Started with a 10,000x Multiplier in a Game World

Dante slept.

It was not the brief exhausted blackout he had experienced in his old Sector 4 apartment.

The high-end military-grade VR capsule in the corporate penthouse actively managed his REM cycles. It ensured deep and restorative rest.

But his mind wasn’t entirely at peace.

The neurological bleed-over from the Zenith Protocol was intensifying.

The sheer cosmic weight of his Level 61 avatar combined with the primordial data of [Voidsever] was actively pushing against the boundaries of his physical consciousness.

He didn’t dream of the Sky Demon Forest or the massive vaporized Dark Demon boss.

He dreamed the past.

The dream didn’t feel like a standard subconscious projection. It felt like a memory. But it wasn’t his memory.

Dante was standing in a massive sprawling digital courtyard.

The architecture wasn’t the heavy steampunk steel of Ironhold or the ruined bone of the Necropolis.

It was pristine glowing white marble adorned with towering statues of angels and high-tier clerics. The sky above was a bright flawless gold.

It was the headquarters of the Orthodox guilds. It was the massive unified alliance that had completely controlled the server during the First Cycle twenty-five years ago.

But the pristine courtyard was currently burning.

Massive craters scarred the white marble.

The statues of angels were shattered, and their glowing wings were broken.

The bodies of hundreds of top-tier Orthodox players littered the ground. Their avatars were completely frozen in the permanent gray state of True Death.

Dante wasn’t fighting. He was watching.

Standing in the center of the burning courtyard was a man.

He wore simple unadorned leather armor that looked completely out of place among the high-tier glowing loot of the defeated army.

The man held a long simple steel broadsword.

He was standing in the exact asymmetrical stance Dante used.

His lead foot was angled sharply inward. His back leg carried his weight, and the sword was held low and relaxed.

It was Kaelar. The Sword-Saint. The father of Dante.

Dante had never known his father.

The man had vanished when Dante was barely a toddler. He left nothing behind but a few scattered journals and the physical muscle memory he had drilled into Dante during his earliest years.

"Thanks for the stance, old man," Dante thought in the dream. "A college fund would have been nice too."

Kaelar wasn’t looking at the dead army. He was looking at the massive heavily fortified cathedral at the end of the courtyard.

"Let her go," the voice of Kaelar resounded across the burning plaza.

It wasn’t a roar. It was a terrifyingly calm demand.

On the balcony of the cathedral stood a group of five players. They wore the opulent heavily gilded robes of the Orthodox High Council.

They looked down at the lone Sword-Saint with a mixture of absolute fear and deep hatred.

"She broke the rules of the server, Kaelar!" the High Priest shouted down. His voice trembled violently.

"She shared the anomaly! She taught the evil cultivation methods to the unauthorized zones! The system demands a purge!"

Hanging from a glowing chain of pure light behind the High Priest was a woman.

She was heavily wounded. Her health bar completely bottomed out and hovered on the absolute edge of True Death.

It was the mother of Dante.

They were torturing her.

The Orthodox guilds were using her as bait. They held her avatar hostage to force the Sword-Saint into an unwinnable siege.

"The system does not demand anything," Kaelar said softly and gripped his steel broadsword. "You just want to keep your monopoly."

Kaelar didn’t activate a massive flashy Zenith-tier skill. He didn’t summon a hurricane or a reality-bending clone.

He just moved.

Dante watched his father blur.

It wasn’t a teleport. It was pure unadulterated speed driven by absolute fundamental mastery of the movement engine of the game.

Kaelar crossed the burning courtyard and scaled the sheer fifty-foot marble wall of the cathedral in a fraction of a second.

The five High Council members didn’t even have time to cast a defensive barrier.

Kaelar materialized on the balcony. He swung the simple steel broadsword.

It was a massacre.

The five top-tier players were heavily armored and fully buffed. They were instantly and flawlessly executed.

They shattered into blue pixels before they could even scream.

Kaelar shattered the glowing chain holding the mother of Dante. He caught her as she fell.

But the dream didn’t end with a rescue.

The sky above the burning courtyard violently shifted.

The flawless gold clouds parted to reveal a massive pulsating red eye that looked down upon the balcony.

It wasn’t a boss. It was the manifestation of the original administrative AI of the Zenith Protocol.

The system had detected the anomaly. It recognized that Kaelar was completely bypassing the rules of the server.

[System Directive: Anomaly Purge Initiated.]

A massive beam of absolute unmitigated red light shot down from the sky aimed directly for the balcony.

Kaelar looked up at the beam.

He didn’t try to run. He knew he couldn’t dodge an orbital system purge.

He looked down at his wife. He placed his hand gently against her chest.

Dante watched completely paralyzed as Kaelar voluntarily triggered a system command.

It wasn’t a combat skill. It was a hard-coded physical sacrifice.

[Entity ’Kaelar’ initiating life-force transfer.]

