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8 PM on Shark Platform, and Maverick was doing what Maverick did best.
Absolutely nothing.
Well — not nothing, technically. He was staring at a black screen with the focused, Zen-like composure of a man who had long since made peace with his own limitations. The VR helmet sat slightly askew on his head. His controller rested in his lap at the angle of a thing recently set down and not picked back up. His expression was the expression of someone who had achieved enlightenment, specifically the kind of enlightenment where you realize that struggling harder isn't going to help.
The stream title read: Everyone Come Shoot — Maverick's Box Horse Epic.
The chat was a different story entirely.
[Confused]: okay I'm new here, can someone explain why the streamer is just... staring at nothing?
[Helpful]: he got eliminated again. this is his coping mechanism. we call it "the meditation phase"
[OldFan]: third time this stream. we're in uncharted territory tonight
[Supportive]: Maverick bro it's fine if FPS isn't your thing, you don't have to be a gaming streamer
[Rocket]: MAVERICK HAS A ROCKET — READ THE DONATION!!
[System]: Rich_Auntie_Susan has sent a Rocket. Current donation streak: 1.
That snapped him out of it.
The moment the rocket notification hit, Maverick sat up straight like a man who'd just had cold water poured down his back. The meditative stillness evaporated. His hand shot to the helmet, pulled it off, and he leaned forward with the sudden energy of someone who remembered they had a job to do.
"Alright, alright — thank you, thank you, Rich Auntie Susan, you're literally keeping this stream alive right now." He swept his eyes across the chat, catching up on what he'd missed during the void staring. "And hey — can a guy get a moment of peace around here? I wasn't skydiving. That's called strategic disengagement. There's a difference."
[Skeptical]: strategic disengagement from what, the floor?
[Laughing]: he fell through the map again didn't he
[Technical]: honestly though the feedback on the VR in this game is genuinely terrible
[Understanding]: RIGHT? the haptics feel like you're wearing oven mitts
"Okay, see — that I agree with," Maverick said, pointing at the screen like he was identifying an ally in the crowd. "The graphics are gorgeous, I'll give them that. Every blade of virtual grass is individually rendered, I can count the pixels on a guy's jacket from fifty yards out. But the tactile feedback? I'm shooting what feels like wet cardboard at cardboard targets and somehow that's supposed to feel immersive." He shook his head. "If the feedback wasn't this bad, half of those shots would've landed. I'm just saying."
[Defending]: the recoil on the AK is so unrealistic, it jumps like a cartoon
[AlsoDefending]: and the light pollution from the skins!! someone in a neon outfit jumps around a corner and I'm literally blinded
[Cynical]: they made $9 billion in revenue this quarter and still can't fix the haptic engine?
[SponsoredContent]: instead of complaining here why don't you go buy more skins and support the developers :)
[Everyone]: WHERE DID THIS SHILL COME FROM
[Maverick_fan]: bro unlock the secret achievement: corporate apologist
"Let's not start a war in my chat," Maverick said, though he was visibly trying not to laugh. "Look, Goose Corporation games are what they are. The user base is there, the infrastructure's there. They're fine. Other studios are worse — I've played some of those competition submissions where the haptics feel like nothing and the graphics look like they were rendered on a toaster, and those companies are charging more. At least Goose's stuff works ninety percent of the time."
He minimized the game and pulled up the National Game Production Competition page, scrolling through it with the idle curiosity of a man killing time before deciding on his next stream segment.
The chat went with him, naturally.
[Curious]: ooh what are you looking at
[Browsing]: national production comp, I've been checking this all week
[Opinion]: most of it is boring but there's like two or three actually interesting ones
Maverick's expression as he scrolled was professionally neutral — the practiced face of a streamer who knew the camera was always on. But the slight downturn at the corners of his mouth told anyone watching closely enough that he wasn't exactly wowed by what he was seeing.
"Most of these I've already played," he said, scrolling past entry after entry. "That one — played it. That one — played it and dropped it in forty minutes. That dungeon one's alright but it's just..." He waved a hand. "It's fine. You know? It's fine. Nothing here is making me want to clear my schedule."
[Agrees]: King of Treasures is supposed to be good at least
[Disagreement]: king of treasures is mid
[Defending_KoT]: it's mid but it's the best mid we've got right now
"Maybe King of Treasures," Maverick allowed. "If I'm scraping the bottom of the barrel, at least that barrel has decent lighting. I heard the reviews are decent."
He kept scrolling.
And then he stopped.
The icon was black — completely, deliberately black, like it was designed to stand out from every other thumbnail on the page by being the absence of anything. Centered in the darkness was a golden cup radiating light in thin, elegant rays, the kind of design that looked like it had been thought about rather than slapped together. Simple. Confident.
Holy Grail War.
[Chat]: holy grail war??
[Chat]: HOLY GRAIL WAR
[Immature]: why does that sound like an ad for a —
[System]: User "Maverick_Must_Eat_My**" has been flagged for inappropriate content and banned for 48 hours. Reminder: platform rules apply to all users.
