The ornate silver tray had been sitting untouched on the polished mahogany side table for exactly eleven minutes, and Karl had not spared it a single glance since its arrival.
He knew it was precisely eleven minutes because a small, glowing digital clock now sat anchored in the upper right corner of his vision.
It was part of a translucent display that only he could see, a phantom interface hovering over reality, and it had been ticking steadily upward ever since the household maid had knocked softly on the heavy wooden door, apologized profusely for waking him, set the steaming tray down, and quietly slipped out of the room without waiting for a reply.
His mother would have broken down and cried at the mere sight of that breakfast tray. It would not have been from sadness or grief.
It would have stemmed purely from the overwhelming fact that another human being had taken the time to cook a warm, extravagant meal and painstakingly carried it up a grand flight of stairs specifically for her son.
’Later,’ Karl thought. ’I will eat later when this is done.’
He pushed the thought of food away because, right at this moment, there were sixty small, brilliantly red points of light hanging suspended in the crisp morning air directly over his quilted blanket.
They pulsed with a rhythmic, almost impatient energy, and he knew they were waiting exclusively on his command.
He had not managed to sleep much at all during the night. Somewhere around one in the morning, long after the heavy door to Elsa’s bedroom had shut with a decisive click, and the television movie had finished talking endlessly to a completely empty living room downstairs, he had picked up the sleek visor, put the helmet back on his head, and queued for another match.
He had ground through nine grueling matches back to back, starting in the isolated custom sandbox to test his reflexes before throwing himself into the unforgiving public ladder.
He spent hours running through hero after hero, dominating the jungle, holding the mid lane, and even suffering through the awful gold lane that he had sworn off and had not touched in three long years.
He played relentlessly until his eyes burned with a dry, scratching ache.
He had forced himself through that exhaustion for one highly specific reason.
The enigmatic system running in his head registered everything it saw him accomplish. If it truly wanted him to form a second bond to increase his power, it would inevitably need a roster of viable options to choose from.
By the time he finally reached up and pulled the heavy helmet off his damp hair, the system had indeed found something suitable. The blue brackets flashed across his tired eyes.
[Hero registered: Raziel. Race: Angel.
Weaspn choice- Melee. Three-weapon cycle.]
[Blade one: reach. Blade two: burst. Blade three: restricted.]
He had chosen to bond the hero anyway.
The empty slot positioned just beneath Charlotte’s glowing name had filled instantly, and the dull greyed ring had flared into a brilliant gold. After that, the system had gone completely quiet for the remainder of the night.
...
Now it was late morning, sunlight was filtering through the thick curtains, and the sixty floating Hearts hovering above his bed were still entirely his to spend however he saw fit.
’I would like to pour all of this directly into Charlotte,’ Karl thought, projecting the decision outward.
[Confirm allocation?]
’Confirm.’
The sixty crimson points of light drifted forward in unison and sank seamlessly into the translucent system panel one after another.
[Bond interaction progress: 50 percent... 61 percent... 74 percent... 88 percent.]
[Bond interaction progress: 100 percent.]
[Synchronization complete.]
Karl sat very still, his breathing shallow as he waited for the inevitable reaction from the system.
[EXP threshold met.
New feature available: Personal Domain.]
[The Administrator may generate a private world and invite bonded heroes into it.]
[Initialize?]
’...Yes,’ Karl thought, bracing himself for whatever came next.
The familiar guest bedroom folded away in an instant. It did not fade out like a digital screen cutting to black, but rather peeled back like a heavy paper page being turned by the hand of somebody else.
Karl’s stomach abruptly dropped through the floor of a physical body that was suddenly no longer in the place where he had just left it.
He was sitting down.
That was the first concrete thing his senses could grasp in the disorientation.
He had been sitting before, resting on a soft mattress, and he was undeniably sitting now, but the shape and texture underneath his weight had changed entirely. When he tentatively put his hands out to steady himself, he found cold, unyielding stone arms that were wide and flat enough to rest an elbow on comfortably.
A throne. He was sitting on a massive, imposing throne.
The grand hall stretching out around it went up further than the ambient light even bothered to follow, fading into a cavernous, shadowy vault above.
The floor was made of pitch-black material, polished to such a blinding point that he could look down and see a perfect, second version of himself hanging upside down in the reflection.
That reflected version was wearing something Karl definitely did not own in the real world. It was a long, sweeping dark coat with a severe, high collar. .
’Okay,’ he thought, settling into the flat, detached calm expression, ’Okay. What is this place?’
[This is the World of the King.]
[Current infrastructure: One building.]
[Population: zero.]
’It is completely empty,’ he observed silently.
[Correct. The Administrator has not built anything yet.]
A sudden swirl of pale light gathered twenty paces out from the base of the throne. It hovered low to the polished floor, spinning rapidly, and then pulled itself upward into a distinct silhouette that he knew significantly better than his own handwriting.
Two short, lethal blades materialized first, one held pointing forward and the other gripped in a reversed stance.
Then came the slim, athletic frame, draped in a familiar, understated grey hood.
Charlotte immediately went down on one knee against the black floor before her physical projection had even finished fully forming in the air.
"Master," she said softly.
Karl’s hand tightened convulsively on the cold stone arm of the grand throne.
It was actually her voice.
It was low and exceptionally careful, carrying the very slight, hesitant roughness of something being used out loud for the very first time.
"You can talk," Karl said, his own voice sounding foreign as it echoed slightly in the vast, empty hall.
