The rain wouldn't stop.
It pattered against the glass walls of the penthouse like a countdown. The soft flicker of city lights couldn't pierce the fog rolling through Neo Angeles' skyline. From up here—floor 119 of the Apex Tech Tower—everything looked distant, like it wasn't real.
Just like him.
Ethan Ryker sat motionless in a sleek leather chair, drenched in blue holographic light. He hadn't moved in for over an hour. Not when the bank feeds are updated. Not when the alerts chimed. Not even when the seventh legal document pinged on the corner of the screen, informing him that his esports team—GrimVault—was officially bankrupt.
Everything he built. Gone. In forty-eight hours.
The laughter was what haunted him most. Not the betrayal—he had expected that eventually. But the way they smiled while doing it. His team. His "brothers." The people who cheered when he won tournaments, who used to sleep on his couch, who cried when they won their first league trophy. Those same people livestreamed his public disgrace for 2.8 million viewers. Sold their souls for viewership bonuses.
And now?
They sold his soul, too.
"Ethan Ryker is no longer fit to lead GrimVault."He diverted team funds to offshore accounts."We had to report him to sponsors and terminate his contracts."He's… not mentally well."
All lies. Perfectly timed. Carefully orchestrated. And with his legal team bought out and his AI assistants hacked, Ethan was silenced in real-time.
No defense. No rebuttal. Only one headline, echoing louder than all the others:
"The Grim King Falls."
Ethan looked down at his hands. Callused from training. Scarred from an old street fight no one remembered. Twitch reflexes dulled from stress and sleepless nights. His heart felt like ash.
Then came the message.
[Your ApexNet security override has been revoked.][Eviction Protocol 2B has been initiated.][This suite will be reclaimed in 120 minutes.]
They didn't even give him the courtesy of a full day.
He chuckled bitterly, leaned forward, and shut off every screen. Silence. No AI voices. No echoes. Just rain and the low hum of the city outside his thousand-dollar view.
He stood up, went to the kitchen, and poured a glass of water—no food left. Even the groceries had been auto-cancelled.
He stared at the water. Cold. Clear. Untouched.
He raised it to his lips—
—and then stopped.
The reflection in the glass didn't look like him. Too pale. Too empty. Like someone wearing his skin. And in that second… he realized something.
He was already dead.
The body was waiting for the soul to catch up.
Ethan turned and walked back into the room. The crown jewel of modern gaming stood at the edge of the apartment, mounted on a throne-like platform: the NeuroDive Mark V. It was a full-body immersion capsule, last-generation military-grade.
He stared at it for a long time. Then, slowly, he pulled open the lid.
It hissed like a coffin.
The last thing he remembered was the cold of the gel pads. The hum of the neural stabilizers. And then… silence.
When he opened his eyes again, it wasn't to the smooth interior of his pod or the dull burn of shutdown errors.
It was too warm.
The sting of sweat in his eyes. The sound of birds. The light of dawn bleeding through cheap blinds.
He blinked.
Pain surged through his skull like a blade. He gasped and rolled onto his side, off a thin mattress, straight onto the hard floor.
Hardwood.
Dirty.
A shitty one-room apartment with posters of Mythos Online plastered to the wall and a cracked holo-mirror near the door.
"No…" His voice cracked. He scrambled toward the mirror. "No. No no no—"
The reflection was young.
His face was in his early twenties. No scars. No bags under his eyes. No stubble.
The bruises from last night's drunken collapse? Gone.
He stumbled to his knees and started laughing—a raw, manic sound.
This was the apartment he lived in five years ago, before the sponsors, before the money, before the betrayal.
This was the day before the world changed.
Ethan didn't sleep.
He sat with his back against the wall, memories flooding in like a hurricane. Patches. Raid schedules. Streamer scandals. Skill exploits. Item bugs. Dungeon blueprints. Names. Faces. Passwords.
It all came back.
But what hit hardest was this: He was weak then. Smart, but soft. Fast, but undisciplined. He thought being a god in the game would protect him in life.
Now he knew better.
If he wanted to survive this time, he wouldn't just master Mythos Online. He'd master himself.
The next day, while everyone else lined up to buy last-minute gear for launch, Ethan went somewhere different.
A gym. Underground. Cash-only.
He walked in wearing an old hoodie and was greeted by the sharp stench of sweat, metal, and aggression.
A man with a shaved head and fists like bricks approached. "You lost?"
"No." Ethan looked him dead in the eye. "I need to fight."
"You don't look like you can last one round."
"Then let me prove it."
The man studied him.
Then nodded. "Wrap up. You bleed, you clean it."
Ethan smirked. "I plan to make someone else bleed."
The first hit knocked the wind out of him.
The second cracked his lip.
The third sent him to the floor.
He didn't care.
He got up.
Again.
And again.
Until his vision blurred, his ribs screamed, and the crowd stopped laughing.
Something in him had shifted. He wasn't here to win. He was here to become.
By the end of that session, he had two bruised knuckles, a black eye, and a name echoing in the gym:
"Ghost Kid."
That night, he returned home.
He sat in front of the cracked old rig he used to stream from.
And smiled.
Tomorrow, Mythos Online launches.
And this time?
He wouldn't be entering the world like Ethan Ryker, the king everyone remembered.
He'd be logging in as a ghost.
A shadow with no name.
But soon?
The world would remember him again.