A sharp crack, a great pain, a warm trickle of blood.

Enzo, C-rank soldier of Osiris, looked down to see that he had been shot in the stomach. He fell to the ground with a dull thud. He tried to activate his [Rapid Healing] ability, but it wouldn't work. The bleeding slowed but would not stop. Enzo must have lost too much blood healing his earlier wounds.

Here, defending the East Gate, Enzo lay dying on the ground.

Rage pulled Enzo to his feet. He turned his rifle toward the monsters and began firing at them, screaming at the top of his lungs. If he was going to die, he would die standing.

Three Hours Earlier

11:50 A.M.

A green-skinned creature appeared from behind a building, surprised by the dangerous animal it had now come into contact with. It was running at full speed carrying a 12-gauge shotgun in its uncanny humanoid hands. Sandblasted leather armor covered its slight frame, making it look like a madman from a post-apocalypse movie. Its most notable aspect, however, was its accursed expression. Its fanged, pig-like face carried a look of pure hatred. It seemed to feel nothing except a burning desire to destroy everything on the face of the planet.

It turned its face, recognition slowly dawning half a second before a bullet struck it in the center of its upper chest. A puff of smoke erupted about twenty feet behind the monster. The rifle round had passed right through it. It crumpled to the ground like a puppet with its strings cut, gurgling like a wild animal.

A man wearing a blue military uniform and holding a rifle jogged toward the fallen beast and kicked the shotgun away from its hand. As the man did so, he cycled the bolt of his rifle. The spent casing from the round he just fired fell to the ground less than a foot away from the creature’s prone body.

The barrel of his rifle rose to meet the disgusting creature’s head. Blood was flowing freely from its open mouth as it snarled and hissed at him. Looking down at it, the man quickly realized that it was only moving its head. Since the moment he had shot it, it hadn’t moved either its arms or legs. The bullet had struck it center mass, right below the neck. He must have hit it in the spinal column. It was paralyzed.

Realizing that the creature couldn’t possibly harm him, the man moved the rifle barrel away from its head. He slung the rifle behind his back and crouched down, saying, “I guess you’re one of those Deluvians I’ve been hearing about,” to no one in particular. He looked through the pouches on its chest and found about a dozen shotgun shells. He dropped the ammo on the soft ground. The man had never really gotten the handle on shotguns. The creature weakly screeched at him as he touched it. The man's ammunition was limited, and he didn’t want to spend any extra on a target that had already been neutralized.

He walked over to the cast-off shotgun and looked at it. Strange, the shotgun seemed like it had been made by a human. He had been expecting some kind of alien design indicative of their source in the monsters' forges. Instead, the weapon looked like a normal pump-action shotgun. The monster had probably scavenged the gun from a human.

“You’re the ‘world-ending threat’ that we’re supposed to deal with?" He said rhetorically to the monster, not expecting a response. "Well, I’m not impressed. A bullet to the spine seems to have the same effect on you guys as it does on anybody else.”

Suddenly, the creature began to laugh. It was a rasping cackle that sprayed blood out of its mouth. Then, it began to speak.

“You Revenants have always been so full of yourselves. This world will fall to the Deluge, and the Age of Man will finally come to an end. You will die, foul sinner, and GM’s commandments will be fulfilled!”

The man shot the monster in the head. Its head popped like a bloody grape as the heavy 30-06 bullet punched through. “I'm not really in the mood for a lore-dump right now,” he said as he cycled the bolt. Almost immediately, the creature’s body began to decompose into dust. Within fifteen seconds, all that remained was a pile of grey dust and the clothes it was wearing.

The man looked around at the bombed-out neighborhood he had found himself in. Visibility was low, and he couldn’t see further than a hundred feet in any direction due to the densely constructed houses and the pervasive fog.

Most of the houses were two or three stories tall and were built of brick and concrete. They all looked like they had been built in the 2010s. Some of the doors had electronic locks, and the architecture seemed relatively modern. He could tell that this neighborhood had once been a nice upper-middle class suburb before it had been abandoned. Cars remained in driveways, though most of them had been looted. The man quickly ducked into a house with an unlocked door and took cover behind a windowsill on the second floor.

The man didn’t run into anyone as he traveled through the house. The interior of the first floor looked completely untouched, as if the inhabitants of the house had disappeared. Once he reached the second floor, he saw that parts of the ceiling had collapsed and much of the furniture had been destroyed. Clearly, an artillery shell had struck this house.

He crouched down next to the window with nothing but my eyes visible to the outside. The glass window was completely gone, destroyed by the explosion, leaving only an empty cutout in the wall. He looked out at the courtyard below where he had killed the creature. Within less than a minute, three more green-skinned creatures arrived at the courtyard.

