Volume 1: Earth Arc
Chapter 1: Fifteen and the Red Screen
The three-by-three-meter room felt like a concrete oven.
There was no ventilation.
A rusted fan in the corner did nothing but churn the stifling air, cycling the sour stench of dried sweat, rotting instant noodles, and stale dust.
In the suffocating darkness, the only source of light was the harsh, blue glare of a 24-inch monitor, carving sharp, jagged shadows across a young man’s face.
Shu.
Twenty-two years old.
Heavy, bruised-looking bags hung beneath his eyes, starkly contrasting the dense web of burst capillaries turning his sclera a sickly red.
Click.
Click.
Click-click-click-click.
The mechanical switches of his mouse snapped like a frantic metronome.
His right hand gripped the plastic shell so tightly his knuckles shone bone-white beneath his pale skin, while his left fingers danced across the keyboard in erratic, desperate bursts.
It was 3:47 AM.
On his monitor, a fictional war was reaching its bloody climax.
His team’s Nexus was clinging to a mere third of its health.
“Step up…
just step up a little bit, you useless tank,” Shu hissed through gritted teeth.
His breaths were shallow and rapid, tearing through his dry throat.
This was his fifteenth match of the night.
The previous fourteen had all ended in a blinding red screen spelling DEFEAT.
Fourteen times his Ranked points had been butchered, dragging him down from the division he had spent months clawing his way into with blood and sweat.
On the screen, the marksman champion he controlled was threading a needle.
Shu was calculating everything.
Auto-attack ranges, enemy ability cooldowns, the blind angles in the fog of war.
His brain was firing on all cylinders, pumping venomous adrenaline through his veins that left his fingertips ice-cold.
Flash!
An enemy burst through the jungle wall without warning.
A colossal, purple monstrosity from the Void—Cho’Gath.
Shu’s reflexes flared.
His left index finger slammed down on the ‘F’ key in a fraction of a millisecond, commanding his champion to Blink away to safety.
But in that exact microsecond, his monitor stuttered.
A catastrophic frame drop—half a second of frozen pixels caused by his overheating, dying processor.
Half a second.
In the real world, it was the time it took to blink.
In League of Legends, it was the absolute threshold between life and death.
By the time the frame rate unspooled, Shu’s champion was already launched into the air, impaled by the monster’s earthen spikes.
Before the character model could even hit the ground, the purple leviathan’s jaws unhinged, swallowing Shu’s marksman whole with a sickening, visceral crunch.
The screen washed out into a dull, lifeless gray.
Dead.
Five seconds later, his team’s Nexus shattered into a thousand glowing shards.
The in-game camera panned away, and massive, glowing red letters tore across the center of his monitor.
DEFEAT.
A suffocating silence crashed down on the room.
The only sound left was the agonizing whine of his PC’s cooling fans begging for mercy.
Shu did not blink.
He stared at the crimson letters.
The red light reflected in his deadened pupils.
The fifteenth defeat.
Something fundamental snapped inside his chest.
This was no longer just frustration over a video game.
That red screen felt like a physical manifestation of his entire miserable existence mocking him.
He had failed his university classes, he had been fired from his degrading part-time job just a week ago, and now, the one single sanctuary where he felt he had any semblance of control—this digital battleground—was rejecting him outright.
A white-hot heat bloomed in the pit of his stomach, slithering up his esophagus, before detonating in the center of his skull.
“FUCK!”
Crack!
His left hand slammed down on the mechanical keyboard with the full weight of his upper body.
Hard plastic keycaps exploded outward like shrapnel.
A few ricocheted off his cheek, but Shu didn’t register the sting.
His vision tunneled.
Every ounce of his rationality was incinerated by blinding, feral rage.
He shot up to his feet, kicking his chair backward so violently it slammed against the dilapidated wardrobe.
His chest heaved.
“Trash game!
Trash matchmaking!
Trash life!”
His right hand seized the fractured keyboard and hammered it into the edge of the desk.
Smash!
Smash!
Smash!
The thick braided USB cable tore free, and the jagged green circuit board snapped, slicing a deep gash straight across his palm.
Fresh blood welled up instantly, but the adrenaline had completely muted his pain receptors.
He stared back at the monitor.
The word DEFEAT was still there.
Red.
Mocking.
Unforgiving.
With a guttural snarl that sounded more animal than human, Shu pulled his right arm back, balled his bleeding hand into a tight fist, and drove it dead center into the LCD panel.
CRASH!
It wasn’t a clean, cinematic punch.
The thick glass panel splintered inward, forming a dense spiderweb of cracks.
But the sheer momentum of Shu’s rage carried his fist straight through the liquid crystal layer, tearing into the hard internal components behind the screen.
Riiiip.
Thick, jagged shards of broken glass flayed the back of his hand as his fist plunged deeper.
Skin peeled back, exposing the yellow adipose tissue beneath, scraping violently against his metacarpal bones.
“ARGH!” Shu roared.
The pain finally registered in his brain—a blinding, searing agony that made his vision swim.
He instinctively tried to yank his arm back, but the violent jerk of his muscles was sloppy.
As he pulled back, his wrist snagged brutally on the jagged steel frame inside the monitor housing.
Worse, behind the shattered panel, the monitor’s faulty internal power supply had been laid completely bare.
Shu’s sweat-drenched hand, now slick with his own arterial blood, brushed directly against an exposed copper capacitor.
In that fraction of a second, time stopped.
BZZZTT!
A ruthless surge of 220-volt, high-amperage electricity arched directly into the fluids of his open wound, seeking a violent shortcut to the earth through his body.
Shu’s entire frame locked up with terrifying rigidity.
It wasn’t just stiffness; it was a catastrophic full-body spasm where every single muscle fiber contracted simultaneously at maximum capacity.
He couldn’t pull his hand out.
The electrical current hijacked his nervous system, forcing the flexor muscles in his fingers to clamp down on the lethal circuitry in a death grip.
His bloodshot eyes bulged from their sockets.
His jaw unhinged to scream, but his lungs were paralyzed.
His diaphragm had seized entirely, locking his chest in a rigid vice that refused to let air in or out.
He could hear the sickening sizzle of his own flesh cooking.
The sharp, metallic tang of ozone from the electrical short mixed with the repulsive stench of burning hair and roasting fat.
Deep within his chest, the natural rhythm of his heart was obliterated.
Ventricular fibrillation.
His heart stopped pumping blood, instead reduced to a useless, chaotic quivering mass of muscle as the external current shredded his biological electricity.
The pain was beyond the threshold of human comprehension.
It felt as though every vein in his arm had been injected with molten lead, while thousands of white-hot needles were driven directly into his brain stem.
In the first two seconds, his vision blew out into a blinding, agonizing white.At four seconds, profound dizziness flooded his skull as the oxygen supply to his brain was absolutely severed.At six seconds, the delicate capillaries in his eyes burst, flooding his vision with dark, murky crimson.
The exact same red as his defeat screen.
His knees buckled.
Gravity finally became stronger than the electrical grip.
As his dead weight fell backward, his arm was violently torn from the monitor.
A massive chunk of flesh was ripped from his wrist, left sizzling on the smoking steel frame.
Shu hit the wooden floor with a heavy, lifeless thud.
His body convulsed twice against the cold floorboards.
His vision rapidly decayed, collapsing inward into a microscopic tunnel.
The very last thing he registered was a profound, creeping numbness that swallowed him from his toes up to his throat.
The desperate whining of his PC fans faded away, replaced by an absolute, crushing silence.
No more pain.
No more rage.
Just a bottomless, infinite dark.
…And then, the sickening sensation of falling.