They weren't the "Raven" team. They were silhouettes—glitchy, flickering models with no team colors. They didn't shoot. They just stood at the edge of his render distance, watching. Every time Elias looked away and back, they were ten virtual meters closer.

He hiked toward the center of the map, where a single, crashed helicopter lay smoldering. As he approached, the game’s logic began to fracture. The skybox didn't cycle from day to night; it simply bruised, turning a deep, unsettling violet. Then, the shadows moved.

The screen went black. His fans whirred to a deafening scream, and then—silence. When the monitor flickered back to life, the .rar file was gone. In its place was a single text document titled Eagle-1_Status.txt .

You shouldn't have unzipped the archive, Elias.

He tried to quit to the menu, but the Esc key did nothing. He checked his inventory. He had one weapon: a flare gun.

Elias looked at his hands. For a split second, they looked like low-poly, untextured blocks. Then, he blinked, and they were flesh again. Or so he hoped.