"I could always talk," she replied smoothly. Her hooded head stayed bowed respectfully toward the floor. "You simply could not hear me. There is a distinct difference between those two things, and I have had a very long time to sit in silence and think about it."
"Stand up," he commanded gently.
"I would rather not," she countered.
"I feel incredibly uncomfortable with you speaking to me when your head is lowered like that," Karl insisted.
She stood. She executed the movement slowly, mimicking the precise way people stand when they are merely being permitted to do so rather than acting on their own free will.
When she finally lifted her head, her bright, observant eyes moved quickly across his shadowy form, darted away to the walls, flicked back to his collar, and then darted away again, almost as if she was actively rationing how much she was allowed to look at him.
"I have never actually seen you," she said, her tone carrying a quiet intensity. "You have been resting inside my hands, moving within my legs, and watching from right behind my eyes for battles on end, and yet I have never once been able to turn around and look at you." Her jaw tightened and shifted visibly beneath the edge of her grey hood. "And it seems I still cannot. Your face is entirely dark."
"That is just this strange world doing that to my appearance, not a choice I made," Karl explained.
"I know," she replied. A long, weighted pause stretched between them in the cavernous hall. "It is still remarkably unfair."
Karl honestly did not know what to do with any of this unexpected emotional weight, so he fell back and did what he always did when cornered by a situation he did not understand. He chose to ask a direct question.
"What exactly are you, Charlotte?" he asked, studying her slim frame.
"I am yours, Master," she stated instantly, leaving absolutely no room for hesitation or thought in front of the declaration.
"Before you made the choice and selected me, I did not exist. There was simply a generic hero portrait resting on a digital panel, accompanied by a set of static combat numbers, and there was absolutely no one living inside it. Then you reached out, pressed your palm flat to the glass of the screen, and suddenly there was me."
Her gloved fingers curled slightly at her sides. "So, the answer is that I am yours. That is the entire, uncomplicated whole of it.
’That is not an answer i was hoping for, but I’d take it nonetheless,’ Karl thought, feeling a sudden chill.
"You keep insisting on calling me your master. And you called me a god, apparently, because the system made sure to relay that specific thought to me earlier," he pointed out.
"I call you those things because the title is completely accurate," Charlotte replied, her posture unyielding.
"It is not accurate at all," Karl argued.
"You took a digital thing that was entirely not alive, and you made it alive," Charlotte countered, tilting her hooded head to study him. "What else would you like me to call that process, exactly?"
He had absolutely nothing to say to that. He genuinely had no logical counter-argument to offer her.
"When you are not present here," she went on, her voice dropping to a much quieter, almost vulnerable volume,
"when I have no physical body to inhabit, the only thing I can do is hear you. Your passing thoughts arrive in the void, and I cannot answer them, nor can I see where they originate from. It is exactly like living trapped inside a single room with a thick, impenetrable wall running straight down the middle."
Something subtle shifted in her rigid posture, and for the very first time since she materialized, she looked a little less like a programmable servant and a bit more like a living person carefully choosing her own words.
"But when you finally take me into a match. When you are wearing me in the arena. Then I am no longer stuck on the other side of anything. I move precisely because you decide it is time to move. We share one body and one mind, perfectly synchronized. I would gladly choose to stay in that state permanently if the system allowed it."
Karl looked away from her intense gaze, sweeping his eyes across the vast, empty stone hall around them, and slowly felt the back of his neck go uncomfortably warm under the high, shadowy collar he was not actually wearing in the real world.
’Change the subject,’ he commanded himself. ’You don’t really do well with conversations.’
’Can you hear me?’ Karl called out to the void. ’What is the primary purpose of this place?’
[Purpose: expansion.]
[EXP may be invested into permanent structures. Structures generate weekly EXP passively. Structures that produce goods or services generate real-world currency proportional to revenue.]
A massive, shimmering wall of architectural options unfolded seamlessly down the sprawling length of the shadowy hall, illuminating the dark stone, and Karl immediately leaned forward on his throne to inspect the glowing text.
[Watchtower — 400 EXP.]
[Farmland, tier one — 1,200 EXP.]
[Forge — 3,500 EXP.]
[Settlement, tier one — 12,000 EXP.]
[City, tier one — 90,000 EXP.]
He stopped and read that final, staggering number twice just to be sure his eyes were not deceiving him.
’Ninety thousand,’ he thought, letting the impossible cost sink in.
[Correct.]
’And building a city actually generates money. Real, tangible money. Deposited directly into my actual bank account.’
[Correct. Output is proportional to what the city produces. An empty city produces nothing.]
Karl slowly sat back against the cold stone of the throne, reigning over a digital world with a total population of zero, and he began to do math in his head.
[Charlotte notes that her master looks different when he is actively planning.]
He blinked and glanced back up from the glowing menus. She was standing quietly, watching him with her gloved hands neatly folded in front of her. She was entirely patient, bearing the calm demeanor of a seasoned soldier waiting diligently on a critical tactical briefing.
"Charlotte," he began, his tone shifting into something more authoritative. "The upcoming tournament in two weeks. If I were to ask you to—"
Somewhere very far above the cavernous black hall, anchored securely in a mundane physical world filled with frayed carpets and a broken second dresser drawer, a metal door handle suddenly turned with a loud squeak.
Karl violently flinched.
"Master, wait—"
He slammed back into his physical body on a virtual stranger’s mattress with a heavy gasp. His chest heaved as his heart pounded against his ribs like a frantic war drum, and the neglected cup of cold tea sat totally undisturbed on the mahogany side table beside him.
The bedroom door slowly creaked open.
Elsa stood awkwardly in the doorframe.