2026-07-06 15:10:42The snow in Munich tonight felt like icy needles piercing the skin. Saddam pulled the hood of his courier jacket lower. His breath billowed in white clouds in the bone-chilling air. He had just finished his last delivery in a narrow alley near the Frauenkirche Cathedral. The wages he received today weren't even enough to buy a bowl of hot stew or a glass of cheap beer to warm his shivering body.
"Damn it. My life is just one stroke of bad luck after another," Saddam muttered.
His voice was hoarse from exhaustion. He stared at the cracked screen of his phone, which showed a pitiful remaining balance.
Suddenly, the silence of the night was shattered by a sickening low-frequency hum. The air in front of Saddam began to vibrate violently. The space before him seemed to be torn open by an invisible knife, creating a purplish-black rift that spewed out a hot stench of metal and rot. A micro Rift had just opened right in front of him.
Saddam froze. His heart hammered so hard it felt like it was hitting his ribs. Two shadowy figures leaped out of the crack. They resembled wolves but were twice the size. Their bodies were made of condensed black smoke with fangs that glittered like sharp mana crystals. They were Shadow Wolves.
"Good God, what the hell is this!" Saddam screamed. He backed away in a panic until his back hit the cold brick wall.
One of the monsters let out a low growl. The sound was like metal scraping against stone. Without warning, the creature pounced at Saddam with unreasonable speed. Saddam's survival instincts, forged by the harshness of the streets, took over. He grabbed an old iron pipe lying in a pile of trash beside him and swung it with all his might at the monster's snout.
Crash!
The pipe hit the monster's head, but it only produced sparks and a dull thud. The monster only flinched slightly before lunging again with claws ready to rip Saddam's chest open. Saddam fell onto the wet asphalt. He could feel the deadly cold from the monster's fangs which were now right in front of his face. The foul stench of the creature's breath made him nauseous.
Suddenly, time around Saddam seemed to freeze. The sound of the wind, the snow, and the monster's growl went dead silent. A transparent blue holographic panel appeared right before his eyes with a sharp, cold font.
[SYSTEM WARNING: Death threat detected. User: Saddam. Survival Rate: 0 percent.]
"System? What the hell is this? Have I gone crazy from the cold?" Saddam shouted in his mind.
[The Romantic Synchronization System has been activated to ensure the User's survival. Activation requirement: Synchronize with the nearest target possessing the highest mana energy.]
"Romantic synchronization? Don't joke with me! I'm about to be eaten by a monster, and you're offering a date?" Saddam screamed in frustration.
[Target detected within a 50-meter radius: Captain Felisa von Schwarzwald. Current alignment level: 0 percent. To activate the Absolute Shield, the User must make physical contact that triggers an emotional response within 10 seconds.]
"I can't run away from here! This monster is already in front of me!" Saddam shouted while trying to ward off the sharp claws with his trembling arms.
[If failed within 10 seconds, death is certain. Time remaining: 9 seconds.]
"Crazy system! I don't even know who Felisa is!"
[Time remaining: 7 seconds.]
Saddam felt the monster's sharp claws begin to scratch his jacket. He could feel his skin starting to tear. A sharp pain stung his shoulder.
[Time remaining: 5 seconds.]
Saddam gathered his remaining strength. He had no other choice. He had to live. He twisted his body with all his might to the side, avoiding the monster's main lunge, and began to run staggeringly toward the end of the alley.
[Time remaining: 3 seconds.]
Saddam saw a blinding blue light streak down from the roof of the Frauenkirche Cathedral. It was a human figure moving like lightning.
[Time remaining: 1 second.]
Saddam ran toward that light, ignoring the monster chasing him from behind. He saw a woman in magnificent silver armor land gracefully right in front of him. Her silver hair glistened under the moonlight and snow. Her eyes were as sharp as deadly ice.
[Time remaining: 0 seconds.]
"Who are you!" the woman shouted in a cold, threatening tone. Her sword, made of pure ice, was already raised, ready to cut down anyone who approached.
Saddam had no time to explain. He knew if he didn't do something now, he would die. Desperate and using his last bit of strength, Saddam lunged forward, ignoring the safe distance, and grabbed the Captain's wrist, which felt as cold as snow, just as the shadow monster pounced right at their backs.
"I'm sorry, but I want to live!" Saddam screamed just as his hand touched the woman's skin.
