“Hiro! Hiro! Wake up!”
Flap! Flap! Flap!
Spyro slapped Hiro’s face, using its two front paws multiple times. The dragon didn’t even hesitate to use its claws to wake Hiro who was lying on an empty land with blackish red land like it had been burned by hell fire. Next to his body, there was Liberty who was curled up motionless.
“Hiro! Wake up! Geez! How long are you going to sleep like that?” Spyro still hadn’t given up even though it had been doing that for more than half an hour now.
Alice had managed to find a gap to enter the game again, which was currently announced to have closed all of its servers due to a very serious problem. Even though no one had managed to break into the server that had been mentioned that was locked from the inside due to a hacker attack, Alice still managed to get into the messed up system as usual. Although she was dishonorably expelled before.
Finally, after clawing at Hiro’s face until his face was covered with a lot of scratches and flowing blood, Hiro was able to feel pain again when all the pain receptors in his body had returned to normal. He blinked and saw Spyro’s round eyes right in front of his face, which immediately startled him.
He didn’t know what exactly he just experienced until he was lying there helplessly. However, Hiro’s brain that had returned to function remembered right away that he was taking care of the girl he loved. He instantly got up and sat down to find where the girl was right now.
Hiro breathed a sigh of relief when he found Liberty by his side. In that place, in an unfamiliar place and far different from what he had seen before he lost consciousness, Hiro could only see an empty expanse of dry land. The surface is cracked. However, he didn’t know where his current location was, as if he had just been thrown out to a different planet. At least he was still thrown off with the girl he was trying to protect when that horrific apocalypse-like explosion happened.
“Are you okay?” Spyro asked, looking a little worried. The dragon flew around Hiro to check his condition, and it didn’t seem like Hiro had suffered any damage.
“Alice, can you check on her condition?” Hiro moved to touch Liberty’s body, which felt very cold right now. Her body still didn’t move an inch. However, one significant change that made Hiro instantly feel relieved was, this time the girl clearly seemed to be breathing normally as if she was just sleeping.
“You think I’m a doctor? I’m just a dragon, Hiro,” said Alice, making Hiro feel disappointed.
“What just happened? Where’s everyone?” Hiro looked at his surrounding, and still the same, there was no one there but the three of them. Whereas, just a moment ago before he lost consciousness, he was very sure that all the players were jostling in this place. But, where had they all gone now?
Hiro had nothing in his head to guess how they all got lost. Were they all killed in that huge explosion? Or were they all thrown far away somewhere like Hiro was right now? Hiro decided to check his HUD system.
The first thing he wanted to confirm was the fate of the people who meant the most to him. Everlasting members, what had happened to them now?
When Hiro checked the chat group for the guild, he only managed to see an empty chat group with no sound. All his members in the chat group showed the same status. Offline. Even Jacob and Noah, who had never been offline before, their status had changed to offline. It made Hiro feel like something bad really had happened.
However, he was a little relieved when he saw that all the names on his friend’s list were all offline, including Liberty. It was clear that the girl should be online, but it was considered offline by the system, as if the status detection system was no longer functioning properly.
“This game is broken.”
Hiro opened his GPS system and his eyes immediately widened when he saw that all the familiar maps, the global map for the world of the Last Shelter Online suddenly seemed very foreign to him because everything had changed. The most striking change was it showed the same color.
The dominance between black and red was like being scorched. There was no longer an ocean that separated the islands from the big cities in the world. Everything was the same color as if there was no water in this world anymore. And even though there was no water, one thing that stood out was that all the land seemed connected to each other and could be accessed easily without the need to fly or swim through the ocean.
[Last Shelter Online: The Dark War]
The name appeared when Hiro tried to display the map onto the transparent screen that had just appeared in front of him, so that he could examine it further easily.
“What was going on here?” Hiro looked at Spyro. He really needed a very detailed explanation for what had just happened.
“It’s him, Hiro. It’s him. All of this was his plan with someone who claimed to be the game master. I can’t believe that he would actually do something like this. This has gone too far. I feel like I don’t know him anymore.” Alice’s voice changed, sounding slightly trembling as if there was a deep sense of disappointment in her heart. However, Hiro didn’t know the reason for the girl’s disappointment.
“Tell me. What did I just miss?”
…
It was a while ago when Alice was kicked out of the Last Shelter Online.
The news portals all over the world suddenly shouted at each other to update the breaking news. The content they read over and over again was the same thing until even Alice could remember it very clearly now.
“Last Shelter Online server has been attacked by unknown hackers.”
It was a headline that kept popping up all over the country.
The chaos did not only occur in the game world, but extended directly to the real world opposite it. Everyone talked about it. From players who couldn’t log in to access their game accounts, then moved to people who worked at the game company. All of them were affected. Dr. Jeff Johnson, as the person whose voice was most eagerly awaited by people, did not immediately present himself in public with the reason that he needed to deal with the problems that had occurred right away.
The Last Shelter Online had locked its servers from the inside, and everyone in the company couldn’t open them. They seemed to have lost the game in the hands of a thief who knew very well how the game’s security system was, so the hackers could penetrate it very easily. It looked like the culprit was someone from the system security administrator, and Dr. Jeff Johnson immediately investigated them.
As if they needed someone to blame for the problem, the developers of the Last Shelter Online issued a list of suspected perpetrators according to their version. And one of those lists made Alice forget to breathe for a while.
Because it was her.
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