CONGRATULATIONS! Your World has been accepted into The System! Please prepare for Integration! 00:28:32
To say the world has been in chaos lately is an understatement. For the past three days, this message has been on every electronic screen across the planet.
Cellphones, computers, laptops—even restaurant terminals and FIDS screens in airports.
No way to turn it off. No signal to override it.
The message is everywhere.
He looks at his monitor again.
00:25:26
The first day, most people assumed it was a prank. Some hacker playing with global infrastructure. Funny, until the banks froze. Credit and debit cards declined across the board. ATMs dead. No way to access digital currency. The stock market didn’t crash—it evaporated.
The second day, society lost its mind. Chaos. Looting. Gunfights in the streets over a cart full of bottled water. People beating each other to death in grocery store parking lots. By nightfall, half of Manhattan had reportedly caught fire—no one was sure if it was riots or arson or just one more desperate act among thousands.
Emergency services tried to hold the line. Sirens screamed nonstop. Firetrucks, ambulances, police vehicles tore through neighborhoods—until they didn’t. By midnight, the responders stopped responding. Maybe they’d fled. Maybe they’d died. Or maybe they just gave up, same as everyone else.
He glances over again.
00:15:57
He exhales slowly through his nose, the kind of breath that carries weight.
Then he pushes himself up from his computer chair, joints stiff, body heavy.
“That’s enough reminiscing for me,” he mutters. “If the world’s gonna end, I want to be good and smashed when it does.”
He crosses the apartment, bare feet quiet on cold floorboards, and opens the freezer. The light flickers, barely alive, like everything else these days.
Inside, the last survivors of his ice trays float in greyish meltwater. The beer’s not cold. It’s not even cool. Just slightly-below-room-temp, but he doesn’t care.
He slings it back.
God, I hate corona.
He slowly shambles over to his couch, collapses into his seat, and just.
Waits.
00:13:12
The feeling of waiting is a familiar one to him, even if this memory is less pleasant.
Memories as a kid of sitting outside of a Gamestop, waiting for a midnight Halo release, or in a theatre line waiting for a movie to release.
At least those timers were fun, he complains, this one is just 2012 all over again.
00:10:12
Man, this is taking forever.
Sylas settles more into the couch, getting as comfortable as he can in the little divot he’s worn out into it.
He glances around his ratty apartment one more time.
The spots on the ceiling that leak, even though he’s not on the top floor.
The off-white walls with patches that are slightly—or a lot—more off-white.
Mouse holes in the floorboards.
The hallway closet he’s terrified to open because of the noises that come from it.
Hell, he bemoans, I think I’d rather just live in the woods.
Maybe this is a good thing?
They say heaven’s a paradise, after all.
Gotta be better than this place.
00:00:12
He lets out a breath—slow, quiet, final.
The kind you only exhale when something in you shifts.
I wish I’d seen the world before it ended.
PREPARE, SYLAS.
The words slam across every screen in his apartment—TV, laptop, phone, even his cracked microwave display. They don’t flash. They burn.
His half-drunk beer slips from his hand, hits the floor, and rolls under the coffee table.
He opens his mouth to speak, to curse, to scream—
—but no sound comes out.
Everything… stops.
The buzz of the broken fridge.
The faint hum of the streetlamp outside.
The neighbor’s dog, who never shuts the fuck up.
Gone.
Sound, light, gravity—
gone.
The world folds inward like a collapsing lung.
Darkness spills in, thick and soundless. Not black—empty. Like the absence of light was a liquid now, seeping into his bones.
Then—
His phone flashes to life, the cracked screen pulsing once—
Royal Road is the home of this novel. Visit there to read the original and support the author.
Then text begins to scroll, line by line,
NEW USER INTEGRATED WELCOME, SYLAS VENN
RACE DETECTED: HUMAN MIND DESIGNATION: SENTIENT BEING PERSONALIZED CLASS: NOMAD RESOURCE GRANTED: RESOLVE
STATS NUMERIZED: VITALITY: 4 ENDURANCE: 4 LUCK: 2
UNIQUE CLASS PHYSICAL STAT GRANTED: RESILIENCE RESILIENCE: 2
UNIQUE CLASS MENTAL STAT GRANTED: INSTINCT INSTINCT: 1
INTEGRATION COMPLETE
The screen flickers. Then dies.
Not a shutdown—like it never existed.
And suddenly Sylas is no longer in his apartment.
The couch beneath him is gone. The walls, gone. The lights, gone.
WORLD INTEGRATION 12%
PLEASE STAND BY
Of course, he can’t read that, as he is currently panicking, the feeling of everything vanishing, leaving him in a black abys of nothing where he is going to have to STARVE TO DEATH AND-
He’s suddenly just, back.
