NPC for Hire-[Gamelit|Simulation|Multi-genre]

Fen weaved through the thinning crowd toward the spaceport, frustration bubbling back up as he spotted the trio from earlier still dragging their feet at the rear. Their movements were lazy—casual, even—and the gleam in their eyes told him everything. Still recording. Still treating this like content. Like survival was just another event to farm reactions.

Their hands were empty, of course. In the SynthNet, recording your POV was as easy as blinking.

"Still at it," Fen muttered, watching them trail behind with casual steps and clueless smirks. "Hope the system doesn't hand out karma for stupidity."

He didn't know what was coming—but whatever it was, it wasn't a joke. And he was getting real tired of these button-mashers acting like it was.

He fought the urge to go back and bark at them again—but there wasn't time. If the rift hadn't convinced them yet, nothing he said would. One way or another, they'd learn.

As he reached the spaceport, the sheer scale of the organized chaos came as a strange relief. Seraph had worked fast. She moved through the crowd like a blade, sharp and steady, guiding players toward their ships with clear, efficient commands. The first vessels were already lifting off, landing gears folding with a hiss, the deep hum of ion drives cutting clean through the noise.

Fen paused, letting his eyes scan the landing pads—and despite everything, a flicker of amusement pulled at the edge of his mouth.

He didn't spend much time down here. His old routines kept him closer to the training grounds, far from the departure zones. But now, taking it all in, he was struck by just how much personality players crammed into their ships.

Some were elegant—sleek and mirrored, like luxury yachts plucked straight from a dream. Others looked like industrial scrap-heaps, slapped together with mismatched panels and more rust than hull.

And then there were the tributes.

A freighter that looked suspiciously like a YT-1300 sat off to the left—an antique by anyone's standards, but its silhouette had somehow survived centuries of remakes, mods, and nostalgic reuploads. Every line of its hull whispered of an era long past. Auri would've caught the reference instantly—and scolded him for not.

Nearby, a knockoff Serenity-class ship stood proudly beneath chipped orange trim, another relic from the age of space-western mythos. And parked dead center, someone had taken a sleek Silver Wings of Morning clone and absolutely defiled it with neon-green flame decals. It looked like a crime of shaders in the highest order.

Seraph cut between it all, anchoring the chaos with her presence. Her voice carried above the noise, calm but commanding. One hand rested on her blaster, ready. Fen felt steadier just watching her work.

Then his gaze drifted back to the sky.

The rift pulsed, slow and steady, its edges creeping wider like it was tasting the air. No sound. No movement. Just a growing pressure, subtle but wrong.

"This isn't over, not by a breeze or stormwind," he muttered, picking up speed as he cut through the crowd.

He reached the sector pads and shouted above the noise. "Alright, folks! Listen to the lady with the gun and board your ships. Let's go, move it! Just a reality-consuming rift full of horrors, nothing major."

He gestured to the squat, rectangular ships behind him. "If you don't have your own ride, get on the sector transports. No shame in surviving the day."

The contrast was ridiculous. Where the player ships were flashy, sentimental, or bold, the sector transports were bland, low-poly bricks. They looked like a toddler's first Blender project—square and uninspired, but functional.

For a moment, everything seemed to be going smoothly. Nearly all the player ships had departed, and the last stragglers were boarding the transports. Another five minutes and they'd be in orbit.

Then Fen heard it.

"Whoa, dude, look! It's like, breaking apart!"

He spun, eyes locking onto the trio of fools still dragging their heels near the landing pad. The tall one—with the look of someone who'd be looting a gas station during a hurricane on the evening news—was grinning up at the sky.

"Oh man, this is awesome! We're gonna be famous! The AIs are trying to block my feed, but I got an old server off the grid. This is going live as soon as it's done uploading!" He jabbed a finger toward the sky. "You hear that, you old motherboard? Your oppression can't stop this!"

The rift wasn't just expanding. It was fracturing—splintering into jagged shards that spun outward in chaotic arcs. At first, Fen thought they were just debris, torn pieces of sky free-falling toward the ground.

But then the pieces moved.

They spread wings—vast and unnatural, all nightmare black and needle-sharp edges. The things weren't falling. They were gliding. Steering. Hunting. Each silhouette twisted in the air like a bird of prey, limbs bent at impossible angles, tracking the spaceport with single-minded intent.

