The sensory transition from the Ethereal Plane back to the real world was always a jarring and deeply unpleasant experience. It felt like being violently inhaled by a vacuum cleaner and spat out onto cold concrete.
Sebastian gasped as his eyes snapped open. The sleek metallic VR helmet hissed as the neural link needles gracefully detached from the base of his skull. He ripped the visor off his sweaty head and tossed it onto the stained mattress.
His 2077 apartment was a miserable box of grey concrete and exposed wiring.
The air didn't smell like the ozone and blood of the Ethereal Plane. It smelled like cheap synthetic ramen, damp mold, and the acidic rain relentlessly pounding against his single cracked window.
The neon sign from the noodle shop three stories below blinked erratically, casting sickly green shadows across his walls.
He swung his legs over the side of the bed, his bare feet hitting the freezing linoleum floor.
"Home sweet home," he muttered. His voice was raspy from disuse.
He stood up, intending to walk to the tiny kitchenette to grab a packet of military grade rations. But the moment he put his weight on his legs, he stumbled.
It wasn't a stumble of weakness. It was a severe miscalculation of gravity.
He had intended to push himself off the mattress with a normal amount of human force. Instead, his leg muscles fired with a terrifying and unnatural snap.
He launched himself forward, nearly taking the door off its hinges as his shoulder slammed into the wooden frame. The wood splintered with a loud crack, and the frame groaned under the impact.
Sebastian froze and pressed his back against the wall. He looked down at his hands.
His veins were visibly pulsing beneath his pale skin. A faint and almost imperceptible dark violet hue traced the blood vessels in his forearms.
His heart was beating at a slow and impossibly steady rhythm of maybe forty beats per minute. Yet he felt entirely oxygenated.
He opened and closed his fists. The tendons in his hands felt like braided steel cables.
"The synchronization," Sebastian whispered. A dark thrill shot down his spine. "It's already bleeding through."
In the game, he was Level 10. He had maximized a basic stealth skill into a conceptual law of space, and a dagger passive into absolute severance.
The system was currently attempting to download those digital metrics into his physical biological body. The sync rate was probably hovering around 1 percent.
It sounded small, but 1 percent of a god was enough to turn a baseline human into a biological weapon.
He walked over to his cracked holographic terminal, moving with deliberate and careful slowness. He looked like a man trying to operate a bulldozer in a china shop. He booted up the local news feeds.
The holographic projector flickered to life. It displayed an anchorwoman with pristine cybernetic implants. She looked stressed, and her perfectly manicured facade was cracking.
"Authorities are still struggling to contain the mass hysteria in downtown Tokyo," the anchorwoman reported. Footage of a burning intersection played behind her.
"Police reports indicate a series of catastrophic gas line explosions, but eyewitnesses are claiming to have seen anomalies. Reports of people being violently lifted into the air and dismembered by unseen forces are flooding the local networks. The military has been deployed to enforce a strict quarantine."
Sebastian leaned in. His dark eyes locked onto the blurry cell phone footage of a businessman being violently torn in half by absolutely nothing.
The man's torso separated from his legs. Intestines unspooled onto the crosswalk like wet rope, and blood sprayed into the air as if hitting an invisible glass wall.
"Phase Spiders," Sebastian noted clinically. "Level 25 stealth mobs. They're tearing through the dimensional fabric early."
The broadcast switched to a geological map of China.
"In other news, Mount Qiongtu has experienced a series of unprecedented seismic events. Strangely, the earthquakes are emitting a resonant frequency that has shattered glass in a fifty mile radius. Geologists are baffled."
"That's not an earthquake," Sebastian scoffed, turning off the terminal. "That's a Level 40 Abyssal Dungeon anchoring its core to the tectonic plates."
The news was calling it gas leaks and seismic anomalies. The government was trying to cover it up with quarantine zones.
They were treating a cosmic invasion like a public relations crisis. It was almost funny in a sick and twisted way. They were playing politics while the universe was quietly locking the doors and turning on the blender.
Sebastian didn't have time to worry about Tokyo or Mount Qiongtu. He had his own problems. He needed to test the limits of his new biology before he accidentally crushed a doorknob and bled to death from shrapnel.
He stepped into the center of his cramped living room. He rolled his shoulders, feeling the strange and frictionless glide of his joints.
He approached the solid load bearing concrete wall that separated his apartment from the hallway. It was reinforced with cheap steel rebar, designed to withstand the megacity's frequent tremors.
He didn't wind up. He didn't adopt a martial arts stance. He just stood a foot away from the wall, pulled his right fist back a few inches, and punched.
He didn't use full force. He used maybe 30 percent of what his brain was telling him he could output.
Bang!
The sound was deafening, like a shotgun firing indoors.
Sebastian's fist didn't just dent the concrete. It punched cleanly through it. Dust and pulverized gravel exploded outward into the hallway. He felt the steel rebar inside the wall warp and snap around his knuckles like dry twigs.
He slowly pulled his arm back.
There was a perfect circular hole in the concrete, looking straight out into the flickering fluorescent lights of the apartment corridor.
Sebastian looked at his hand. There was a thin layer of grey dust coating his skin. He wiped it off. His knuckles weren't broken. They weren't bleeding. There wasn't even a bruise. The skin had hardened into something that mimicked the conceptual durability of his digital avatar.
"Hey! What the hell is going on in there?!" his neighbor, a grumpy overweight man named Higgins, yelled from the hallway. His face appeared in the newly made hole. "Are you doing construction at two in the morning, you psycho?!"
Sebastian looked at Higgins through the hole in the wall. He stared at the man with his cold and dead eyes.
"Sorry," Sebastian said. His voice was entirely devoid of apology. "Slipped."
He grabbed a piece of duct tape from his desk and slapped it over the hole, right over Higgins' complaining mouth. He completely ignored the muffled swearing from the other side.
The synchronization was real. It was working. The 10,000 times multiplier wasn't just breaking the game. It was going to break reality.
He walked back to his bed and picked up the VR helmet. He didn't need sleep. His body was buzzing with the ambient mana bleeding into the real world.
He needed to get back in. He had a sanctuary to build, and he needed a map from a certain blind beggar to find the basement to put it in.
"Link start," he commanded, pulling the visor down.
The concrete room vanished, and the bloody work continued.