An incredibly bright flash of golden light exploded from the point of their contact. A dome-shaped energy shield appeared automatically, slamming into both monsters until they were thrown far against the alley walls and shattered into mana dust. Saddam stumbled, but he still gripped the woman's wrist tightly out of fear of falling.
The silver-haired woman stared at her held hand with a look of utter disgust and fury. She looked down at Saddam, who was panting at her feet. The tip of her runic sword, glowing a cold blue, was now exactly an inch from Saddam's throat.
"You dare touch me, stranger?" the woman's voice trembled with rage, as cold as a blizzard on a mountain peak.
Saddam swallowed hard. His heart was racing, no longer out of fear of monsters, but because of the gaze of the woman in front of him who could freeze him in an instant.
[Synchronization Successful: 0.1 percent. Starting data processing.]
Saddam could only stare into those cold blue eyes, realizing that his quiet life as a package courier had just ended in the most terrifying and embarrassing way possible. Behind them, the sound of another dimensional crack began to grow louder, as if the entire city of Munich had just become a battle zone they couldn't escape. The woman growled softly, her sword pressing deeper into the skin of Saddam's neck until a drop of blood trickled down.
"Explain," the woman commanded in a deadly voice, "why are you still breathing after committing such a cursed act?"
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Chapter 50: The Rift Gate Reopens—The Trap is Set
The Spire was dying. It didn’t expire with a cinematic crash, but with the wet, structural groans of a carcass undergoing forced decompensation. Gravity in the Garrison fluctuated—a wave of 10G crushing the chrome tiles into ripples before snapping back into zero-point vertigo. Saddam clung to the edge of the lift-bay, his hands raw, the skin etched with violet radiation scars that refused to scab over.His vision pulsated. Every time he breathed, the air didn't taste of oxygen; it tasted of burnt copper and old dreams. He wasn't tracking mission logs, unit signatures, or combat timers anymore. He was just trying to remember what it felt like to be upright without the artificial aid of the System.“If you stay here, you’re just part of the internal structural support,” a voice rasped. It was a digital echo, brittle and fraying at the edges.Saddam whipped his head around, his pulse hammering. Felisa wasn’t standing there&mdash
Chapter 49: Sacrifice and Synchronicity
The platform plummeted through the shattered sky like a stone dropped down a well of liquid static. Around them, the Spire was no longer a monument of chrome; it was a screaming skeleton of steel, stripping itself of reality as it descended into the base of the simulation’s engine.Saddam hung onto the railing of the elevator platform, his fingers burning with a cold, necrotic violet fire that hadn't faded since he touched Kepler’s core. Every nerve ending in his body felt like it was being pruned with glass razors. Beside him, Felisa was struggling to maintain her cohesion, her arms constantly shifting, blurring into streams of soft-blue telemetry data that vanished before they could touch anything solid."Stabilize!" Saddam roared over the roar of collapsing dimensions. He lunged, slamming his palm into her chest, not to shove her, but to ground her. "Felisa, focus on the sync! Don't let yourself drift! We aren't falling out of the world—we're crash
Chapter 48: The Escalation: Unleashing the Dormant Core
The blast doors of the vault didn't just break; they vaporized into superheated dust.Stepping through the ruined aperture was Hanz Kepler, or at least, the nearest approximation he could project. His robes were gone, replaced by a jagged, skeletal exoskeleton woven directly into his flesh. His eyes weren't human—they were rotating apertures of high-resolution sensors, grinding against bone as they focused on Saddam and Felisa."You really thought exporting those records was the end?" Kepler’s voice rippled, a composite of a thousand trapped screams and his own dry, aristocratic sarcasm. "The memories were never the treasure. The 'Archive' was just a battery, a way to keep the sub-routine fed. By dumping them, you’ve forced the System into a forced-calibration mode. Do you have any idea what that looks like?"Saddam didn't answer with words. He dumped his entire reserve of kinetic energy into his pulse-emitter. The weapon whined, the improvised
Chapter 47: Tactical Breakthrough in the Vault
