The time engulfed in darkness felt like eternity to Andrew. He didn't know how many hours he'd been trapped in this feeling of hanging midair with no anchor point, hearing nothing but his heartbeat and seeing nothing but the constant playback mirages of his past hundred lives.

When Andrew was finally released from his pitch-black prison, he found himself inside a room a tad too spacious for one person and too cramped for two. The surrounding walls were a creamy white, but unlike him, they were covered with posters of none other than Andrew himself. Behind him was a desktop. Brown shelves are filled with music albums, some of them looked like they were limited edition. Next to the cupboard was a large, long mirror, the kind that could illuminate his entire body.

A pleasant and gentle smell wafted through the air, like the fragrance of fresh air after the rain.

Apart from an alarming number of posters of himself on the walls, everything looked. . . normal. Just like in the 3D world.

Before Andrew could take a closer look at the room, he heard the scolding voice of a man from below, presumably downstairs, "Why do you keep gaming? You done gone mess up your life and do nothing, missy! You're a dinosaur and you never brought any guy home! Are you. . . anti-social or sum?"

"I-I do have a boyfriend!" The protesting sound of a woman resounded. Unless all of this was a huge coincidence, that voice must've belonged to the Goddess.

"Oh yeah? Then show me that 'boyfriend' of yours."

"H-he. . ."

"He ain't real, is he? He some digital-ass wanker that the closest you're ever gonna touch is by licking that computer screen of yours."

"That's mean, dad! He's real!"

"Then where is he?"

Andrew rushed downstairs, forgetting he was dragging a giant-ass cannon along with him. When he ran down, the two person inside the first-floor turned to him, wide-eyed. Especially the Goddess.

"A-A-Andrew?" Her eye jerked and her hands shivered.

Andrew had imagined that real-life Goddess would look like a huge gaming nerd, but surprisingly, she looked no different from her appearance game apart for the fact that she wasn't wearing any weird clothing and had a thick pair of glasses, probably from binge gaming.

She's pretty cute in those glasses, though.

"Who this dude?" The middle-aged man with a retracing hairline and a slightly out of shape body exclaimed. He then glared at the cannon behind Andrew. "What you think you're doing?"

Andrew, being the genius he was, blurted out the foolproof answer that would save him from the beat-up of all fathers in the world, "I've been banging your daughter."

"Why did you say that?" The Goddesses' face turned blanched.

"What do you mean. . . 'banged'?" The father froze. "Like, bashing her face on the table or some?"

"Oh, no. Not just on the table, sir. I smashed her in the bathroom, inside a fast food drive-thru, on top of an aircraft, in North Korea, inside the International Space Station. Y'know your daughter has a habit of gritting her teeth so often after smashing, yeah? So we went to the dentist, and he had to head out for a sec. A sign on his chair said 'don't smash'. We smashed there too."

"So. . .you saying 'banging' in, like. . . having intercourse with my daughter."

"Well, uh, yeah."

The dad's face burned with a fiery red. Looking at Anna's abhorred expression, Andrew realized that he might have messed up.

The father asked Andrew with a death glare, intoning every single word, "You came down from the stairs. So you've been with my daughter, 'smashing' the whole night before?"

"N-not like that. . . I can explain—"

"That's awesome!" The dad jumped in joy, then walked up to Andrew and gave him a hug.

"Wait, what?" Andrew and Anna said in unison.

"I thought my girl would die alone, unwanted by any man! Thank you; thank you; thank you! You've saved us all!" The father pulled Andrew over and sat him on a chair. "You have to stay for dinner! We shall feast to celebrate the day I learn that a man has screwed my daughter!"

"Uh. . ."

Soon, the father disappeared into the kitchen. The Goddess looked at Andrew, her eyes tinted with a shade of joy and a glimpse of disbelief. "How are you. . . here? In flesh and blood?"

"The same way you told me would never work. Antimatter. Anyway, you don't look thirteen."

"That's because I'm twenty-seven."

"You could've just told me you're twenty-seven!" Andrew threw his hands in the air. "Oh, wow. You're four years older than me, man. I'm dating an old lady."

"You're a hundred years old judging from the years you've lived, though." She cast her gaze away, her voice shaky. "Then, from now on, are you my real boyfriend?"

"I don't know about you, but I've always considered myself a real one."

