The blackout

“I guess you can call me the Great Dragon, now.” Hunter smirks, as the ground stops shaking. Maxim's face turns red with fury. His men also start struggling with the magical restraints, trying to break free of them.

Maxim starts screaming and yelling, demanding that Hunter release his men immediately. However, the Great Dragon just ignores him. After a few minutes, all of Maxim's men are dead, and all traces of Hunter disappears as the land returns to normal. Maxim and his minions respawns somewhere else and all of their achievements are gone and they are back to level 1.

The sky grows cloudy and lightning flashes continuously all across. In the distance, thunder rumbles in response to the booming sound of lightning striking the ground.

“Whoever that guy was, he saved us.” Zack gets up and tells Steven. He is seriously injured and has a few HP left. Both Zack and Steven will die if help won't come.

Meanwhile David and his friends are searching for their teammates.

After searching for some time, they finally found Zack and Steven unconscious next to each other. Alice immediately started healing their injuries. Then she woke them up as fast as possible so that they could leave. Once everyone was healthy enough, Alice asks Zack and Steven about what happened. The enemy is nowhere to be seen and the entire area is destroyed by lighting.

“They wanted me to give up the password of our hideout so that they could capture it..”

Steven told Alice and ohers.

Zack starts crying in anger as he thinks of how helpless they were. “That bastard! He made Steven suffer so much! If it wasn't for that mysterious Hunter….”

“A hunter saved you guys?” Lisa asks in shock.

Zack and Steven tells the whole story to the others and they gets relieved.

David does not know what a hunter is and he asks Lisa about it.

“So, what exactly are hunters?”

Lisa explains the situation to David. “Basically they are people who work for a special organization known as the Hunters Guild. They are very powerful people in the world of game. A hunter is basically a rank, the highest rank of System Ascend. Only the top 30 players receives this rank. Some hunters are rough and chooses to work alone. The others are part of the Hunter guild which I mentioned.”

“I think we got saved by the hunter Xero. He is known as a vigilant, he saves the innocent and punishes the criminals. The way he fought, it resembles the legend of Hunter Xero. I believe it is him.” Steven lets the others know.

Steven and others goes back to their hideout. It has almost been an entire day, it's time for logging out once again. All of them tries logging out at once but for some reason, they fail to do so.

[System Ascend is on maintenance, there is a slight error in the program. All thirty million remaining users in the US region will have to wait till our programmers fix the error. Thank you for your patience.]

The message pops up in every ones screen. This is the time when everyone starts logging out, so majority of the people have already logged out of the game. Only thirty million users in the US region remains. Since this has happened before, non of the users panics. David gets kind of worried as he does not want to be late to class. The others just calms him down and tells him to take some rest for the first time in a while. All of the Kitty Kat guild members goes to the nearby Xangzai City to kill time. Suddenly they hears a man screaming and telling everyone that they are going to die. Few man stopped him and asked what he was saying.

“This world is in ruins, the entire system is hacked. This is no usual maintenance. I worked at the Z-corp, I know what happened. The entire VR system was attacked a day ago and we were trying our best to fix it. But it got hacked by someone else. Now we can never log out of here, we are trapped here forever. Z-corp cannot fix the system anymore, we are doomed.” The man has completely lost his sanity. Most of the people ignores him but one or two of them try to get the information from him. One of those person grabs the man and pulls him away. Others try to calm him down by patting him on the shoulder but this only makes things worse. Soon everyone has gotten angry at the man for interrupting their conversation to tell the news. The man looks even more insane. His crazed eyes show fear and despair.

Everyone ignores him, except David. He recognizes the man, he was a high-ranked official at the Z-corp. David hurried and asked him if what he said was true or not.

The man also recognizes David and gets happy.

“Do you remember about the details you were given? About System Ascend having two founders and one of them was on a run? He is the one who hacked the System. He wants to use all of the people as a ransom. Though we don't know what exactly he wants or when we will be released. Z-corp tried their best to protect this world but failed. But we managed to destroy all the programming powers before it was taken away. It means that this world will run on its own and the hacker won't be able to influence it. There is a way to get out of here and wake up in the real world. If a single player or a guild manages to do it, then the system will crash and everyone will be saved. But it is nearly impossible. We programmed it to be so hard that it might even take ten years to complete it. But you David, you might be able to do it. You have the special YYY chip inside you. You can level up twice as fast as a regular player. You were selected for some other purposes, but your main mission is to save everyone here in System Ascend.” The man cries and asks David for help.

Now it has been 3 days since the blackout.

At this point, almost everyone hears and believes what the man is saying.

David and his guild members knew what was going on and they prepared themselves for the worst case scenario.

The guild members asks David about his real identity, as they thought that he works for the Z-corp. Lisa gets upset with him for lying to her.

“You work for the Z-corp and you lied being a restaurant worker? Why would you do that?” Lisa asked him.

David sighs at her. “Well… It's complicated. I don't wanna lie right now. We have to focus on the upcoming obstacles. And it'll be easier if we aren't all suspicious of each other. I was just selected as a experiment subject or something like that. I don't work for the Z-corp, why would I lie about that? It's only been a few days since the Z-corp recruited me. You should have asked that old man, you still can when we go back to Xanzai city.” David sits back.

Lisa nods. Then she gives him an apologetic look. “I guess… I overreacted.” She takes a deep breath. “Just so long as you're not going to lie any more… If we need to trust each other more in the coming days, then I won't hesitate to ask again. But please don't take advantage of my trust issues, David. Please don't.”

David nods.

The guild decides to stay positive and take more tasks to complete them and earn rewards. Getting strong and finally completing the final stage will guarantee their freedom.