The collapse of the Spire didn’t leave behind a smoking crater. Instead, it left a scar on the reality-scape—a localized rupture where the digital world simply refused to stitch itself back together. Saddam stood amidst the shifting, holographic shards of the "Vault," the place where the primary indexing protocols resided.He didn't know if he was still ‘human’ in the way his memories dictated, or if he had become a new breed of system-glitch. Beside him, Felisa was struggling, her body rippling with unstable light. The "Tactical Breakthrough" they had enacted hadn't destroyed the mainframe; it had pushed them into the deepest server bank—the heart of the Spire’s recursive archives."Focus, Saddam," Felisa whispered, her hand trembling as she clung to his shoulder. She looked up at the looming wall of data-cradles. "This isn't just an archive. If we can manipulate the vault-node, we can rewrite the entire extraction queue. We don't j
Chapter 46: The Controllers Reveal Their Purpose
The collapse of the Spire did not come with an explosion; it arrived as a shudder of logic. The walls—once seamless chrome—bled digital fluid, and the golden veins of the processor core turned a sickening, necrotic grey.Saddam wasn't sure how they were still anchored to the dais. He felt frayed, his edges blurring into the surrounding static, but Felisa’s hand remained in his—a searing, immovable point of truth in a room that had lost its physics."It’s not shutting down," Felisa whispered, her voice layered with a strange, reverberating timbre. She didn't look at Saddam; she looked at the air itself. "It’s consolidating."The ceiling of the sanctum vanished, not to reveal the stars, but to project an image: a colossal, featureless void where figures began to emerge. They were tall, fluid entities with no defined features, moving like shadows stretched across an infinite pane of glass. These weren't units. These were the ones
Chapter 45: What It Means to be Human
The silence that filled the containment hall wasn’t empty—it was vibrating. Kepler stood trapped against the shimmering glass wall of the terminal, his polished mask catching the flickers of code dying in the room around him. Saddam stood five paces away, chest heaving, his fingers raw and bloodied where he’d held the shard too tight for too long. Felisa stood beside him, her silhouette flickering like a ghost in a strobe light, the physical cost of their intrusion beginning to eat her alive.Kepler didn't move. He didn't even try to reach for the ruined console. Instead, he laughed—a thin, dry sound that grated against the stillness."You’re killing yourselves," Kepler said, his voice modulating between dozens of pitches, layered like a corrupted audio file. "You understand that, don't you? This synchronization—it’s not evolution. It’s an unsustainable loop. A feedback error that ends in total cessation of function. Look
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Reader Comments
His life was already a mess, and then the system showed up out of nowhere. Things are getting interesting!
The opening immediately builds tension ...... Just a few paragraphs in, we're already presented with monsters and the appearance of a system. I'm really curious how Saddam will survive ......
Saddam ran toward that light, ignoring the monster chasing him from behind
I'm feeling anxious as well, Saddam. It's hard to imagine what you're going through.
Saddam saw a blinding blue light streak down from the roof
I'm nervous too, Saddam. I can only imagine how hard this must be for you.
I'm also nervous, Saddam. I can't imagine what it would be like to be in his position.
What a suffocating dilemma. If he didn't touch Feliza, Saddam would be attacked by the wolf monster. Even touching her would mean facing Feliza, who seemed ferocious.
poor Saddam. i feeling blue in early chapter
poor saddam. after the monster you meet someone more than a monster. wkwkwkwkwk
poor Saddam. a mission that risks pride. good luck Saddam
so far so good. i got no idea for Saddam
That plot twist at the end caught me completely off guard.
poor Saddam
The system's first appearance was so exciting. I can't wait to see how his life changes.
Just when Saddam thought his life couldn't get any worse, these random systems decided to enter the chat
I laughed a little when I read the part "I was going to be bitten by a monster but the system offered me a date" wkwk
Cliffhanger at the end " their lives are hanging by A threads " please drop chapter 3 autor
What an opening chapter, auto rain !! From zero precent life to suddenly getting A system meeting A strong
Escaped the wolf's clutches only to walk right into the lioness's den, haha.
Feel bad for Saddam. Dude went from chilling to just trying to survive
what dimension is this?
If you're not breathing anymore, what's the point of doing missions?
This mission was thrilling and almost killed Saddam......
Wow, how do they manage to survive?
The system saves, but it's a bit troublesome too, that's the mission
Saddam’s life is already a mess, and now these random systems just show up uninvited lmao
If I were Felisa, I would also be surprised because my hand was held by a stranger.
Just holding hands, and it's already considered a cursed act? Poor Saddam almost lost his life just because he held a girl's hand.
for the sake of life, sadam does a funny romantic scene because of the mission