Chris woke up to a world that somehow felt wrong.
The first thing he registered was the silence. It wasn't the peaceful, gentle quiet of an early morning; it was a dead, oppressive silence that felt thick and heavy in his ears. The usual, barely-noticed sounds of his existence was gone. There was no low, comforting hum from his computer's fans, a sound so constant he only ever noticed it when it was absent. There was no faint electrical buzz from the three monitors in their sleep state. There was no distant, cycling groan from the kitchen refrigerator. The silence was a presence, an intruder in the familiar landscape of his room.
The darkness was the next thing. It was absolute. His blackout curtains were effective, but they had never achieved this level of profound, ink-black void before. Usually, a dozen tiny LEDs would pierce the gloom: the pinprick of white light on his primary monitor, the pulsing orange standby light on his PC tower, the green glow of the power strip under his desk.
Now, there was nothing. Just a darkness so complete it felt like he had his eyes squeezed shut when they were wide open. Panic, cold and familiar, began to prickle at the edges of his consciousness. His hand, acting on pure, desperate instinct, shot out from under the covers, slapping around on the surface of his nightstand. His fingers brushed against a half-empty glass of water, a stray sock, and finally, the cool, smooth rectangle of his phone. He snatched it like a drowning man grabbing a life raft.
He pressed the side button. The screen flared to life, its weak glow a pathetic imitation of the LEDs he so desperately needed. The light illuminated his pale, worried face. And on the screen, he saw the three horsemen of his personal apocalypse.
In the top left corner: No Service.
In the top right corner: An empty, mocking triangle where the Wi-Fi signal strength should be.
And front and center, the time: 7:14 AM. The power had been out all night.
A wave of withdrawal, sharp and unpleasant, washed over him. It was a physical sensation, a crawling itch under his skin, a hollow feeling in the pit of his stomach. His entire social life, his entertainment, his sense of accomplishment and power—it all lived behind that missing Wi-Fi symbol. His mind flashed back to the night before. The desperate sprint through the Sunken Cathedral. The rushing figure of x_CyrisWarden_x, mere seconds from the Echoing Save Crystal. It was all gone.
The thought was so devastating he actually groaned aloud, the sound swallowed by the heavy silence of the room. The Flawless Scale. The Tome of the Sunken Arts. An hour of his life, an hour of focused, high-level effort, deleted from existence. It felt like a part of him had been amputated.
He threw back the covers and swung his legs out of bed. The floor was cold. He stood up, his body stiff, his mind a frantic swirl of loss and disconnection. He needed a signal. He needed a connection. He needed to know if the Vexlorn servers were still up, if by some miracle his character had been saved. He needed to check the forums, Discord, Reddit—the digital communities where he might find answers, or at least commiserate with others who had surely been wronged by this cruel act of nature.
He stumbled through the darkness of his room, his hands held out in front of him like a zombie. His shin connected sharply with the corner of his desk chair. He hissed in pain, hopping on one foot. He before navigating the rest of the way to his door.
He opened it to let in enough light to find and slip on his sneakers. He stepped out into the hallway. The gloom here was less absolute, broken by a pale, gray light filtering in from the living room window. And here, the silence was broken by new, alien sounds.
A soft, rhythmic hissing.
The scratching sound of a drawer being rummaged through.
He crept down the hall, his bare feet silent on the worn wooden floorboards. The scene in the kitchen was like something from a historical documentary about the pioneer days. His mother, Misty, was hunched over a small, green propane camping stove she'd set up on the granite countertop. A tiny blue flame hissed eagerly beneath a small metal percolator. The air smelled of propane and the faint, promising aroma of brewing coffee. She looked tired, her hair pulled back in a messy bun, but she moved with a practiced calm.
Across the room, his step-father, Pete, was on his knees, his head and shoulders stuck inside a deep drawer of the kitchen island—the junk drawer, a place of cosmic horror where batteries went to die and twist-ties wrapped around miscellaneous items like tentacles.
"Any luck?" Misty asked, her voice quiet.
"Found a pack of C-cells from 1998 and something that might be a D, but it's corroded," Pete's muffled voice replied from inside the drawer. "Pretty sure it's leaking." He backed out of the drawer, holding a small, battery-powered radio in one hand and a corroded-looking battery in the other. He tossed the battery into the sink with a clatter. "Nope."
Pete was a man built for this kind of crisis. He was practical, unflappable, his mind already working on solutions for keeping the freezer cold and finding a reliable source of news. He saw a power outage as a logistical challenge, an opportunity to use the emergency supplies and generator fuel he kept meticulously organized in the garage.
Chris saw it as the end of the world.
They didn't seem to notice him standing there, a ghost in his own home. Their conversation was muted, focused on the practicalities of a long-term outage. A world of batteries and propane and static-filled radios. Chris's only thought was of the severed fiber-optic umbilical cord that connected him to everything that mattered. He wasn't just offline. He was adrift.