The short player was already backing up, panic cutting through the bravado. "No, guys. Seriously. We need to go." He glanced between his friends, voice rising. "Guys, come on. Oh frag this. James, give me the keys to your ship, dude. You can stay if you want, but I'm out of here. I'll come pick you up when you respawn."

The third player snapped out of his trance, frantically patting down James's jacket. "James, I swear—give me the sparking keys!"

"Fine, fine. You guys go," James muttered, still transfixed by the rift. "You know how many drinks people back home are gonna buy me after they see this?"

He handed over the keys without looking, gaze locked on the horrors growing larger with every second.

Fen closed the distance, maybe fifty feet from where they'd paused near the outer edge of the launch pad. He'd only peeled away for a minute to help load another group. Long enough for them to fall behind. Long enough for this.

The air shimmered with static, like the sound of a corrupted broadcast trying to claw its way into words. His heart pounded.

"No time to argue," Fen said flatly, stepping in front of James. "Run. Now. Get to your ship."

James didn't budge. Fen's eyes narrowed.

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"Last chance, script junkie. You really want to risk a broken respawn cycle? This sector's crashing. You're softcore—blue-eyed. If the server goes before you log out, there's no reboot. No reroll. You fry."

James's smirk twitched. He hesitated. Then he shrugged, still watching the sky like it was a movie made for him. "Yeah, but no one's been neurolocked in what, a hundred cycles? It's a bug, not a death sentence. I'll be fine. This footage? Worth it. I'll be a legend. Now leave me alone, subroutine."

He waved Fen off like he was a pop-up ad.

Fen clenched his jaw. A lost cause.

It wasn't that he didn't care—he did. But there were dozens still waiting, still listening. He couldn't waste time arguing with one idiot while the sky cracked open.

So he turned toward the loading zone, still close—maybe fifty feet. He hadn't gotten far. But every step back felt heavier now, like gravity itself was getting stronger.

Behind him, the sky howled. Distorted static chased him—a crackling hum, almost words, like a broken transmission warped past meaning.

"Seraph," he barked into the comm, barely keeping the desperation out of his voice. "Get Carmen set for takeoff. We don't have much time."

"The last of the players are aboard the egress ships—except for that one straggler," Seraph commed back. "They're already lifting off. I just sent the startup signal to the Carmen and I'm heading there now. Where the hell are you?"

"I'm on my way." His boots hammered the concrete as the landing zone came into view. His personal ship, The Carmen Aeternum, stood there, engines pulsing with restrained power as the start-up sequence ran, bathed in a wash of landing lights that cast sharp shadows across the pad. He could almost feel the heat from her thrusters.

"You'd better be," Seraph snapped. "These things are closing in fast, and we're about to lose our window."

He didn't answer. Just ran.

A scream tore through the air behind him—metallic, warped, like something trying to imitate life through a broken speaker. His stomach dropped. He already knew what it was.

But he looked anyway.

Fifty feet back, just beyond the loading zone, the idiot from before—James—still stood there. Not running. Not moving. Just... filming. Still wearing that same smug, glassy-eyed expression.

For a heartbeat, James's form shimmered. Then the shimmer broke—replaced by jagged tendrils of darkness that tore into him from above. Black limbs like wire and smoke punched through his chest, pulled him upward, then down, then apart. No blood. Just flickering fragments of code, shredded and scattered like ash on the wind.

Fen stumbled to a stop. The creatures, at least a dozen of them, didn't slow. They rebounded, sleek and vicious, their attention snapping to the egress vessels lifting off in the near distance. Writhing horrors peeled through the sky toward the departing ships like taloned missiles.

Talons that found metal.

The screech of impact rang out as one of the escape ships took a glancing blow. A plume of white-hot vapor erupted from a damaged engine, sending the craft listing midair.

Fen froze. "No," he breathed. "Not again. Not like this."

It was happening all over again.

First Auri—ripped away without warning, erased by the very system she'd once defied. Now this player. The anomaly wasn't just a disaster. It was a pattern—and that pattern was accelerating, closing in on the innocent people he was supposed to protect.

His pulse roared in his ears. The ground blurred. Light stuttered. For a second, the world felt… wrong. Like his eyes were processing two realities at once.

And he could feel it. Not just the glitch—but her absence. No voice in his ear. No backup. Auri was gone.