Andrew had thought that the Goddess (he didn't know why he still referred to her as one) would have been overjoyed, but instead she brimmed with tears as she latched on his collar. "Come back to your world! You're the most beautiful and talented person I've ever met! And I'm just. . . me, a talentless hack spending all my life hiding inside my room in the attic, staring at the other cool college kids on their skateboards passing through the streets and asking myself I can't smile like them.

Andrew stood still for a long while as the Goddess Anna buried her face in his chest and sobbed. He couldn't find anything to say for a longest time before uttering, "You've never told me all this."

"I. . . I didn't have to in my game world. I can always make myself pretty, and if I'm not pretty enough, I can be powerful enough to overwhelm you. I don't have any power in this world. I can't keep other women away from you."

Andrew had to admit that although Anna'd resorted to rather unorthodox methods of flirting, she was passionate about him, enough to cast a meteor a hundred times and hung dozens of posters of him on her walls. For a second, he felt empathy towards her.

"No one's gonna take you away from me," he said as he wrapped his hands around her.

"And how do you know that?"

"I shifted an entire dimension to come to you and definitely not because my world was disappearing and I needed to save my life. What do you think?"

"But what are you even going to do here? How are you going to get a job? You don't even have a birth cirtificate in this world."

"Have you seen what I've done in my world? I'm resourceful. I'll manage."

"How am I going to explain to my dad?"

"He doesn't seem to have much problems even with. . . the most ridiculous of stories."

Anna had no more reason to refuse. She lifted her face and looked at Andrew in silence. Andrew hugged her cheeks. "Let me stay in this world. What's the worst that could happen?"

"I don't know. Maybe you'll fall in love with another person who isn't a psycho."

"You seem much more tamable here than inside the game, to be honest."

"And what is that supposed to mean?"

"We shall see." Andrew leaned in for a kiss. Anna softened in an instance, and surrendered herself without resistance. He swept her off her feet and pulled her into her deepest desire.

Then the clicking sound of a camera resounded.

A dazzling light appeared and the two of them stopped. Both of them turned to the light in shock as Anna's father grinned, a camera in hand.

"Your mom's gotta know about this!" He exclaimed as he ran up the stairs. "Babe! Look at our daughter groping some boy in the living room! This is the most beautiful thing in the world!"

Andrew eyed Anna. "Okay, how long have you been single?"

"Ahahahaha. . ."

"I guess your family wants me to stay."

"I wouldn't say no," she blushed.

"Then it's settled." He gave her a light peck on her cheek. "Where can I forge a birth cirtificate and an ID real quick, and where's the nearest lottery store?"

The months that followed was the calmest months of Andrew's life. He plot-armorly got himself a new identity and got accepted into Harvart University. Anna kept fawning over him like a needy teenager, and her parents liked him so much that they asked him to move in with them to their little mansion on the coast. Soon after, they moved to a more remote area, where the scenery was more beautiful and the climate was milder. He and Anna agreed to leave the game set in the warehouse of the old room, along with Anna's old desktop. There wasn't a reason to keep it around now they'd both found happiness elsewhere.

The biggest problem Andrew had in the new world was that he very often blurted out Goddess when addressing Anna, instead of using her real name. Anna's mother told Andrew that he was a crazy one. "You don't just love my girl. You worship the earth she walks on!"

Andrew tried to explain that he was a game character and the Goddess could destroy the Earth within a single mood swing, but shockingly, Anna's parents didn't believe the convincing and plausible truth. In the end, he found no reason to argue. He had been given a chance to live a normal life, and he shall live it to the fullest. Nothing could stop Andrew from his simple happiness anymore.

Or so he thought.

***

The space rift Andrew created in the 3D world had never been closed. Top-tier scientist Elbert Ainstein, after trying and failing to patch the rift, warned the public that the hole would shred everyone who dared approach it to pieces. Because of that, the area was off-limits, with 10,000,000 armed guards carefully protected it every second.

Then one day, a person walked in and defeated 10,000,000 armed guards—an ordinary college student with an obsessive, inexplicable liking for schoolgirl uniforms. Short, petite, and hair fumbling over her chest, she was dressed in her highschool uniforms that still fit her slender form and black socks that went over her knees.

Stepping out of the screen of an old computer in a dusty warehouse, she hummed, "You aren't getting away from me, sugarbear~~~"