The front door groaned in protest as Pete pushed it open. A wave of cool, clean air washed into the house, carrying with it the scent of a world scrubbed clean. It was a complex, layered smell of wet earth, of the sharp, electric tang of ozone left behind by the lightning, and the fresh, almost medicinal scent of snapped pine branches.
The three of them stood on the threshold for a moment, blinking in the unexpectedly bright morning light. The world felt unnaturally quiet. The constant, low-level hum of civilization—distant traffic from the main road, neighbors' air conditioning units, the electrical grid itself—was gone. The only sounds were the gentle dripping of water from the roof and the cheerful, almost mocking, chirping of birds who were clearly thrilled with the abundance of freshly unearthed worms.
"Well," Pete said, his voice a low rumble. He stepped outside onto the porch, his boots making a soft thud on the damp wood. Misty followed, pulling her thin cardigan tighter around her shoulders. Chris trailed behind them, feeling like a reluctant captive being led into an alien landscape.
The yard was a disaster zone.
A thick, sodden carpet of green leaves and small twigs covered every inch of the lawn, turning it from a familiar patch of grass into a messy, primordial soup. Larger branches, some as thick as Chris's leg, were scattered about like giant's pickup sticks. A bird's nest lay upside down on the welcome mat. Along the side of the house, a ten-foot section of gutter had been torn from the roof and now hung down like a broken arm, swaying gently in the breeze.
Misty let out a long, weary sigh. Her gaze was fixed on what used to be her flower beds. The vibrant reds and yellows of her petunias and marigolds were gone, smashed into the mud under a layer of leafy debris. A single, resilient sunflower stalk stood bent at a ninety-degree angle, its heavy head facing the ground in defeat.
"Oh, my poor flowers," she said softly. It was a lament for a small, personal loss, a pocket of beauty that had been casually erased by the storm.
Pete's eyes were elsewhere. He stood at the edge of the porch, hands on his hips, his gaze sweeping across the property like a surveyor. He followed the line of trees and bushes that separated their yard from the neighbor's, his brow furrowed in calculation. He noted the snapped limbs on the maple tree, the way the hedges were flattened in one section, the sheer volume of debris that extended fifty yards down the slight slope of their front lawn. He grunted, a sound of grim assessment. "Well, that's not getting cleaned up today."
The words, so practical and innocuous from Pete's mouth, landed on Chris like a judge's sentence. They were a confirmation of his deepest fears. This wasn't a temporary inconvenience. This wasn't a few hours of offline frustration. This was a long-term situation. "Not getting cleaned up today" meant hours of outdoor work. It meant his return to the digital world was not imminent.
A day. He might have to go a whole day. Maybe more.
The thought was a physical blow. A day without Vexlorn. A day without Discord chats. A day without mindlessly scrolling through forums and watching streams. No anime! What did a person even do? The prospect of the hours stretching out before him, vast and empty and silent, was a form of torture he could barely comprehend. This wasn't just an inconvenience; it was an existential crisis. Pete's words had just handed him a death sentence, confirming a prolonged and torturous offline existence.
"Let's check the back," Pete said, already moving off the porch and onto the soggy grass. "Want to see if the generator shed is still in one piece."
Misty nodded and followed him, picking her way carefully through the debris. Chris had no choice but to follow, his lower legs of his pajama pants already soaked through, his mind numb with a sense of impending doom. He felt like his own character in a game, stripped of all his gear and abilities, forced to wander a hostile, unfamiliar world.
They rounded the corner of the house, heading towards the backyard where the massive, ancient oak tree stood. Or, where it used to stand.
They all stopped dead in their tracks. Pete, who had been a step ahead, froze mid-stride. Misty, walking beside Chris, let out a sharp, audible gasp. Chris just stared, his brain struggling to process the impossible sight before him.
The oak was gone.
For two hundred years, it had been a permanent fixture of the landscape, a silent, towering giant that had watched generations of families live and grow on this patch of land. It had been there when the house was built. It had shaded picnics and held tire swings. It was as much a part of the property as the foundation of the house itself.
And now it lay on its side, a fallen giant.
The place where it had stood was now a scene of shocking violence. A colossal, gnarled root ball, taller than Pete and wider than a car, had been ripped from the earth. It stood vertically, a tangled, terrifying monument to the storm's fury, clumps of dark, wet soil and stones still clinging to its thick, severed roots. It looked like a giant, woody fist that had punched its way up from the underworld.
The tree's massive trunk, a cylinder of wood so thick Chris couldn't have wrapped his arms halfway around it, lay stretched across the entire length of the backyard. Its highest branches had crushed a long section of the wooden fence that separated their property from the woods behind it, the planks splintered into kindling.
Misty slowly raised a hand to her mouth, her eyes wide with a mixture of awe and sadness. "Oh, Pete," she whispered. "The oak tree."
