Hayden’s eyes snapped open.
The first thing that hit him was the smell.
It wasn’t just the sharp tang of burnt gunpowder; it was the suffocating, cloying stench of rotting mud, ruptured bowels, and copper.
He gasped, his lungs burning as he inhaled the freezing, damp morning air.
His vision swam, slowly resolving into the grim reality of a reinforced trench.
The walls were lined with weeping, mud-slicked wooden planks.
All around him, soldiers in filthy, mud-caked blue uniforms crouched in the muck, their faces pale and drawn.
They gripped long Lebel M1886 rifles, their knuckles white.
“Thought the last barrage finally scrambled your wits, kid!” a heavily bearded soldier barked, punching Hayden hard in the shoulder.
“Get up!
They’re coming back!” The sharp pain anchored him.
Hayden looked down at his hands.
They were calloused, ingrained with dirt, and trembling slightly.
He was occupying a digital avatar, thrust into a completely different era, but the sensory feedback was flawlessly, terrifyingly real.
Fragmented context flooded his mind, provided by the System.
1918.
The Western Front.
Côte 378 Trench Line.
“Sturmtruppen!
They’re through the wire!” a lookout screamed from the parapet, his voice cracking with raw panic.
The trench erupted.
Hayden instinctively grabbed the Lebel rifle leaning against the mud wall.
The freezing wood and heavy steel sent a jarring chill up his arms.
Through the thinning gray fog, he saw them.
They weren’t just soldiers; they were the elite German Stormtroopers.
Clad in heavy steel helmets and the terrifying, insectoid visages of gas masks, they surged through the mist.
They carried sharpened trench spades and the deadly, short-barreled MP18 submachine guns.
This wasn’t a standard infantry assault; it was a systematic, close-quarters slaughter.
Just the sight of them, moving with ruthless, pragmatic aggression, sent a spike of primal terror through Hayden’s chest.
His civilian mind reeled at the sheer scale of the industrialized death surrounding him.
“Fix bayonets!
Hold the line!” roared Pierre, his squad leader, a man whose eyes were sunken deep into a face caked in grime and dried blood.
Hayden mentally opened his spatial inventory and cursed.
His modern weapons were completely grayed out.
The Trial Instance strictly forbade his modern arsenal.
There was only one way to access his advanced gear: he had to meet the activation condition for his Overclock ability.
He forced his breathing to steady.
He pressed the heavy maple stock of the Lebel against his shoulder, resting his finger on the curved trigger.
Just survive, he told himself.
Just like the alleyway.
Just like the penthouse.
Turn it off.
Thirty meters away, a Stormtrooper vaulted over the sandbags, landing squarely in the trench.
He swung his sharpened entrenching tool, burying it viciously into a French soldier’s chest.
Blood sprayed across Hayden’s face, hot and metallic.
Hayden’s breath hitched.
His heartbeat hammered against his ribs like a trapped bird.
He activated his Auto-Aim.
Thankfully, his passive System abilities remained fully functional.
The invisible, digital crosshair in his vision snapped perfectly onto the commando’s steel helmet.
Boom!
The heavy 8mm Lebel round tore through the air.
It punched a fatal, cratered hole straight through the center of the Stormtrooper’s helmet.
The commando dropped instantly, dead before his knees hit the mud.
“Good shooting!” Pierre yelled over the deafening din of battle, firing his own rifle.
Hayden absorbed the bruising recoil, smoothly working the bolt-action.
The smoking brass casing ejected into the mud with a soft hiss.
He didn’t feel triumphant.
He just felt sick.
“Medic!
The right flank is gone!” frantic screams echoed down the line.
The German assault teams had broken the perimeter.
The rapid, relentless thump-thump-thump of the MP18 submachine guns mercilessly reaped the defending troops.
Pierre desperately dragged a wounded soldier backward, his own right sleeve soaked in dark blood.
“Fall back to the secondary line!” Pierre roared, but his orders were swallowed by the earth-shattering crash of an incoming mortar.
Hayden mechanically worked the bolt.
Fire.
Cycle.
Fire.
Cycle.
Every single bullet found its mark, guided by the System’s flawless targeting.
But there were simply too many of them.
