I had a dream. No—could I really dismiss it as nothing more than a dream? The sticky pressure transmitted through all five senses and the thick, acrid stench of blood needling my nose gnawed at my nerves with a vividness far surpassing anything in reality.
All around me stretched an infinite abyss that allowed not a single scrap of light. Something enormous and ominous was looking down at me from within that pitch-black darkness, a shape beyond the capacity of human perception to comprehend.
It was unmistakably that thing. The absolute transcendent entity that had never once been slain in the history of the game—Greed. Its colossal body blotted out the sky, constantly writhing and changing shape, while tens of thousands of eyes and hungry maws grotesquely sprouted across its surface.
It was no longer a crude scrap of pixel art on the other side of a monitor. If I were to face that monster with my own eyes in reality, this was surely what it would look like. The vivid texture of its distorted features as it stared at me was horrifying enough to chill my bones.
The stench of rotting meat mixed with clotted blood rushed over me, and every time its gaze touched me, it felt as though the veins throughout my body were freezing solid. My lungs shriveled and my heart thrashed like mad, but my limbs would not move even a single step, as if bound by invisible chains.
The rational voice screaming that I had to run could not reach my paralyzed body, and all I could do was remain helplessly pinned beneath its enormous shadow. Some terrible remnant carved into my soul must have kept summoning this vision. At last, the entity opened thousands of maws at once and began to laugh grotesquely. Along with a ringing in my ears that seemed ready to split my eardrums, a single sentence drove straight into my mind.
%/:-::/%:/:Return, Mortal.
It was a bizarre string of characters I could not interpret, yet instinctively, I understood all too well the unmistakable call and obsession contained within it. The thing's tenacious, viscous mass of emotion reaching toward me pierced my mind in its entirety. Immediately afterward, before I had any chance to evade it, a gigantic hand closed around me and squeezed hard.
Bones crumbling. Ribs piercing my lungs and my organs being crushed—the pain came through with the clarity of reality. And then, a desperate scream burst from my mouth.
"Hah—hah…!"
I jolted awake and sprang up from the bed, my body drenched in cold sweat. I gulped down ragged breaths like someone whose lungs had been punctured and looked around the dark room. In the quiet of dawn, the monitor on the desk was still on, casting its blue glow. I dragged both hands down my face. My fingertips were trembling faintly.
I clutched at my chest as if trying to tear it open, but of course, my bones and flesh were perfectly intact. Even so, the lingering pain remained like phantom pain and did not fade easily. I had always been quiet and cautious, with a tendency to immerse myself frighteningly deeply in anything that caught my interest. Going without food or drink and throwing away my daily life to obsess over something was hardly an unfamiliar experience for me.
The game I had become so absorbed in over the past few months that I had even forgotten to leave the house was the screen inside that monitor: Vertus. Now entering its tenth year since release, it was an intensely niche open-world single-player game with pixel art, boasting a grand total of only ten thousand downloads worldwide. Ten thousand downloads over ten years meant a complete commercial failure. Thinking back, I had first stepped into the game during its fifth year after release.
It was because of some user who roamed every corner of the internet promoting the game like a madman. Every dawn, he wrote bizarrely long posts and plastered community boards with cult-like slogans about how there was a true world here. But despite his tearful efforts, no one gave him even the slightest bit of attention. More often, people reported him for being obnoxious, and his posts were deleted. Then, at some point, even that promoter vanished without a trace like smoke and was never seen again.
In the end, new players were out of the question, and the only users left were a few hundred ghosts, myself included. The reason Vertus had been so thoroughly rejected by the public was obvious. Its difficulty was so brutally extreme that it left people speechless.
There was no friendly tutorial designed to help the player, nor any prescribed main story. The moment you started, you were dumped into an empty wasteland or a dark prison and left to survive on your own. In exchange, the player was given an incredible amount of freedom of choice, and the world teemed with countless types of monsters.
You could assassinate NPCs or burn down villages—anything was possible—but the system's punishment for those choices was merciless. Even with pixel art, injuries were rendered with horrifying realism: a deep slash from an enemy would tear open flesh and expose bone, and weapons could even break during combat. Worst of all was the hardcore system that deleted the hundreds of hours of data a character had accumulated without a trace upon death, shattering countless players' mental fortitude.
And in that hellish world of Vertus, I had accomplished the feat of cutting off the head of Greed, the transcendent entity no one had ever officially slain.
I should have been drunk with joy after seeing an ending no one else had reached. But there was no joy in victory. My character had failed to evade Greed's last desperate attack, and we had both died in the end, meeting a miserable fate of mutual destruction. The Enemy Defeated notification and the cold Death message had appeared on the screen at the same time.
After the character I had built up with all my time and effort was pointlessly deleted into dust, I quit the game completely. I had even considered deleting the client, swearing I would never set foot in this damnable game again.
But after that day, my daily life was consumed by nightmares. The nightmare that I thought would end in a day or two tormented me relentlessly for nearly a month. Every night, Greed appeared in my dreams and looked down at me, sneering, without ever dying. The terror of being helplessly crushed beneath its overwhelming presence was painful enough, but what truly drove me mad was that horrible lingering regret and unease.
It had not ended in a perfect victory, but in mutual destruction, with our lives traded for each other. Along with its sneer, the unfinished ending kept scraping at my cautious, obsessive nature and remained behind as regret.
"Hah…"
I rubbed my dry face and dropped into the old chair in front of the monitor. The cold sweat had dried against my skin, leaving my spine chilled. I gripped the mouse with a trembling hand. In the end, the only way to put a complete stop to this wretched unease and the nightmares repeating every night was not to avoid the game, but to face it head-on again and crush that thing utterly.
