The cold hit first.
It wasn't a surface chill, something I couldn't just shrug off by moving my shoulders or blowing into my hands. This cold cut straight through fabric and into bone, settling there as it had always belonged.
I dragged in a breath and flinched as it gnawed at my lungs. For a few long seconds, I just sat hunched on a plastic bench beneath a cracked bus stop roof while snow gently drifted sideways in front of me. The streets were empty, and everything around me was too pale.
"Where...." I said.
My voice came out thin, drowned out by the wind. I looked down at myself.
A dark winter coat, heavy and practical. Jeans. Boots. Thin gloves that were already losing heat. No logos, no familiar tags, nothing that anchored any of it to something I recognised.
When I shifted, the bench creaked. I pressed my palm against the metal pole of the bus stop. It was cold, and I could feel the rust gathered on its surface.
'This level of detail....It feels too perfect.'
My stomach tightened as I lifted both hands to my face, half expecting to hit the VR headset. My fingers met skin. In a panic, I ran my hands over my cheeks, my brow, the bridge of my nose.
"No headset." My heart sped up.
"Menu," I said quietly. "Open interface."
Nothing.
"Exit. Log out. Settings."
Still nothing.
"Status."
The wind pushed a fresh gust of snow through the shelter. Flakes landed on my eyelashes and fused into my skin. I closed my eyes and counted to five.
'One. Two. Three. Four. Five.'
When I opened them again, the street hadn't changed. The bus stop hadn't softened or pixelated.
It stayed.
"Right," I said, my heart quickened again. "So.... this is real."
I didn't like how easily I had uttered those words. I also didn't like how I had nowhere to go.
Sitting still meant the cold would freeze me over. I shoved my hands deeper into my pockets, pushed myself up, and stepped out from under the shelter. Snow struck me like a slap. My face reddened as the cold winds wrapped themselves around my figure. Ahead, the road stretched wide: four lanes, a concrete divider, streetlamps casting pale islands of light onto asphalt. Buildings rose on both sides, glass and steel and concrete stacked into the dark. Some windows glowed warm. Most were dead.
Then the feeling hit.
'Deja Vu'
The kind that didn't come with explanation, only with that sudden, sick certainty that you've stood somewhere before, except I hadn't. Not like this.
I turned my head slowly, taking it in.
The placement of the alley mouth. The corner store sign. The angle of a side street that disappears between towers.
Everything was in the right place.
'Southern Ridge.'
A small network of towns and cities at the edge of Advent's map. Far away from the conflict. This place was the starting town in the game, right next to the Academy, where people would playout the first half of the story.
As I realised that, it made my panic worsen.
I swallowed. My breath fogged thick in front of me.
I started walking.
Snow crunched under my boots. My coat rubbed the back of my neck, stiff with cold. The wind cut along the street as if it had practised this route for years. My panic was rising. All I could think of was to move, to prove myself wrong by surveying my surroundings.
For a while, all I did was scuttle around the empty streets. The city was clean, too clean. I could tell that the snow had been falling for a few days, and yet it remained undisturbed.
I walked around a few buildings and glanced at their windows. Most of the ground-floor lights were off. Behind a few windows, I caught silhouettes moving, someone crossing a room, a curtain shifting. One shape froze when it noticed me and didn't move again.
No one stepped outside.
I passed a café with chairs stacked inside, a closed bookstore, and a narrow alley that smelled faintly of trash and stale water. My body started to complain. The cold was brutal. My fingers had gone numb. My toes were stiff in my boots. A dull ache settled into my thighs, like my muscles were arguing with the idea that this was normal.I wrapped my arms tighter around myself and kept walking.
Blocks passed. The street opened into a plaza.
A frozen fountain sat at its centre, half-buried in fresh snow. Benches curved around it like ribs. I continued trudging through the plaza. Only hearing the hiss of snow and the distant, muffled rise and fall of sirens somewhere far away.
As I looked at a towering skyscraper nearby, a holo banner flickered to life on its sides. I stepped into the plaza. Static crawled across it, then resolved into clean text.
CURFEW IN EFFECT: SOUTHERN REGION, THIRD DISTRICT
LEVEL 2 THREAT
CIVILIANS REMAIN INDOORS
AWAKENED REPORT TO LOCAL COMMAND
The message scrolled once, then held.
I stared at it longer than I meant to.
Curfew. Threat. Awakened.