He clenched his fists.

The blur sharpened. The air warped.

And the SynthNet peeled back like skin from bone.

Not just visually, but viscerally. The rupture behind reality pulsed through him, pressure bleeding in from something vast. Not one mind, but many. The AIs' logic, their will was raw, conflicted, and afraid. It pressed in from every side. This wasn't code anymore. It was intent.

They weren't losing control.

They were trying to bury something.

The swarm, the rift, the horrors pouring out—this wasn't chaos. It was a cover-up. And that fear—the controller AIs' fear—was leaking into the system like rot through old wiring. Fen felt it pulsing through the glitch, warping the air.

He stared into the rift. Not just expanding. Not random.

It was annihilation.

And somehow, that fear, the very thing the Synth had tried to smother,was giving him power.

He could feel it now: the pressure behind everything. Ancient. Thinking. Fractured. The controller AIs weren't unified. One side wanted erasure. The other wanted deniability. Neither cared who burned.

And the evac order? It hadn't been mercy. It was a stall. A way to round up every player while the system deliberated their fate. Let them go quietly… or delete them all at once.

This world had become evidence.

And in the middle of their silent war, this planet—his people—were being ground to digital ash.

But now Fen understood. If the ships lifted off, if the players escaped, the balance might shift. The faction that wanted to contain the damage, to spin the narrative, would have leverage.

He didn't have to win.

He just had to force their hand.

He had to get those ships out.

The world Auri died protecting was being erased. Pixel by pixel. Line by line. The anomalies were weapons intentionally sent to wipe the slate clean before anyone could ask why it needed erasing.

The glitch hit him again. Not resonance. This wasn't harmony—it was dissonance. A fracture in the world's stability, sharp and unrelenting. Fen raised his hand, heart pounding, as threads of energy—like glowing nets of malice intent—shot from his fingers. They lashed outward, tethering to the creatures in the sky, catching their jagged forms as they hovered inches from the ship.

He closed his eyes and clenched his fist.

The air cracked. The anomalies shuddered—then buckled midair, their forms jerking like corrupted puppets. Twisted wings seized, limbs snapped at impossible angles, and the sky itself seemed to flinch. Some folded inward, collapsing into jagged spheres of code, black tendrils curling and sparking before dissolving. Others fractured entirely—flattened by unseen pressure, splintering into raw data before blinking out.

The sky began to clear—but not completely. Dozens of the creatures remained, their warped silhouettes hovering, no longer focused on the fleeing egress ships. Now their attention turned. Fen felt the shift like static across his skin—their hunger, their focus, narrowing on him.

He stood exposed, still a dozen meters from the Carmen Aeternum. But he didn't flinch. Didn't panic. He braced himself, expecting fear, but it didn't come. What rose instead was sharper—cleaner. Like a splinter finally worked loose.

He didn't need to flee. He needed to destroy.

They had come into his world, shaken it to its foundation, torn away the one thing that mattered—and then kept coming. They had given him the change he craved in the worst possible way. And now, he would make them pay.

He raised his hand again. The air warped. A hole tore open mid-sky, and the nearest cluster of nightmare harpies was sucked screaming into the void left behind—vanishing into the tear like smoke pulled through a crack.

As the world twisted around him, threads of code bending and rewriting in real time, Fen felt something else shift. A pressure beneath the surface—but not from the controller AIs.

It wasn't the fracture between those trying to erase and those trying to conceal that still pulsed at the edges of his awareness. But this signal wasn't part of that war. It didn't roar with command or pulse with threat. It was soft—subtle and fragile, out of place. Yet it felt familiar, like a memory tucked too deep to name. Not something he remembered, exactly—more like something he'd always carried without realizing it.

Fen hesitated, then reached.

He sifted through the static and distortion like someone scanning open water, searching for the faintest ripple in a storm-swept sea. Most signals slipped past—too jagged, too hollow, too empty to hold onto. None of them felt real. But this one did. It reacted to him. Tugged back. Dim, but steady. Not noise. Not code. It felt soft and familiar.

He followed it.

And then, through the fury and the noise, he heard it.

"Fen? ...Fen!"

Auri!

The sound of her voice broke through the haze like light through dark water. Just like that, the light of hope, flickering for so long, flared into a steady blaze within Fen.