Pete let out a long, low whistle. The sound was not one of sadness, but of pure, unadulterated shock at the scale of the problem. His practical mind was already churning, the gears grinding against the sheer magnitude of the task ahead. He was calculating the cost of a tree removal service, the hours of back-breaking labor with a chainsaw, the logistics of hauling away tons of dead wood. This wasn't a "not getting cleaned up today" problem. This was a "not getting cleaned up this season" problem.
Chris, however, felt a different kind of awe. The sheer power required to uproot something so immense was staggering. It was the kind of thing you saw in a video game cutscene, a demonstration of a boss monster's world-altering strength. But his gaze quickly moved past the fallen titan. His brain, trained to scan the environment for anomalies and objectives, didn't fixate on the tree itself, but on the consequence of its fall.
His eyes were drawn to the gaping wound the tree had left in the earth.
The crater was enormous, a deep, shadowy pit of dark, muddy soil and a tangled web of severed roots. It was a raw, open sore on the face of the yard. And in the center of the crater, half-buried in the mud, something lay coiled and exposed.
Something that didn't belong.
It was black, thick, and utterly out of place against the organic chaos of the upended earth. It was a line of perfect, unnatural geometry in a landscape of jagged, random destruction. While Misty mourned the past and Pete worried about the future, Chris felt a sudden, sharp jolt of present-tense curiosity.
He started walking toward it, his steps slow and deliberate at first, then faster.
"Chris, don't go scrambling in there," Pete's voice cut in, sharp with annoyance. "The whole edge could collapse. Just stay put."
But Chris barely heard him. The voice was just background noise. His attention was completely captivated by the object in the hole. He reached the lip of the crater and, ignoring his step-father's command, half-walked, half-slid down the slick, muddy embankment. The mud was cold and slimy, grabbing at his sneakers, but he didn't care. He landed with a soft squelch at the bottom of the pit.
The air down here was different. It was colder, shielded from the morning sun, and it smelled intensely of torn roots, damp soil, and something else... a faint, sterile, almost ozone-like scent that tickled his nose. He took a few steps closer, his heart beginning to beat a little faster with a feeling he hadn't experienced in a long time: genuine, unscripted discovery.
He knelt down beside the object, his pajama pants immediately soaking up the cold, muddy water. It was a cable. An armored cable, thicker than his bicep, its surface a seamless, matte-black material that seemed to drink the light. He reached out a hesitant hand and touched it.
The surface was strangely smooth and cool, with a texture that felt neither like metal nor plastic nor rubber. It was something else entirely. He ran his hand along its length. There were no markings. No embossed manufacturer's name, no stenciled serial numbers, no little yellow warning labels about high voltage. It was a perfect, featureless black tube.
One end of the cable snaked down and disappeared deep into the packed earth at the bottom of the crater. The other end, about ten feet away, terminated in what looked like a weatherproof junction box, roughly the size and shape of a shoebox.
The box was made of the same unmarked, matte-black material.
But the most interesting part was right in front of him. The massive root ball of the fallen oak had clearly snagged the cable on its way out of the ground, and the tension had snapped it in two.
Chris closely examined the break. And that's when he knew.
The cut was perfect.
It wasn't a tear. It wasn't a ragged, violent rip like you'd expect from a cable being sundered by a multi-ton tree. There were no frayed wires, no twisted copper strands, no bent and sheared metal conduit. The break was a perfectly clean, impossibly smooth cross-section, as if it had been sliced by an industrial laser. He could see layers within the cable, concentric rings of materials he didn't recognize, all cut with the same surgical precision.
A shadow fell over him. He looked up. Pete was standing at the edge of the crater, peering down with a frown, his hands on his hips.
"What is it?" Misty called from a safe distance.
"Some kind of old cable," Pete called back, his voice full of dismissive authority. He looked down at Chris. "Looks like old telephone trunk line," he declared, his tone that of a man who knows things about the world. "They buried them all over the place back in the day. Probably been dead for thirty years. Just leave it be."
But Chris knew Pete was wrong.
He had spent hundreds of hours building and upgrading his own computers. He knew what a severed cable looked like. He knew the satisfying mess of a clipped coaxial cable, the delicate, colorful spaghetti of a cut ethernet cord, the thick copper heart of a power line. This was none of those. This was strange. This was advanced.
This felt... important.
He looked from the impossibly clean cut to the dead junction box, then followed the line of the cable as it disappeared back into the earth, heading roughly in the direction of the main road. A theory, sudden and absolute, crystallized in his mind. A logic, a process of elimination that cut through all the boring, real-world explanations.
This wasn't a dead telephone line. This wasn't a forgotten piece of infrastructure.
This was in direct relation to his problem.
This cable, he decided with the unshakeable certainty of a man who has just found the key to the locked dungeon, was the reason his internet was out. And if it was the reason for the problem, it had to be the key to the solution. The world had presented him with a quest. Fix the cable. Get back online.
To Pete, it was a piece of debris. To Chris, it was the only thing in the world that mattered.