James had been holding a controller when the world decided to end.
The room was dim, lit only by the glow of his monitor. A familiar loading screen pulsed softly, accompanied by background music he had heard so many times it barely registered anymore. His fingers moved out of habit, muscle memory guiding them while his mind drifted elsewhere.
He was thinking about his life.
About how quiet it was.
James had no parents—hadn't since he was young enough that their faces had blurred into impressions rather than memories. No siblings. No friends who checked in. No one waiting for him on the other side of a screen. He worked online, took jobs that paid just enough, spoke to people through text boxes and emails that ended with polite punctuation.
Existence, reduced to routines.
He exhaled slowly, eyes fixed on the screen, wondering, not for the first time, if he had taken a wrong turn somewhere. Or if this was simply all there was meant to be.
Then something unfamiliar appeared.
A translucent window hovered in front of his vision, layered cleanly over the game screen.
James blinked.
The window didn't disappear.
It floated calmly, perfectly centered, unaffected by where he looked. The text was simple, stark, impossible.
SYSTEM NOTICE
'All humans transporting'
"…Huh?"
He leaned back in his chair, lifting one hand and waving it slowly through the air. The window remained. No flicker. No distortion. His monitor showed the game, unchanged. No pop-ups. No notifications.
"Did I forget to sleep again…?"
James stared at the words for several seconds, then shrugged lightly. Stress hallucination, maybe. Burnout. Too many late nights and too many stories about other worlds and systems and protagonists who mattered more than he did.
"Yeah. Right."
He ignored it.
The window faded quietly, like a thought losing relevance.
James looked back at the screen and pressed a button on his controller.
Click.
The room vanished.
There was no transition—no blur, no tunnel of light, no dramatic sensation. One moment, his chair supported his weight. The next, his bottom sank slightly into soft ground.
James stumbled forward, barely catching himself.
Grass brushed against his palms.
"…What?"
He stood up slowly.
The world around him was wide, painfully wide. A vast, flat expanse of green stretched endlessly in all directions, broken only by scattered clusters of people standing exactly like him: frozen, staring, trying to understand.
The sky was wrong.
Not threatening, just unfamiliar. Its color held depth that Earth's sky never had, layered with subtle hues that shifted the longer he looked. The air smelled clean, almost sharp.
James turned in a slow circle.
No buildings.
No roads.
No furniture.
No room.
He was no longer home.
For a few seconds, his mind refused to accept it.
Then someone screamed, searching for their children.
The sound cut through the open air like glass shattering.
Another voice followed. Then another.
People began to run, no direction, no goal. Parents shouted names. Children cried. A man fell to his knees, clawing at the grass as if searching for a seam in reality.
Panic erupted like fire in dry fields.
James felt it hit him too, his anxiety hard and sudden. His chest tightened. His breathing grew shallow. His hands shook as his eyes darted across the endless plain.
This isn't real.
This can't be real.
Ten seconds.
That was all the panic got.
James forced himself to inhale slowly, deeply, the way he'd learned to do during anxiety spirals in the past. He clenched his hands into fists and grounded himself in sensation, the feel of grass, the weight of his body, the sound of windless air.
Think.
He remembered the window.
The words.
All humans transporting.
His thoughts shifted—not to denial, but to recognition.
"…This is familiar," he muttered.
Mangas. Novels. Web fiction he'd read late into the night. Entire genres built on sudden displacement, on systems and other worlds and humanity thrown into chaos.
He didn't smile.
But something in him steadied.
"If that's true…" he whispered, eyes narrowing, "then this is just the beginning."
As if the world heard him—
The sky cracked.
It wasn't lightning. It wasn't sound. The fabric of space itself fractured, splitting open like glass under pressure. A jagged tear spread across the heavens, leaking darkness deeper than shadow.
The screaming stopped.
Everyone looked up.
From within the crack—something moved.
An outline emerged first—vast, indistinct, wrong. Its presence pressed down on the air, heavy and suffocating, as if reality itself recoiled from it. No clear face could be seen, yet every human felt its gaze.
James's breath caught.
This wasn't in the novels.
This wasn't the gentle start.
This was an omen.
The crack widened.
And the figure began to descend.