[Everyone]: HOLY
[Shocked]: they didn't even warn him
[Surviving_Viewer]: I am watching history
[Calm]: okay but to be fair he walked into that one
Maverick stared at the stream of reaction messages flooding his chat and felt something tighten in his chest that was either secondhand embarrassment or genuine fear on behalf of his audience's collective brain cells.
"Chat," he said carefully. "We don't do that here. That person is going to think about their choices over the next forty-eight hours and hopefully come back a changed individual." He cleared his throat. "Moving on."
He clicked on the Holy Grail War entry.
A brief description populated the page, and Maverick, doing what streamers do, read it aloud: "Holy Grail War — a conflict that erupts between seven Mages and their seven Servants, each combatant vying for the omnipotent Holy Grail, a relic said to grant any wish without exception..."
He let the words sit in the air for a moment.
"Okay," he said slowly. "That is actually interesting. Mages. Servants. Last one standing gets a wish granted." He checked the developer name. "Forest Studio. Never heard of them." He looked at the download size. "Two hundred gigabytes. Chat, Everyone Come Shoot is twenty-seven gigs. What is packed into two hundred gigabytes of Holy Grail War?"
[Suspicious]: that's either incredibly ambitious or bloated to death
[Optimistic]: or both
[Fatalist]: you've been skydiving all night just open it
[Maverick]: IT'S CALLED STRATEGIC DISENGAGEMENT
The chat exploded into laughter. Even Maverick cracked despite himself, pressing his lips together against a grin.
"Fine," he said. "Fine. It's free. Worst case I have a story to tell." He clicked download.
Under the platform's high-speed network, two hundred gigabytes evaporated in under twenty seconds. The file sat ready on his desktop like it had been waiting.
Maverick exhaled, picked up his VR helmet, and settled it onto his head.
"Alright," he said, his voice taking on the slightly artificial brightness of a man committing to a bit. "Let's see what this is about."
The stream view synced to his perspective as the VR initialized, and for a moment there was nothing — just darkness behind the loading screen, uniform and quiet.
Then the darkness became intentional.
The words Holy Grail War surfaced out of it in deep, blood-red letters, not appearing so much as arriving, filling the frame with a weight that felt different from every other title screen Maverick had loaded in the last three years of streaming.
And then the music started.
It came in slowly — a single instrument, low and searching, reaching across the darkness like it was feeling for something it had lost. Then strings, building beneath it, unhurried and inevitable. It wasn't hype music. It wasn't a theme designed to get your blood pumping or your adrenaline up. It was something older-sounding than that, something that felt like the score to an event of genuine consequence, like someone had composed it for a war that actually mattered.
Maverick didn't say anything.
In fourteen months of streaming, he had talked through every loading screen, every cutscene, every musical intro. His audience had long since accepted that silence from Maverick meant buffering, not awe.
This was different.
The chat noticed.
[Quiet]: ...
[Quiet2]: is he okay
[Listening]: no actually shut up I'm listening
[Moved]: what IS this
[Music_Fan]: this soundtrack is doing something to me
[Hooked]: I came for the skydiving memes and now I'm having an emotional experience
Maverick sat with the music for its full duration, and when it finally faded — not ending abruptly but resolving, like it had somewhere it needed to go — he let out a long, slow breath.
"Okay," he said quietly.
Then, louder: "Okay. Who made this game."
[Chat]: FOREST STUDIO
[Chat]: FOREST STUDIO LET'S GO
[Early_Adopter]: I TOLD YOU
[Converted]: I wasn't going to watch tonight but I'm staying now
[Invested]: Maverick I need you to play this whole thing right now
Maverick pulled up the developer credit on the side screen without leaving the game. Forest Studio. Still nobody he'd ever heard of. Still a name with no history attached to it, no reputation, no previous titles to reference. Just a golden cup on a black background and a piece of music that had just made thirty thousand simultaneous viewers go quiet.
He shook his head slowly, something between disbelief and genuine excitement working across his face.
"Chat," he said. "I have a feeling about this one."
He hit New Game.
Back in his apartment, with no idea any of this was happening, Max was deep in code.
The Holy Grail War project had consumed him completely — not in the desperate, grinding way it had consumed the original owner of this body, but in the clean, focused way that the Memory Palace made possible. Every element was laid out with perfect clarity. He could hold the entire architecture of the game in his mind simultaneously, rotating it, examining it, identifying the exact order in which things needed to be built.
The Myriad Worlds System had done the hard part: the source data for the entire Fate universe was there, catalogued and ready to convert. The VR integration specifications, the Servant data, the Noble Phantasm logic trees, the battle system frameworks — all of it existed in the system's library, waiting to be instantiated into this world's code format.
What Max was doing wasn't building from scratch. It was translating a masterpiece into a new language, one careful line at a time, making sure nothing was lost in the conversion.
He worked through the night without noticing the time passing.
By the time he finally sat back, stretched, and checked the clock, it was 2 AM. The core framework was done. The opening sequence — the title card, the music, the first cinematic — was fully functional and polished to the standard he'd set for himself.
Somewhere across the city, on a platform he wasn't watching, thirty thousand people had just heard Yuki Kajiura's masterwork for the first time in this world.
Max didn't know that yet.
He just knew the path was clear.
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