August 11th. 9:09PM.
Magnus stood naked in a spiraling corridor, illuminated with a faint sheen of light that never revealed its source. As if it just existed.
The floor beneath him groaned, not from weight, but from movement, as though something slithered far beneath the surface. He felt the vibrations against his feet.
The spiral stretched endlessly upward, yet it felt like Magnus was being pushed downward.
The whispers came first.
A thousand voices, layered and murmuring.
Too much noise to make any of the singular whispers out.
But they wanted something.
Needed something.
They didn't sound distant. They pressed against his skull, worming their way through bone, trickling like warm breath down the nape of his neck.
Hands emerged.
Too many to count. Grey, brittle, and long-fingered.
The hands reached not toward him, but from him.
As if they were pieces of him, torn away, clawing for something beyond his comprehension. Magnus brushed and tore them from his body, but they turned to ash at a touch. Their silhouttes of ash faded into the air, as if reaching out for something intangible until they disapeared.
And then he saw it.
The throne.
It wasn't a chair.
It was much more than that.
The monument of bones was fused together like something that had grown instead of been built. Femurs formed the legs, ribs curled like petals, and at its crest, a skull with no jaw gaped like it was once punished for speaking.
The hands and arms coming from Magnus were reaching for the throne.
His feet carried him forward without his consent. Every step felt like sinking.
Into what, he didn't know.
The journey took what felt like years.
The whispers grew sharper, syllables breaking free from the jumbled sounds.
They repeated a single phrase that clawed at his mind like nails on glass.
"You are our salvation. We are your consequence."
The voice wasn't human. It wasn't even singular. It was an amalgam of sounds, hundreds speaking as one.
Pressure clamped down on him, invisible and merciless. His chest burned, ribs groaning as if they wanted to split. His vision bled at the edges.
He gasped, but there was no oxygen here.
Only the whispers.
Only those impossible voices gnawing at him like a tide of teeth.
The hands reached deeper from his skin now, pulling from his organs.
He sat on the throne, and the hands disapeared.
A pressure crushed down on him until his lungs shrieked for air and his chest burned like iron in a forge.
He clawed at nothing, his hands joining with the many others.
Every instinct roaring for him to survive, and then reality slammed back like a truck taking the life of a teenage boy coming back from late-night grocery shopping.
Magnus jolted awake, flailing, sputtering against a dense, suffocating weight smothering his mouth and nose. His vision filled with fur. Warm, ginger fur. A thick, plush wave of it pressing like a pillow over his face. The immense cosmic dread condensed into a single creature.
Lazlo.
The bastard was sprawled across his head like a furry executioner, tail flicking lazily, purring with all the serene malice of a creature who knew he owned this bed, and the man in it.
Magnus tore the cat off and sat up, dragging air into his chest like it was worth diamonds, heart hammering as if he'd just clawed free from a buried coffin. Sweat pooled beneath him and soaked his clothes and hair.
"Bloody hell, Laz…" he wheezed, staring at the smug fluffball now perched on his chest, blinking slow.
He spat out the ginger hairs that were in his mouth, and pulled the remaining strands from his tongue.
The whispers from the dream still echoed in the back of his skull.
The dream was vivid.
Not terrifying, at least not in the usual sense, but as if it had been constructed for him rather than conjured by his own restless mind. Every detail was clearer than usual.
With his memory, Magnus remembered many of his dreams as they were, but none ever felt like reality.
"I am someone's salvation, and they are my consequence?"
Before he could talk to Lazlo about the implications of murdering his owner, his phone vibrated violently against the nightstand.
SkillSphere: Challenge Complete! Set a new one!
Magnus groaned, rubbed his eyes, and rolled over.
He blinked at the notification.
"...I got B-Rank? No way!"
Still foggy with sleep, he shuffled toward the bathroom like a reanimated corpse. The scales blinked to life beneath him and synced with the mirror.
The glyphs that lit up were sharper today. Cleaner. Brighter.
Probably because Magnus cleaned his glasses before sleeping.
Possibly also because he just had a near-death experience.
Then he saw the text:
~~~
SSS-Rank Cult Management.
A-Rank Gamer.
E-Rank Weight Lifter.
~~~
"…Huh?"