The gray-clad figures swarmed the parapet, overwhelming the trench with sheer numbers.
Suddenly, a German soldier leaped out of the thick smoke, thrusting a bayonet directly at Hayden’s throat.
Time seemed to dilate.
Hayden could see the terrified, wide eyes of the young soldier behind his mask, and the dried blood caked onto the steel blade.
Panic flared.
Hayden twisted his body sharply, dodging the thrust by a fraction of an inch.
He swung his rifle like a club, smashing the heavy wooden buttstock directly into the German’s temple.
The sickening crunch of bone vibrated up Hayden’s arms.
The soldier collapsed.
“Look out!” Pierre screamed.
The warning came a fraction of a second too late.
Hayden snapped his head around.
A bundle of three wooden-handled grenades was tumbling through the air, landing right at his boots.
The world vanished in a blinding, sun-white flash.
A violent shockwave picked Hayden up and threw him backward.
He slammed brutally into the trench wall, a rain of dirt, shrapnel, and splintered wood burying him.
Through the agonizing, high-pitched ringing in his ears, Hayden realized Pierre was lying directly on top of him.
The squad leader had thrown himself over Hayden to absorb the blast.
Pierre’s back was a ruin of shredded fabric and weeping, shrapnel-torn flesh.
A dark pool of blood was rapidly expanding in the mud beneath them.
Hayden’s retinal display flashed red.
His health bar plummeted to a critical ten points.
If Pierre hadn’t shielded him, he would have failed the Instance instantly.
“No, no, hey—stay with me,” Hayden gasped, struggling to push the dead weight off him.
He pressed his trembling, mud-caked hands against Pierre’s massive wounds, desperately trying to stem the flow.
Pierre’s lips twitched.
He exhaled a bloody bubble, his eyes struggling to focus on Hayden’s face.
“Keep going,” Pierre wheezed, his voice a wet, rattling sound.
“You told me…
your girl was waiting for you in Paris.
Go home to her.” Hayden’s throat tightened.
It was a lie—a fabricated backstory implanted by the System for the avatar.
But Pierre had believed it.
He had died for a fiction.
The heavy, rhythmic thud of hobnailed combat boots echoed down the trench.
A new wave of Stormtroopers was advancing through the smoke, their bayonets fixed.
Hayden’s grief instantly crystallized into a cold, blinding fury.
His eyes darted to his retinal display.
The [Juggernaut] icon flared a brilliant, flashing red.
He had secured his five-kill streak.
He realized with sudden, grim clarity that the objective of this Trial Instance wasn’t to survive.
It was to hold the line.
The lead German officer stepped around the corner, raising a Luger pistol directly at Hayden’s forehead.
The officer’s eyes were cold, expecting an easy execution.
The exact microsecond the officer’s finger tightened on the trigger, the air around Hayden warped.
Heavy, overlapping plates of explosive-resistant Kevlar and ceramic materialized out of the digital void, locking together with a heavy, mechanical clack.
The massive Juggernaut helmet sealed over his head, the visor snapping down with a hiss of pressurized air.
The 9mm bullet struck the Juggernaut visor and deflected harmlessly into the mud with a pathetic ping.
The German officer’s triumphant expression shattered.
He froze, his brain entirely unable to process the sudden appearance of a two-ton, futuristic bomb-suit in the middle of a 1918 trench.
“Verdammte Scheiße…” the officer whispered, taking a terrified, stumbling step backward.
He raised his pistol again, his hands shaking violently.
Hayden didn’t say a word.
He slowly stood up, the sheer weight of the armor cracking the wooden trench floor beneath his boots.
In his heavy, armored gauntlets, a massive M60E4 light machine gun materialized.
He squeezed the trigger.
The M60 roared to life, spitting a three-foot tongue of blinding fire.
The confined space of the trench amplified the deafening roar into a physical force.
A relentless, supersonic storm of 7.62mm rounds shredded the trench line.
The Stormtroopers didn’t just die; they were unmade, their bodies torn apart by the overwhelming kinetic energy.
The surviving Germans tried to return fire, but their submachine gun bullets sparked and bounced uselessly off the Juggernaut’s heavy plating.
In exactly five seconds, the vanguard was reduced to a mist of blood and mangled corpses.