I’m going insane
But it’s not the same as before.
His outer wall has been torn away, and the building across the street is just... missing. Nothing but open sky and scorched concrete.
The fridge is turned on its side, his monitor shattered, his PC straight up just gone.
The couch has been torn clean in half, one section hurled across the room and embedded into drywall like a missile.
He stumbles forward, glass crunching underfoot, and looks out into the open at the midday sun- terrifying, because the timer was set to end at midnight.
He glances down at the road below, and not a car is in site, yet the road is filled with potholes and cracks as if years have passed, the paint near gone.
Both ways down the road shows similar stories; the city had seemingly aged years within the apparent few hours he was gone, now something reminiscent of a post-apocalyptic movie.
A groan catched his attention, and he glances down to see a person wandering out of his building at the ground level, stumbling as if drunk.
He goes to call out, but the figure just collapses and- next thing he knows, he’s out the door and down the hall.
Stopping for a second to stair at the empty elevator shaft, he just backs away and goes towards the stairs instead.
Ignoring the clamoring coming from the doors around him as he passes- the world did just end after all- he stumbles at the foot of the stairs and races to the lobby- then out the door.
Coming to a stumbling stop next to the downed figure, the slight of pooling blood unnerving him, he shakes their shoulder, causing them to turn and look at him and-
Their face is gone.
It just isn’t there.
No mouth, no eyes, no nose, just smooth, pale flesh stretching across their face.
“WHAT THE FUCK?!”
He jerks backwards instantly, landing on his back before crawling backwards away, the gritty asphalt digging into his palms- not that he notices.
The figure stumbles to their feet, no fingers on their right hand- sliced off seemingly, not just gone- and what he assumes is the blade in question is stuck in their chest.
And yet, they don't even seem to care.
He climbs to his feet- heart racing and breathing as if he’s ran a marathon, and backpedals quickly to make space as it just stumbles after him.
Slowing to a stop, he realizes that it can’t quite tell exactly where he is.
It’s still stumbling towards him, yes, but just off to his left side.
He slowly creeps forward, reaching towards the knife, feet shuffling on the burning asphalt, and-
It lunges at him!
Scrambling backwards once more, he falls on his ass, hard, and the thing falls on top of him.
He grabs onto the knife even as it starts reaching towards his face with it’s good hand, and yanks it out just as it grips.
As the figure starts pulling something on his face, causing a rather incredible agony to flood him, he brings the knife up, and then down.
And then again.
And again.
And one last, final time, and it becomes limp on top of him.
Rolling out from under it, and scrambling to his feet, he just stares.
From the behind, it looks like a normal stabbing victim, nothing special.
He hunches over and throws up what little of the beer he’s had.
As he’s bent over, he catches the screen of his phone, where it apparently fell out of his pocket.
LEVEL 0 -> 1
1 STAT POINT AVAILABLE
ASSIGN?
Y/N
“What?” he wonders.
He spits what’s left in his mouth, before bending over to pick up his phone, looking at the screen.
He taps the “Y.
CHOOSE A STAT TO INCREASE
VITALITY(+)
ENDURANCE(+)
RESILIENCE(+)
INSTINCT(+)
Slowly, as if it might bite him, he taps Vitality, and nothing happens.
He blinks.
His phone dings
STAT INCREASED
“Huh. I expected growth. Or excruciating pain. Something.”
He squints. “Interesting.”
He takes a step back from the body. Wipes the worst of the blood from his hands onto his jeans—like that’ll do anything. His fingers still tremble.
The phone’s screen glows patiently in his hand.
Top-left corner, there's a little stickman icon.
Top-right, a magnifying glass.
He frowns. Then taps the stickman.
SYLAS VENN
SPECIES: Human
STANDING: Neutral
CLASS: NOMAD
"Roam the broken world, surviving off the land."
LVL: 1 (3/100)
STATS
- VITALITY: 5
- ENDURANCE: 4
- LUCK: 2
- RESILIENCE: 2
- INSTINCT: 1
ACTIVE ABILITIES
PASSIVE ABILITIES
SKILLS
He taps the screen. Nothing. Swipes left—nothing. Swipes right—nothing.
“Tight. Love that for me.”
He flicks back to the main screen. Still as barebones as before. Just enough to give him a taste. Just enough to leave him guessing.
"This is like someone made Dark Souls but said 'you know what would make it better? No UI.'"
The wind picks up. Hot. Dry. It whistles through the gaps in the torn-out building like a warning.
He looks down the street again.
The faceless thing isn’t there anymore.
Just a pool of blood, a knife, and a wide, empty road with no sound.
"...God dammit."