Magnus squinted. Stepped off. Stepped on again. Rubbed his eyes. No change.
He blinked once.
Twice.
A third time, just to be petty.
SSS-Rank.
Not S. Not SS. Not some made-up joke.
SSS.
He didn't even care that he skipped B-Rank and went straight to an A-Rank Gamer.
He sprinted to the bed. Lazlo stirred from the thundering footsteps. Magnus snatched up his phone and opened his SkillSphere profile in record time.
~~~
@MagnusBarlowe.06
Title:
Reputation Points: 10,109
Current Set Challenge: (empty)
Top Skill Category: Recreation
Skill Growth (Last 30 Days): +9174.31%
~~~
"Ten thousand points…?"
He had 109 yesterday. He hadn't shared anything. Nobody had watched him play the game.
'How could this-'
He scrolled to the skills section.
There it was.
In a new Hidden/Restricted category. It existed.
SSS-Rank Cult Management.
A glowing, locked icon pulsed next to it. No description. No tooltip. Nothing but a void-black label under its name that read:
"Classification: Restricted. Data unavailable."
'Unavailable data? But all of the skills have descriptions and explanations. Even things like dogwalking and hairstyling...'
Magnus quickly moved through his other skill sections. His new skill wasn't publicly visible, but he noticed something else.
His old "Manager" skill had vanished completely. It hadn't evolved. It had been devoured.
His Rank F "Leadership" skill was also nowhere to be found.
"What am I even supposed to do with that? Has someone hacked my SkillSense?!"
Magnus tossed the phone beside him and fell backward onto the bed with a soft whump, arms spread like a man crucified by confusion.
Lazlo, who had slept through Magnus's burst of movement upon waking up, his cursing and stumbling, and his hurried movements through the apartment, stared at him with tired judgment. Just one slow blink, then a look as if to say: You gonna make it up to me?
"…Yeah. Yeah, okay," Magnus murmured.
He reached out and scratched Lazlo behind the ears. The cat immediately curled back up, satisfied.
Magnus, however, stared up at the ceiling.
Wide awake.
There was something growing in his chest.
A mixture of fear, pride, and the feeling of potential.
And for the first time in years, he was terrified.
He checked his account once more.
~~~
Current Challenges:
Recruit First Member.
Choose Doctrine.
Enhance Physical Appearance.
~~~
"So... It expects me to start a cult? No. I'm not getting involved in all that demon and god worship and everything that comes with it. Not happening."
The challenges weren't selected by Magnus manually. They were set automatically. That wasn't normal.
He needed answers as to whether he was hacked or not.
Magnus moved to his desk, hunched over his keyboard like a gremlin of modern anxiety, the soft glow of his monitor lighting the shadows under his eyes. Lazlo had already retreated to his bed again, tired of the drama.
Magnus scrolled. Clicked. Refreshed. Rechecked his profile. Still there.
SSS-Rank Cult Management.
Still locked. Still impossible. Still real.
He tried to search it in the SkillSphere interface. The result?
No matches found. Did you mean "S-Rank Manager"?
"No, you algorithmic gaslighting machine," he muttered.
SkillSphere's help section was a bureaucratic nightmare of auto-generated FAQs and smug chatbot loops. If he wanted real answers, he'd have to go where the desperate and deranged dwelled:
The Forums.
He logged into his alt. Something that was considered unethical, as you needed to pay someone to forge skills and other data for it to work.
Luckily, it was just a nameless burner profile he sourced from a friend and used to lurk and occasionally reply to conspiracy threads or post sarcastic takes on tier lists. Still illegal, just a little less so.
'Oh, the tier lists. Placing a social hierarchy on the types of skills people have like it's their right to do so... It's sickening.'
He hovered for a moment over the "General Discussion" tab before finally typing:
-> Thread Title: Skill Rank Glitch?
-> Post: Has anyone ever seen anything above S-Rank in a skill? I woke up today and had something marked "SSS-Rank." No info attached. It replaced one of my older skills. I didn't post a challenge, didn't get filmed, and SkillSphere's pretending it doesn't exist.
-> This is not a joke. Has this happened to anyone else?
He hit "Post" and refreshed.
For a short time, there were no responses, but that soon changed.