The void didn’t fade into light so much as drop out from under him entirely.
Helios fell.
There was no ground beneath him for one long, stomach-lurching second, no void to orient himself against, just open air and a sky rushing past that hadn’t existed a heartbeat ago.
Wind tore at him from every direction at once, and somewhere in the chaos of it he registered, absurdly, that he couldn’t tell which way was down until the ground answered that question for him.
He didn’t even have time to shout before the ground arrived, and he hit it hard, face-first, the impact driving every ounce of breath out of his lungs at once.
He lay there for a moment, cheek pressed into grass that was real in a way no game had ever bothered to render grass before, cool and slightly damp and smelling faintly of woodsmoke from somewhere he couldn’t see.
[Welcome, Founder.]
[Server launch complete.]
“Fantastic,” he wheezed into the dirt.
“Wonderful landing. Ten out of ten.”
He pushed himself upright, spitting out a mouthful of grass, and only then took in the sky above him, streaked orange and violet in a way that felt less like a rendering choice and more like an actual time of day somewhere.
A breeze moved through the clearing, cool against skin that had never felt weather before.
More windows stacked up in front of him, fast and almost urgent compared to the slow, patient prompts of character creation.
[Applying Founder bonus: 5 Free Levels.]
[Domain experience redirection in effect: 62%.]
[Calculating final classification…]
Helios reached up instinctively to adjust the headset, some old muscle-memory habit of pushing hair out of his eyes, and his hand found nothing but his own actual hair.
No headset.
No strap.
No hard plastic edge where his temple should have felt one.
His stomach dropped.
He patted at his own head more urgently now, both hands, searching for a seam, a release catch, anything.
There was no headset here to take off, because as far as his own body could tell, there had never been one in the first place.
He pressed his palms flat against his temples anyway, half hoping stubbornness alone might locate something his fingers had missed the first three times.
“Okay,” he said out loud, voice tighter than he meant it to sound.
“Okay, that’s fine, that’s probably just how full immersion works, there’s probably a menu—”
[Menu access: unavailable outside designated interface windows.]
“There’s not a menu,” he said.
“Great. Cool. Totally normal.”
He tried, next, for his phone, patting down pockets that weren’t there on clothes he hadn’t designed to have any, before remembering with a fresh jolt that he didn’t have a phone here at all.
He tried instead to simply think at Darryn, the way he’d been messaging him all week through some interface layer he’d never questioned, the little chat window that had always just been there whenever he wanted it.
He pictured Darryn’s name specifically, the way he might have tapped a contact, and waited for something, anything, to respond to that.
Nothing answered.
[Communication features unavailable. Player has not yet unlocked in-world messaging systems.]
“Unlocked,” Helios repeated.
“You mean it’s not just off. You mean I don’t have it.”
The system didn’t answer that.
It never answered the questions that actually mattered.
He sat very still for a moment, in a clearing that smelled like woodsmoke and felt like grass and had, apparently, no way out of it that he could reach through a menu, a message, or his own two hands.
No support line.
No developers to email.
No way to even confirm whether Darryn had landed safely somewhere else, let alone tell him anything at all.
The absence of that small, constant certainty, that somewhere out there a friend was one message away, sat heavier in his chest than he expected it to.
“Okay,” he said again, quieter this time, mostly to convince himself.
[Classification complete.]
[Character: Helios]
[Level: 2]
[Rank: Normal Elf]
Two.
Not five.
Two.
He almost laughed, the sound coming out thin and a little unstable.
Of all the things to focus on right now, his own underwhelming level felt almost restful by comparison, a problem with actual numbers attached to it instead of a growing, formless dread about whether he could ever leave this clearing at all.
At least a number was something he understood how to fix.
[Would you like to view the current Founder standings?]
He hadn’t asked for that.
He said yes anyway, grateful for literally anything else to look at.
A leaderboard unfolded in front of him, visible, he suspected, to every one of the five thousand Founders at once, names scrolling past in descending order, levels attached, most of them clustered around five exactly.
A few names near the very top sat well above that, six, seven, even a scattered handful above ten, and Helios wondered, distantly, what choices those particular players had made to end up so far ahead this early.
His own name sat near the very bottom of the list, Level 2, with a small, unflattering gap between him and the next lowest entry.
Beneath the leaderboard, a single line of text sat by itself, unattributed, unexplained, timestamped to the exact second the servers had opened.
Not a system notice.
Not phrased like anything else POMAX had shown him so far, no brackets, no clinical detachment, just a short, almost conversational line sitting where a patch note or a welcome message should have been.
[Congrats founders. Wish you good luck and try not to die.]
Helios stared at it until the words stopped making sense as words at all, until “try not to die” had cycled through his head enough times that it started to feel less like a joke and more like the only honest thing anyone, or anything, had told him since he’d hit the ground.