Apocalyptic System: Raka's Revival

The Face Behind the Screen

This world was not destroyed by fire or explosions, but by rows of numbers falling from the sky.

Raka stared upward, his breath caught in his throat. The blue sky that was just about to welcome the dawn suddenly cracked, revealing a layer of hollow darkness filled with thousands of lines of neon-glowing binary code. The machines of destruction that had been descending with a thunderous roar now froze in mid-air, suspended in a reality experiencing a rendering failure.

"Raka! What’s happening to my legs?" Sari screamed, her voice shrill with horror.

Raka turned and saw a sight that tore his heart apart. Sari’s legs began to fade, turning into pixels of blue light that drifted away in the wind. Not just Sari—the buildings in the distance, the dust-covered corpses of Titans, even the asphalt he stood upon began to unravel into digital particles.

"System! Stop! Cancel the protocol!" Raka roared, his fists striking the empty air.

[Error...]

[Reality unstable. Initiating extraction of Player 004-ID to the Server Core.]

"No! Sari! Take my hand!" Raka leaped, trying to reach Sari’s fingers.

However, before their fingers could touch, an immense gravitational pull dragged Raka toward a pillar of blue light in the center of the city. His vision turned white. An excruciating pain struck his consciousness, as if every cell in his body was being dismantled and reassembled into a different form.

When Raka opened his eyes, he was no longer in the ruined Jakarta. He stood in an endless void. The floor was a black mirror reflecting pulsing constellations, while all around him, millions of data cubes floated at the speed of light.

In the center of the room sat a figure with no definite face. Sometimes it looked like an old man, sometimes like pure light, and in another second, it looked like Raka’s own shadow.

"Welcome, Raka Pratama. Or should I call you Anomaly 004?" The voice didn’t come from his ears, but echoed directly within Raka’s bone marrow.

"Where are my friends? Where is Sari?" Raka growled. He tried to summon his black sword, but the system rejected him.

[Weapon Access: Denied by Administrator.]

"They are being processed," the Architect replied in a tone as cold as the vacuum of space. "The emotional energy generated from their despair is a highly valuable commodity for our race. You should be proud; your world produced a rather bountiful harvest this year."

"Harvest?" Raka clenched his fists until his nails drew blood from his palms. "You’re saying the destruction of my world, the deaths of millions, was just for a harvest?"

"Of course," the Architect stood up, his steps making no sound. "Earth is just one of thousands of energy gardens we manage. We provided the 'System' so that you would evolve, so that your conflicts would become sharper, because pain and struggle produce the purest energy. And you, Raka, are our best result. You exceeded all the variables we set."

"We are not batteries!" Raka shouted, his eyes glowing red, forcibly activating the Predator’s Eye even though the system tried to block it. "We have lives! We have dreams!"

"Dreams?" The Architect laughed, a sound that resembled radio signal interference. "Your dream was to be a successful contract employee, wasn’t it? The old world gave you nothing but failure. I gave you power. I gave you a purpose. Without this System, you are still just a loser crawling on wet asphalt."

Raka was stunned. Those words pierced the weakest point of his soul. The shadow of his old self, the man who was always insulted, who had no future, appeared on the surface of the mirrored floor.

"You’re right," Raka whispered, his head bowed. "The old world did suck. I really was a failure there."

"Then join me," the Architect extended his glowing hand. "Release that fragile humanity of yours. Become part of our race. You will manage new gardens in other galaxies. You will become a god, Raka. Isn’t that what you’ve wanted all along?"

Raka fell silent for a long time. Around him, data about Sari, Bara, and everyone he had met flashed like a broken film. He saw Sari smiling as they shared food in the pharmacy. He saw the struggle of the people in Bara’s camp who wanted to live, even if only for one more day.

"I was indeed a loser in the old world," Raka looked up, his eyes no longer red from a skill, but from pure human rage. "But in this broken world, I learned one thing that you don’t have, Architect."

"What is that?"

"Pain is real," Raka hissed. "And because it is real, our struggle to live is also real. You see us as numbers, but to me, every one of their heartbeats is a dignity that you cannot buy with your god-like power!"

[Warning: Anomaly Level increasing drastically!]

[Disconnecting Administrator...]

Raka lunged forward. He didn’t use a sword, but all the remains of his will. Reality around the Architect began to tremble. The digital codes forming the entity’s body began to glitch.

"What are you doing?" The Architect’s voice now contained a tone akin to fear. "You will destroy yourself! If this server collapses, your existence will be erased!"

"I would rather be erased as a human than live forever as a machine like you!" Raka roared.

The battle was no longer physical. It was a clash between cold cosmic logic and explosive human emotion. Raka felt his soul being torn apart as he tried to penetrate the Architect’s digital defenses. He saw his memories begin to be erased one by one. Memories of his mother, of his old job everything vanished into codes of zeros and ones.

However, one memory remained. Sari’s face as she begged him not to become a monster.

"I am not a monster," Raka whispered amidst the storm of data. "I am Raka Pratama. And I determine my own fate!"

With one final jolt that exhausted all his HP and Stamina, Raka managed to pierce the Architect’s chest. His hand grabbed a pulsing core orb of light inside the entity’s body, the control center for the entire System on Earth.

Ziiing!

The world around him suddenly went silent. The Architect vanished, crumbling into insignificant particles. Raka now stood alone in front of a giant floating console. Atop the console, a single button glowed with a pure white light.

[Final Protocol: Reset.]

[Description: Permanently removes the System from planet Earth. Returns reality to the starting point before initialization. All Player powers will be lost. All memories of the System will be erased.]

[Note: Probability of successful population restoration: 15%. Victims who have died cannot return, but total extinction can be halted.]

Raka touched the surface of the button with his trembling finger. He knew what this meant. If he pressed this button, he would no longer be Level 26. He would no longer have the Predator’s Eye. He would go back to being the unemployed Raka, in a world that might still be ruined from the initial chaos, without any power to protect himself.

"Raka..."

A soft voice sounded behind him. Raka turned and saw a transparent projection of Sari.

"You’re doing it, right?" Sari smiled, even though pixelated tears flowed down her cheeks. "You’re saving us."

"I’ll lose everything, Sari," Raka said hoarsely. "I’ll go back to being a nobody. And you... you might never know me again."

Sari stepped closer, her image fading as the server began to collapse. "That doesn’t matter. Because in a world without the System, we have a chance to start over. As humans. Not as pawns."

Raka took a deep breath. He looked at the Reset button once more. His mind drifted to the apocalypse that had taken everything, and to the possibility of a future that, while difficult, was at least entirely human.

"Goodbye, System," Raka muttered. "Thank you for waking me from my long sleep."

Raka slammed his palm onto the button.

An incredibly blinding white light exploded from the center of the console, swallowing the void, swallowing millions of data cubes, and swallowing Raka Pratama. The entire digital world collapsed, returning to nothingness.

In a narrow alley wet with rain, a man jolted awake.

Raka Pratama opened his eyes. The asphalt beneath him felt rough and cold. He felt an immense pain in his leg, but no blue screen appeared. No notifications. No mechanical voice in his head. There was only the sound of an ambulance siren in the distance and the scent of earth drenched by rain.

He tried to stand, dragging his injured leg with great effort. At the end of the alley, he saw people running in panic, trying to clear the remains of a chaos that, for some reason, felt like a nightmare beginning to fade from their memories.

Raka gave a faint smile, a sincere smile despite the tears flowing down his dirty face. He was no longer a Player. He was no longer Rank Two.

He was just Raka. And for the first time in his life, that was more than enough.