The remaining German forces broke.
They dropped their weapons and fled in absolute, pants-wetting terror.
Hayden marched forward, an unstoppable force of modern ballistics, the heavy machine gun roaring furiously from his hip.
Using his Outline ESP, he tracked every fleeing heat signature through the smoke, methodically cutting them down until the trench was dead silent, save for the crackle of burning timber.
“They…
they retreated?” a weak, breathless voice called out from the mud.
Hayden’s Juggernaut armor dissolved into digital ash, the heavy weight vanishing instantly.
He staggered, dropping to his knees beside Pierre.
The squad leader’s face was completely gray, his breathing shallow and ragged.
“Hold on, Pierre.
The medics are coming,” Hayden said, his voice cracking.
Pierre reached out a trembling, blood-slicked hand, gripping Hayden’s forearm weakly.
His eyes were wide, staring at the spot where the armor had just been.
“What…
what exactly are you?” Pierre whispered.
Hayden opened his mouth to speak, but no sound came out.
How could he explain?
Before he could answer, a blinding burst of white light enveloped his vision.
The mud, the blood, and Pierre’s dying face were violently sucked away into the void.
Hayden gasped, his eyes flying open.
He was back in the driver’s seat of his BMW.
The leather interior smelled of expensive conditioner and faint cordite.
He was completely drenched in cold sweat, his heart hammering against his ribs like a jackhammer.
His hands were shaking so violently he could barely grip the steering wheel.
The psychological whiplash was nauseating.
One second he was dying in the mud of 1918, the next he was in a climate-controlled car in 2026.
The System’s mechanical voice chimed softly in his mind, a stark contrast to the chaos he had just endured.
[Trial Instance 2] Completed.
Clearance Rank: SSS.
Rewarding Overclock Skill: [Trench Raider].Effect: Equips heavy assault armor and a specialized Trench Mace.
Grants total immunity to melee, ballistic, and explosive damage.
The Trench Mace possesses a passive Instant Kill effect on all targets, completely ignoring enemy armor.
Activation Requirement: 1 Kill.
Duration: 60 Seconds.
Duration extends by 60 seconds for every consecutive kill secured.
Hayden read the skill description, taking deep, shuddering breaths to calm his racing heart.
He immediately understood its tactical purpose.
It was a snowballing melee Overclock.
Once activated, he could charge directly into a massive crowd and slaughter them endlessly, as long as he kept securing kills to refresh the timer.
It was the perfect counter to heavily armored enemies that his shotgun fired too slowly to handle, or foes his M60 couldn’t pierce.
He looked at his hands.
The System wasn’t just giving him digital interfaces; it was physically rewriting his biology to handle these upgrades.
His muscle density, his reflexes, his pain tolerance—it was all evolving.
That’s why the Black Sovereign Syndicate wants my organs, he realized with a cold, sinking feeling.
I’m not just a guy with a cheat code.
My actual flesh and blood are becoming superhuman.
I’m a walking goldmine.
Hayden shook his head, clearing the dark thoughts.
He reached for the ignition.
But as he looked out the window, his blood ran cold.
Down the alleyway, the door to the little girl’s shack was hanging wide open, splintered off its hinges.
The interior was completely ransacked.
The crude bed was overturned, and the rusted stove was smashed.
Hayden kicked his car door open and sprinted over, his combat boots splashing through the muddy puddles.
“Hey!” he called out, his voice tight with panic.
The little girl was nowhere to be found.
He stepped into the shack.
The air was stale.
On the wooden floorboards, right where she used to sit, were several drops of fresh, wet blood.
They were still tacky to the touch.
Hayden’s eyes darted to the windowsill.
The crooked, hand-sewn teddy bear she had left behind swayed gently in the cold night wind.
The Syndicate hadn’t just come for him.
They had tied up their loose ends.
Hayden’s grip tightened on the doorframe, the wood splintering under his enhanced strength.
The hollow, exhausted feeling in his chest vanished, replaced by a dark, bottomless void of pure, unadulterated rage.
They had taken the one innocent thing he had tried to protect.
Now, he wasn’t just going to clear the bounty.
He was going to burn the Black Sovereign Syndicate to the ground.
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