The sound of his voice made the kneeling people stop chanting. They looked up at the sky. They looked at the giant screens on the buildings. The screens showed a live video of Everett. He was lying in the dirt. He looked pathetic. He looked weak. He looked completely defeated. "You are praying to the wrong thing," Everett’s voice boomed through the city. The people frowned. They were confused. "You think I am going to magically solve your problems," Everett coughed. Blood dripped from his chin. "You think I am a perfect, flawless savior. You think I am the Man in the Sky."Everett slowly turned his head. He looked directly into the camera drone hovering nearby. His green eyes were full of a fierce, desperate honesty. "I am not a god," Everett declared. The words hit the city like a physical shockwave. The people gasped. "I am a player," Everett said loudly. "I am just a human being. Look at me! I am lying in the dirt! I am missing my arm! I make terrible mistakes!"Everett forc

The giant monster stood in the middle of the ruined desert. It was no longer just an ugly beast made of stolen body parts. It was changing. It was mutating. The beautiful, glowing white spear that Everett had thrown was stuck deep in the monster’s chest. But the spear was not hurting the beast. The spear was feeding it. The False God grew taller. It grew to sixty feet. Then seventy feet. Its dark blue scales turned completely pitch black. The wooden tree-trunk arm caught on fire, burning with a sick, bright purple flame. The screaming faces carved into its stone head stretched and melted. Their eyes stopped glowing red. They began to flash with wild, angry, broken colors. Blue, green, yellow, and black. The air around the monster buzzed with a terrible sound. It did not sound like an animal roaring. It sounded like a broken radio. It sounded like screaming computer static. KZZZT. KZZZZZZT. Everett took a slow step backward. He breathed heavily. His green eyes were wide. He had f

"The monster is broken, but it still needs fuel to move!" Rae explained rapidly. "It is not pulling power from the System Core! It is pulling power from the desert!"Rae typed a command to highlight the energy lines on her map. "Look toward the horizon, Everett!" Rae directed him. "Look toward the army of Zealots!"Everett rolled onto his back. He looked past the giant, glitching legs of the False God. He looked out into the massive, gray-skinned army of half a million players.Far in the back of the army, he saw them.The Faith Amplifiers.There were dozens of giant, black iron spikes towering over the crowd. At the top of each spike, a stolen piece of a dead god’s core glowed with dark, angry red light. And at the bottom of each spike, chained to the metal, were the innocent, crying peasants.The machines were humming loudly. WUM-WUM-WUM.They were violently draining the terror from the peasants. They were twisting the belief of the crowd. They were pumping massive, thick, invisible

Everett stood a hundred feet away from the monster. He saw the players vanish. "Rae, what did it do to them?" Everett asked. His deep voice was tense. He gripped his empty hands into tight fists. He had no weapon. He had lost his sword. "It didn't do damage, Everett!" Rae cried, typing furiously on her keyboard. "It did not hit their health points! It is dealing True Damage! It is dealing Null Damage!""Explain it in plain English, Rae!" Silas yelled over the radio. Silas was standing on top of the heavy iron gates of Apex City, looking through his sniper scope. "The monster is a walking computer virus!" Rae shouted. "When it hits you, it doesn't break your body. It breaks your account! It damages your System interface! It attacks your login integrity! If that monster touches you, you don't just die. You are permanently, entirely deleted from the game's code! You will never have existed!"Everett felt a cold drop of sweat roll down his scarred face. Permanent death was scary. But

The red desert was incredibly hot. The wind blew hard, carrying sharp pieces of black ash and dry dirt. Everett ran. He ran completely alone. He left the tall, white marble walls of Apex City behind him. He left his friends. He left the safe zone. He ran straight toward an army of half a million angry, brainwashed monsters. The Zealot army was a sea of gray skin and black armor. They stood packed tightly together. They were watching the giant False God attack the city gates. They were cheering loudly. They were so focused on the destruction that they did not look backward. They did not see the single man running toward their flank. Everett stayed low to the ground. He slid into a dry, empty riverbed. The deep ditch hid him from the army's view. He moved quickly and quietly through the dirt. His breathing was heavy. In. Out. In. Out. His chest burned with terrible pain. His broken ribs shifted with every step. As he got closer to the enemy army, a terrifying thing happened. The w