My goal was not simply to clear the game. I had to force that monster to kneel beneath my feet and finish it off in the cruelest, most perfect way the system allowed. Only then, it seemed, could I escape this wretched cycle. I cast aside my hesitation and launched Vertus again. The familiar yet spine-chilling dark-fantasy title screen filled my retinas.
This time would be different. I would never die.
To give true despair to that scrap of pixels that had ensnared me, telling me to return, I decided to create a character that would destroy Vertus's ecosystem itself—one that gathered every stat and trait the system permitted.
Vertus's character-creation system showed no mercy. It used a hardcore method that determined your base stats randomly by rolling dice. If you were lucky, you got stats on the level of an ordinary soldier. If you were unlucky, you had to start with the stats of a low-class slave born with an incurable disease.
Click. Click. Click again. I refreshed the screen over and over until the mouse button wore away, waiting for the perfect arrangement of numbers to appear. Without even turning on the lights, I pressed the button like a machine, relying solely on the monitor's blue glow. My fingers cramped and my vision blurred, but I stared at the screen with an immersion bordering on obsession. Even the time it took to chew and swallow food felt like a waste, so I staved off my hunger with water and never looked away from the screen. Then, after an extreme bout of dice rolling forged from rage and determination, I finally succeeded in producing grotesquely high base stats.
The maximum for initial stats was 12. On my monitor, 12, 12, 12, 12... Every value stood in a row of astonishing numbers. That meant one and a half times the strength and physical ability of an average adult man. For the body of a fifteen-year-old orphan boy just starting out, it was a miraculous level of power beyond imagination. All that remained was choosing the traits to purchase with points. Traits had to be bought with achievement points earned when a character died, and there was the painful restriction that each character could equip no more than three.
The astronomical achievement points I had earned by achieving mutual destruction with Greed. I poured them out without restraint and selected the perfect combination of three.
The first trait was Ironman. It allowed the user to maintain absolute composure and calm even in the most extreme situations or before the most terrifying horrors. It was the ultimate passive ability, allowing me to maintain perfect, machine-like rationality even against enemy hallucinations, status-effect attacks, or the threat of death.
The second trait was Heavenly Martial Body. It was a cheat-level ability that allowed the user to learn and wield any martial art in the world without being bound by weapons or restrictions. Even a simple branch could be wielded like the sword of a sword saint, making it the pinnacle of martial prowess—an ability that ensured I would never lose my combat power in any environment.
The final trait was Genius of Combat. It tripled my ability to learn and understand nearly every technique in the world, including swordsmanship and magic. In a game like Vertus, where raising skill proficiency required bone-grinding levels of repetition, this trait boasted a cheat-like efficiency that warped the very concept of time.
It was perfect. Ironman, Heavenly Martial Body, Genius of Combat. With these three traits and grotesquely high base stats, this character would be able to cut off that damnable Greed's head once again and survive perfectly intact.
Normally, when you completed a combination of traits powerful enough to destroy the system's balance, Vertus's vicious rules forcibly imposed a corresponding permanent penalty. But for some reason, no warning or penalty notification appeared on the screen.
Was it a system bug? Whatever the reason, it was cause for celebration as far as I was concerned. A flawless character without even a penalty—now that was a hell of a deal. Once I finished all the settings, the newly created character's background and fate appeared in red text at the center of the screen, as if being typed out.
[Name: Random Assignment (Kyle)] [Background: A fifteen-year-old orphan who has been living on the streets. Captured by a slave trader and on the verge of being sold to an arena.] [Fate: Before reaching the arena, he will be attacked by two wild orcs and massacred along with everyone else in the wagon.]
It was a brutally bleak, death-guaranteed starting point worthy of Vertus's signature dark fantasy. But it didn't matter. A cold smile spread across my lips. I moved the mouse cursor over the red-glowing [START] button at the center of the screen. I had only one thought: end the nightmare. There was no room for hesitation.
Click— It happened the instant I pressed the Start button.
Static crackled—then crackled again! A blinding flash burst from the monitor, followed by a bizarre wave of noise. Silence settled over the room, as if the flow of air had stopped for an instant. Then the monitor's screen split open like the maw of a gigantic beast. Rather than shutting off, the very space in the room began to warp like a ripple in water.
Before I could scream, an intense light completely swallowed my vision. Along with a horrible bout of nausea, as if gravity had reversed, a sensation swept through my entire body—my flesh seemed to break apart into dust and be sucked toward the rays of light from the monitor.
Just before my consciousness cut out completely, through my blackened vision, a blood-red system window I had never seen before was branded onto my retinas alongside a grotesque metallic sound.
[Hidden Trait Unlocked: Greed (Myth)] Description: Ignores the system's trait limit (3) and binds an out-of-spec... Penalty (Curse of Greed): Unless you periodically kill living beings and absorb their vitality...
Dense lines of text poured downward as if being typed, but in my fading consciousness, my brain could barely register the cursed name and the first line of the ominous penalty.
Greed...? Unless I periodically absorb vitality, what...?
The name of that damnable transcendent entity whose life I had traded my own to destroy, the one that appeared every night in my dreams in an overwhelming form and mocked me. Why was that word appearing before my eyes, breaking the rules of the system?
Unable even to utter a proper dying gasp of astonishment, I failed to read the horrifying rest of the penalty written on the blood-red window. My vision sank into absolute darkness.