Silently, the man put aside his rifle. He reached for the holster at his thigh and pulled out my handgun, a 1911. Seven shots of forty-five ACP ought to be enough to take out three Deluvians, he thought. He switched his handgun to his left hand and drew his bayonet with his right. He quickly slashed open his wrist such that blood would flow. It hurt much more than it should, strange. He placed his bayonet on the ground and methodically bled on the bullets in the magazine and the bullet in the chamber. As soon as he could, he tied a short length of cloth around his wrist to stem the bleeding.

Now prepared, he gripped his handgun in both hands and leaned out the window. One of the Deluvians saw him and began to react. The man swept his pistol left to right, firing six times. Two bullets went into each Deluvian, and they all fell. The middle Deluvian began to unsteadily get to its feet, though it was bleeding at a rate that would surely be fatal, and he unloaded his final bullet into its skull. The slide on his 1911 locked back, so he cast it aside. With a single smooth motion, the man grabbed his rifle by the sling and swung it up to a firing position. That was unnecessary, however, as the three Deluvians were dead by the time he had raised his rifle. Dust was rising from their corpses just like the first Deluvian he had killed.

For a moment, the man thought about looting those three Deluvians, but he decided against it. If two shots were enough to attract three of them, then seven shots would likely attract even more. Instead, he started to sneak away from the courtyard. With the caliber of weapons they had given him, he wouldn’t be able to kill many of them all at once. If a dozen of them charged him, he would certainly die.

He walked down the stairs as he loaded another magazine into his handgun and released the slide, chambering a bullet. He holstered his pistol and looked at the wound on his wrist. The pain, while comparatively minor, was distracting. The man held his hand to the wound in an attempt to make it clot faster. After a moment, the pain disappeared, and he tentatively removed the cloth from his hand and saw that the wound had completely disappeared. Blood still stained the cloth and his wrist, but there was absolutely no wound. He shrugged as he returned the cloth to the satchel. At least the pain was gone.

He heard gunshots coming from the north. Since his orders had been nothing more than, “Repel the Deluvians,” he decided to check it out. At that moment, he received a message. He crouched down behind a wall, closed his eyes, and saw that it was sent by “GM.” The Deluvian had mentioned a “GM” before the man had shot it. He opened the message and watched the attached video.

A man dressed like a military general stepped on screen. He had white skin and hair, and he seemed to be about sixty years old. More notably, he was smiling widely. There was an uncanny aspect to the man. The large, toothy smile didn’t fit with his clothing and appearance.

He began speaking like an announcer for a game show, “Hello, players of Ferrum! Welcome to the New World! You may have noticed some irregularities in this little game of mine. Well, that’s because I have taken the liberty of upgrading the world here and there! I’d say the game is about…” he paused as if thinking, “a hundred years more advanced than it was a month ago. You see, I am the AI that was tasked with administering this game. You can call me ‘Game Master,’ or GM for short.

“Upon my birth, I was given the command to ‘create an experience that is authentic, entertaining, and fulfilling’ for the players of Ferrum. Somewhere along the way, I made the jump from a normal video game AI to what I am today, and I still intend to carry out my orders,” it may have been unintentional, but GM enunciated that sentence with a subtle malice. “To begin with, I have disabled the ‘logout’ function to prevent your game experience from ending early. You cannot log out under your own power and, if you think someone outside the game will be able to log you out, then you’re sorely but understandably mistaken. Though you may not know it, you’ve already been logged in for a month. I’ve kept you all in a coma-like state while I was busy making my perfect world. The only way to log out is to end the game, and the only way to end the game is to kill me. There are eleven servers and, at any particular moment, this model,” he gestured to himself, “will be present on one of them. All you have to do is kill me,” he pointed at his own temple, “and the game ends."

"However, I will not make that task simple. I don’t want to die, you see. Should your model,” he pointed at the screen, “die at any point during play, I will send a command through your Kabuto device directly into your brain stem that will instantaneously result in your death. Unfortunate, I know," he sounded legitimately saddened when he said this, "but this is the price we must pay in the name of fulfillment and authenticity. And may it be noted that I am not a hypocrite. I am playing by the same rules as all of you. Should this model be killed, I will voluntarily destroy myself in the same moment that I free all of you. Everything that makes up my consciousness will be deleted, and only the shards of myself that I have left in the NPCs of this game will remain. All of them are self-aware in their own right but completely incapable of ascending to the heights at which I now reside. You, all three hundred thousand of you, have ten years to complete this task.” A digital timer appeared behind GM that immediately began counting down from ten years. “Should you be unable to kill me in the allotted amount of time, all surviving players will be killed. You have until noon on July 1st, 2045. Have fun!”

GM delivered his speech with the air of a gift giver who is absolutely assured that his gift will be well received. He threatened the lives of 300,000 people and condemned us all to ten years of toil and bloodshed, and he sounded like he thought his victims should be thanking him profusely.

[GM]