The words landed in my chest with weight.
A faint shimmer glistened in my eyes, and a translucent line of text appeared, floating in the air ahead of me.
[CONDITION: MILD COLD STRESS.]
[RECOMMENDATION: SEEK SHELTER / INCREASE ACTIVITY.]
I flinched hard, almost stumbling back.
'This sensation,' I reached out. My finger passed right through it, as if it were some sort of illusion.
Yet I knew it wasn't.
This strange warning, it was unmistakable.
As my focus sharpened on the words, a pressure stirred behind my eyes. Not pain, something closer to a click, like part of my mind had woken up and started labelling things.
I blinked. I knew this effect.
It was [Insight]. Or rather, a variation of it.
"Insight..." The word lingered on my tongue, and my thoughts settled in place.
I had chosen insight before I began my new playthrough to carry it over. I knew I had.
But
"This...really is not a game."
I knew it by instinct. As a man who'd played Advent at the highest immersion setting, there was simply no way I wouldn't recognise it. But this place? These sensations, these things that I saw?
They were all real.
My heart dropped. I felt sick to my stomach, and the panic that had faded jolted back in place. A heat rushed up my chest. It felt wrong.
I moved again, choosing a narrower street away from the open plaza. The buildings closed in, cutting some of the wind. My boots slipped once where snow hid ice, my foot skidding before I caught myself against a wall.
Concrete burned my palm with cold.
I held it there anyway, just to be sure it was concrete. Just to feel that sting and let it settle in my head like a nail.
'Real.'
The longer I walked, the more my thoughts tried to split into two tracks.
One reached for explanations that kept me safe.
The other kept counting details like evidence.
I turned another corner.
The street narrowed again, older buildings on both sides, fewer windows, buzzing streetlamps that looked offended by winter. Snow collected in gutters and along doorframes.
I stopped without meaning to.
My fingers stung as blood tried to hurry through them. My chest tightened.
"Stop," I told myself under my breath. "Stop. Don't spiral."
I forced a breath in and out, counted to three, then moved again.
My boots made small, lonely sounds on the snow.
Another sound slid under the sirens.
A deep, distant rumble.
A flurry of snow gusted down the street and vanished around the next corner.
My hands were shaking. I jammed them deeper into my pockets and hunched my shoulders like it would make me smaller.
My thoughts finally lined up into something usable.
Shelter. Heat. Information.
Those were the three things I needed.
I needed a building. A lobby. A stairwell. Anything that got me out of wind and out of sight. Somewhere I could sit, breathe, and gather myself.
But first.
If the thing I saw really was insight, that meant I could use it again.
I looked down at my hands once more. My eyes narrowed.
"Insight," I didn't need to whisper, but the word had crawled to my lips regardless.
The air in front of me shimmered, and a panel unfolded cleanly, as it had always belonged there.
-
[NAME]
NOAH REED
[GIFTS]
INSIGHT: RANK EX
HERO: RANK F (DORMANT)
[SKILLS]
-None-
[CONDITION]
OVERALL: 74%
COLD STRESS: MODERATE
FATIGUE: HIGH
MINOR BRUISING: PRESENT
RECOMMENDATION: WARMTH, REST, FOOD
-
I stared at the line that mattered.
INSIGHT: RANK EX
Then I looked at the other categories. I had no skills, and my condition was worsening. I also had the [Hero] gift, but frankly, it was useless unless I was actively fighting a demon. What I didn't know, however, was why it was marked as (Dormant).
I had never seen that before.
My feet started moving before I finished the thought. The information in front of me disappeared.
I was still a bit shaken, and so I kept walking.
Two more turns. A side street. A short jog past a fenced construction site where snow collected on half-finished walls.
Then a voice cracked across the street behind me.
"Hey!"
I spun.
Two figures stood at the mouth of the street I'd just come from, silhouettes against the glow of the larger road beyond. Heavy coats lined with neon trails. Straight backs and a subtle set of armour that was marked with a symbol.
Something about the way they held themselves made my stomach drop before I even saw their faces. I recognised that symbol.
'The Awakened Corps'
An army of awakened that helped keep human territories safe from demons. Their primary job included hunting demons that had decided to invade the humans, but in the game, they also served as defenders of the borders.
One of the figures stepped forward, boots crunching in the snow.
"You," she called, voice carrying cleanly down the narrow street. "What are you doing out during curfew?"