered by layers of ice. The layers kept accumulating, until the point where the ice was half as wide as his body. Slowly, Mark starts to feel dizzy, and seconds later, he faints while his body is forced to stand up tall on the ice.

The air around him keeps freezing and turning into blocks of ice that would agglomerate onto the one big block that his body has become. Only when it had become half the size of a car did the temperature start to go back to normal. The block of ice, unable to withstand the hot air, starts to melt, along with Mark, whose body had frozen so much that it had actually become ice itself. His now liquid body seeps into the soil and starts it’s way down, pressured by the rest of the water.

Mark, who had fainted, slowly comes back to his senses, only to realize that he isn’t in his body anymore. He starts to follow his body as it heads into the depths of this world. The heat, which was warm on the surface, begins to slowly but steadily rise as they continue downwards.

After tens of minutes of digging into the ground, the body, as well as the bodiless soul, arrive near an immense ball of magma, the center of the earth. Mark watches, aghast, as his body drops into this endless inferno, expecting to see it turn ablaze before his very eyes. However, as his body reaches the core of the earth, it silently sinks into it, seemingly disappearing from this world.

Mark is dumbstruck as he stares at the surface of the blazing ball of death, both shocked and terrified. He starts thinking: “W...Wait... is my body dead? Then why am I still here? What’s going on? …… Am I going to heaven? But I still have tons of games to play!”

Author/N: Sadly, that isn’t the case, since I want to write a story about your future. ^-^

A few minutes later, Mark is struck by the realization that nothing has yet to happen. He decides on going back up to his town when an invisible suction force pulls his conscience towards the core. As he disappears into the seas of hell, he begs his sister to forgive her for having wasted her 50$ note, and more than once.