Overworld
He switched on the game, ready to savor a rare day off.
The choice had been made long ago, so the game was already decided.
Overworld.
A title that had recently taken the world by storm, praised for its staggering quality.
The difficulty was brutal, yet people swore it was insanely fun.
All because of its absurd freedom. Word was you could even craft your own skills from scratch.
The moment the game launched, an unfamiliar interface filled the screen.
The logo drifted lazily, pulsing with bright light.
Behind it sat a man perched on the edge of a towering skyscraper rooftop.
Beyond him stretched a city ablaze with neon signs.
A colossal metropolis that had rocketed past modern civilization thanks to the explosive fusion of science and magic.
This was the central stage of Overworld.
The game revolved around racing through a vast city split into fifty-seven districts, completing quests along the way.
Districts numbered one through fifty-seven—the lower the number, the greater the importance.
In other words, Districts 1 through 5 formed the city's secretive core, while the 50s were little more than half-forgotten slums.
Put simply, it was cyberpunk with a heavy dose of magic.
Right… time to begin.
He clicked the play button, and a character customization window greeted him.
It had to start with a woman. Anything else was unacceptable.
What was the point of staring at a handsome man? None.
Absolutely none.
Playing as a good-looking guy wouldn't make him any better-looking in real life.
So it had to be a woman.
Four hours of meticulous customization followed—every trick learned from countless other games deployed with surgical precision.
At last, the result satisfied him.
He scrolled slowly, admiring his masterpiece.
A beauty with narrow, slit-like eyes stared back.
The narrowed eyes were purely his taste.
Nothing beat the sheer impact of a character opening eyes that had been closed.
Snow-white hair threaded with hints of blue. Lithe, lively muscles. He lingered on the faint scars tracing her body.
Then his gaze locked onto one specific spot.
"Hmm… battery size…"
The default was AAA. The eternal question: enlarge it or leave it alone?
Faced with a decision more important than the game itself, he agonized.
This was the legendary debate—big breasts or flat chest—right at the starting line.
He disliked anything too small. But nothing excessively large either.
The bigger the chest, the bigger the hitbox. Efficiency mattered.
Still… too small feels wrong.
After a moment's hesitation, he increased the size. Each unit jump made the proportions swell dramatically.
He fiddled for several minutes before stopping at a size that had clearly moved past "battery" territory.
Hmm… should I push it further?
He spun the model. The character rotated a full 360 degrees.
Hair whipped outward, and the chest bounced with lively momentum.
It was massive. Large enough to get wedged in a narrow alleyway.
Scratching his head, he dialed it back just a touch.
When he moved to the next screen, a female character with a generously proportioned chest stood waiting, expression blank.
Here he could assign base stats and potential.
This was where playstyle and character concept truly took shape.
Characters broadly split into two paths: physical powerhouses or magic users.
Dig deeper and you found Purists, psychics, or mana specialists.
Since he had decided on a mage from the start, the choice was simple.
Distributable stat points: 100.
He could add or subtract from the defaults to raise or lower them.
Pouring points into magic-appropriate categories would boost the relevant abilities.
Because this was a first playthrough, he chose a clean, straightforward approach.
He poured everything into magic-related stats. The result was a perfectly average, balanced mage build.
That would be more than enough to enjoy the game.
His eyes drifted to the trait window beside the stat screen.
Traits let you grant innate constitutions, talents, or special abilities.
Adjust them right and you could lean hard into any concept you wanted.
He scrolled past hundreds: Purist, Heavenly Martial Body, True Blood, and more.
He reread the strategy guide he had bookmarked earlier and added several traits that would smooth out gameplay.
Magic Aptitude, Keen Intuition, Calculation Engine.
He was about to finish when one more trait caught his eye.
A red trait—different from the cool blue ones he had been browsing.
These granted extra stats at the cost of negative effects on the character.
As he had told himself before, this was supposed to be a clean first playthrough.
Balance was the goal. He had no reason to touch such a risky system.
But… it does look kind of fun.
The cursor hovered over the red trait.
Battle Maniac
You are a madman obsessed with combat. Battle is your lover. Battle is sex. Oh, sex.
—Upon entering combat, the character becomes uncontrollable. Base stats increase.
—"Instinct" rises continuously with each activation.
—+12 distributable stat points.
It looked helpful at first glance, yet the reality was the opposite.
This was clearly a Briar situation.
And the instinct increase… that's the one that triggers sudden behavior.
Overworld had unique random events called sudden impulses.
While interacting with an NPC, the character might suddenly go off-script.
For example, casually greeting a friend NPC only for the character to blurt out questions about their parents' health.
Favorability would plummet, of course.
The same could happen with dialogue choices—usually in disastrous ways.
The instinct stat raised the odds of those outbursts.
So relationships get wrecked as a baseline, and in the worst cases you can end up with a prison ending. What a stupid mechanic.
For a first playthrough with zero experience, this was a choice to avoid at all costs.
Yet for some inexplicable reason, it felt irresistibly attractive.
Without hesitation, he selected the Battle Maniac trait.
It looks fun, so why not? If I get tired of it I can always quit. No reason to hold back.
Since he had already stepped onto this path, he decided to sprint to the extreme.
He added every red trait whose name appealed to him on sight.
Slaughter Maniac, Adrenaline, Lump of Desire, Attention Seeker, Extreme Rationality.
All but one were red.
The additional distributable points from these traits totaled fifty-eight.
He dumped every last point into magic stats.
Most of his numbers now sat only one or two short of the level cap.
Still feels lacking. I want everything maxed.
After some thought among the red traits, he added Miser.
Now every magic-related stat sat at absolute maximum.
The personality side was riddled with flaws, but in terms of magic she had become an absolute monster.
Her talent alone would not only surpass ordinary mages—it would flatten them like a road roller.
The staggering numbers made his whole body shiver with excitement.
He finished setting only the absolutely necessary values to their peaks and completed character creation.
Just as he moved to close the window, an error popup appeared on his computer.
"Wait, what's this?"
Was the program bugging out?
As he cautiously tried to dismiss the window, the error box twisted into bizarre symbols and spat out a sentence.
The monitor began to glow.
It flickered wildly, as though about to explode, yet the message itself refused to fade.
If anything, the light seemed to emphasize it even more.
In this unprecedented, grotesque situation, his face hardened.
"……!"
He lunged for the power button on the computer tower.
The chair beneath him suddenly gave way.
Living shadows poured down the walls, staining the white wallpaper pitch black.
Meaning itself bled out of the space. The flowing darkness swallowed the entire world, turning everything black.
All that remained in the room was the monitor and him, collapsed on the floor.
A warped, unnatural sound came from the monitor as its text changed again.
Instinct took over.
Not reason—this came from a deeper, primal place.
His unconscious had already finished its calculations. He moved in a panic.
"Fuck…!"
The man shot to his feet and grabbed the mouse.
His body was shaking uncontrollably. Cold sweat poured down like he was standing under a shower.
He closed the error window that kept vomiting strange messages. It reopened instantly.
No matter how many times he killed it, the window returned. He flung it aside.
Behind it waited the character creation screen.
The error had appeared before the game could fully launch.
He clicked. The interface still responded.
Hands trembling, he tried to strip away the negative traits and replace them with beneficial ones.
More error windows appeared.
Not one window—countless error boxes flooded the screen, overlapping until nothing else was visible.
The instant the windows spilled beyond the monitor's edges, the screen detonated.
The explosion hurled him backward. As he sprawled on the floor, one final message burned into his vision.
Your karma.
Your sins.
Your soul.
All shall be inherited and continued in another world.
Flames erupted from the shattered monitor and swallowed him whole.