The avatar of Kaelar began to rapidly dissolve into brilliant blinding white light.

He wasn’t taking damage.

He was actively severing his own connection to the server. He was converting his entire digital mass and accumulated cosmic weight into a cloaking artifact.

The white light enveloped the mother of Dante and formed an impenetrable shield of pure data.

The red beam from the sky hit the balcony.

The entire cathedral was instantly and completely vaporized.

The blast radius covered the entire courtyard. It deleted the remaining Orthodox players and shattered the marble statues into digital dust.

When the red light faded, Kaelar was completely gone.

His mother was still standing there completely unharmed. She was completely hidden from the tracking parameters of the system by the sacrificial cloaking artifact.

The dream violently shifted. The burning courtyard vanished.

Dante was suddenly looking at a memory from his own teenage years.

He was standing in a small brightly lit cafe on Veridia.

The smell of cheap roasted coffee and synthetic pastries filled the air. Rain battered against the dirty windows.

Sitting across from him was Lillian.

His missing girlfriend.

She was holding a small jagged crystal pendant.

"I found this in the old belongings of your mother," Lillian was saying. Her voice was soft as she pressed the dull crystal into his hands. "It feels important, Dante. Like it is carrying a weight it should not."

Dante looked down at the [Tear of the Forgotten] in his hands in the dream.

The pieces clicked together with horrifying clarity.

The pendant wasn’t a random cosmetic item. It was the crystallized remnant of the sacrificial cloaking artifact of Kaelar.

His mother had smuggled it out of the First Cycle.

Lillian had found it, given it to him, and then vanished into Overture searching for answers about the system.

Dante violently gasped for air.

His eyes snapped open. He jolted upright and hit the heavy plexiglass lid of the VR capsule with his hands.

The pod hissed, depressurized, and the lid swung open.

Dante tumbled out of the capsule. His bare feet hit the cold floor of the corporate penthouse.

"Billionaire status, and I still wake up rolling on the linoleum," Dante groaned.

He was breathing heavily and covered in a thin layer of cold sweat.

The neon lights of Veridia flickered outside the floor-to-ceiling windows.

He staggered into the kitchen and splashed freezing water onto his face.

He leaned against the marble counter and stared at his dripping reflection in the window.

The dream wasn’t a random nightmare.

The neurological bleed-over from the Zenith Protocol had forced him to access the fragmented buried data stored inside the code of his own avatar.

"The First Cycle," Dante whispered to the empty penthouse.

It all made terrifying sense now.

The Zenith Protocol wasn’t a new game.

It wasn’t a recent technological marvel deployed by the Veridian corporations. It was a cyclical harvest.

The system had drafted humanity twenty-five years ago and forced the beta-testers to fight and die to feed the cosmic war.

His father had been a Champion of that cycle.

Kaelar had mastered the system. He fought the corrupt guilds that tried to monopolize the power.

He eventually sacrificed himself to hide his family from the purge of the administrative AI.

Lillian hadn’t just disappeared.

She didn’t run off and leave him without a word.

She had uncovered the truth about the legacy of his father. She entered the game early to secure the data before the Orthodox successors could wipe it.

The pendant had stayed dormant for years until the dagger of Silas triggered its defensive protocols. It expended its stored energy to save the life of Dante.

Dante gripped the edge of the marble counter so hard his knuckles turned white.

Silas wasn’t just a greedy guild master.

The board of directors backing Vanguard’s Legacy and the other massive corporate factions running the server were the successors to the Orthodox guilds.

They were trying to rebuild the exact same corrupt monopolistic empire that had tortured the mother of Dante and forced the death of his father.

The anger that had been simmering in the chest of Dante since Aethelgard didn’t boil over. It didn’t explode into a blind rage.

It instantly and violently solidified into absolute freezing cold fury.

He wasn’t just going to beat Vanguard’s Legacy. He wasn’t just going to humiliate Silas on the leaderboards or bankrupt his guild.

He was going to completely systematically dismantle every single piece of the empire of Silas.

He was going to strip him of his power, his real-world funding, and his in-game status.

He was going to make sure that the Orthodox agenda never took root in this cycle.

"I am going to take everything from you, Silas," Dante whispered to his reflection. "And then I am going to drop you in the mud."

He checked the time on his datapad.

His mandatory lockout was almost over. He had slept for several hours.

He didn’t bother eating a synthetic meal. He didn’t care about the physical fatigue.

The revelations from the dream fueled him with an intense razor-sharp focus.

He walked back into the bedroom and climbed into the VR capsule.

He pulled the heavy neural-link cables down and secured them to the ports on his neck.

"Initiate synchronization," Dante ordered.

The real world vanished and pulled him back into the brutal reality of Overture.

It was time to expand the arsenal.

He had a war to win. He needed a Vanguard that could actually withstand the coming cosmic purge.