Upon a mountain overlooking a dense forest in the far reaches of Vanaheimr sat a quaint, lonely cottage. On the front stoop of that cottage sat a lonely girl.

Sybiler slouched in her rocking chair with the posture of an old woman and the stern expression of a disappointed boss. She looked out over the landscape with a critical eye. Just five years ago she would have considered this a beautiful vista; now, all she saw was the way the tree branches clipped into each other as they swayed robotically in nonexistent wind. She glanced down at the hands of her own avatar and scoffed. She could practically see the polygons.

Well, that was to be expected from a twelve year old game. It had been forever since Sybiler had logged in to this account. Her entire guild, Ars Solanum, had ditched YGGDRASIL three years ago in favor of a shiny new sci-fi DMMORPG called Furthest Reach. Now that she was back here, the difference in graphics quality between the two games shocked and amused her. Well, she wouldn't have to deal with the shoddy graphics for long. Thirty more minutes and the servers would be shutting down for good.

There were some things about YGGDRASIL she had missed, however. She stood, walked off the porch and a little ways down the mountain slope, and looked back at the cottage in admiration. No DMMORPG allowed as much customization as YGGDRASIL, especially not of guild bases. In Furthest Reach, the most her guild could do with their mothership was change some colors or buy cosmetic upgrades designed by the official devs. Here, her guild had been able to upload their own art assets to remodel this place however they wanted.

When Ars Solanum first found this dungeon, the entrance was a thick stone slab enchanted with sealing magic, which only a one-of-a-kind item or Super-Tier magic could open. After they captured it, they decided to do away with the boring old seal and put a happy little cottage over the entrance instead. They'd modeled the cottage after the kind often found closer to the center of Vanaheimr's map. Usually theses cabins were home to kindly old herbalist NPCs would would sell potions and give free healing to players. Over the years many clueless players had fallen for the guild's little trick, wandering into the cottage in hopes of restocking their potion supply, only to be swiftly killed and looted by the very old herbalist they came to see.

Chuckling to herself at the fond memories, Sybiler wandered back into the cottage. Inside was a warm, cozy space, packed with rustic wooden furniture and baskets of herbs and spices she couldn't smell. In one corner next to a looping animated fireplace sat Nana, a custom NPC made to pose as a harmless herbalist. A kind, gentle smile graced her lips as her default expression, and she sat with her wrinkled hands folded in her lap as she awaited orders. Sybiler paid her no mind.

Three simple shelves were affixed to the far wall, and on them sat a series of picture frames, each holding a painting of a young, bright-eyed adventurer. Nana always told curious visitors that these were her grandkids, but in reality, each picture was one of the core guild members back when they were level 1. She picked them up and admired them one by one, going on a trip down memory lane.

Vulevina, who had already found a way to make the elf starting gear look slutty. Pertooee, showing off an oversized magic sword he had scammed off some sucker on day one. Eight=Dee, making a bizarre hand gesture in reference to what was by now a long dead meme. Sybiler cringed and chuckled at the last one, and decided to take a screenshot of it to send to Eight=Dee later that evening. That was some good blackmail material.

As fun as reminiscing was, it didn't feel like a proper goodbye to YGGDRASIL. She yearned to grab her bow, snipe some unsuspecting chump of a player with a one-shot arrow, and teabag them while spamming eggplant emojis until their avatar faded into nothing. Unfortunately, doing that today wasn't practical. YGGDRASIL's player base had dropped off severely in the last few months, so even if she spent all of her remaining time hunting, she probably wouldn't find a single player to attack.

Besides, anyone who was still online in these final minutes was likely here for the same reason she was—saying goodbye. Sybiler was a troll, sure, but she was no monster. Messing with people on DMMORPGs was just a way to harmlessly let off steam; she liked to think that the real her was a compassionate, considerate person. Rudely interrupting someone's farewell to twelve years of fun and hard work would be taking things too far.

Sybiler glanced at the clock on her console. 20 minutes left. The last thing to say goodbye to was the NPCs the guild had lovingly crafted. Or, at least, the versions of them left in YGGDRASIL. The guild had recreated all of their favorite NPCs as crew members in Furthest Reach already. Sybiler turned her attention towards Nana. "Tell everyone to gather in the main hall," she said.

Nana didn't respond.

Sybiler grimaced. She forgot how primitive the command system in YGGDRASIL was compared to the AI crew members in Furthest Reach. It took her a moment to remember how she was supposed to do this. She opened her console and scrolled through her substantial list of spells until she found Command Troops. She fumbled with the complex options menu until she figured out how to tell all guild hall NPCs to congregate in the main hall. Casting Gate to get down to the hall herself was not nearly as tricky.

A swirling purple portal appeared in front of her. She stepped through it and found herself in a massive circular room made of marble from floor to high ceiling. The walls were lined with nine banners, and in front of each one was a grand throne. Each throne had a unique aesthetic design as distinct as the guild leader who once owned it. Between the banners rose thick, grand pillars carved of purple crystal; they looked refined at first glance, but upon closer inspection they were clearly designed to look as phallic as possible without breaking content guidelines.

Over the grand double-doors of the hall hung a tenth banner: a field of gold, with a large, juicy eggplant emblazoned in the center. Delicate white linework swirled around the central symbol, which both added a level of refinement and created the illusion of liquid spurting out of the tip of the eggplant. Technically the symbol met YGGDRASIL's content guidelines, but anyone with half a dirty mind could tell what it was supposed to be.

The eggplant was the guild's sigil, it's calling card, the perfect encapsulation of everything that Ars Solanum stands for—fucking over newbs and dicking around. Truly a banner befitting the most infamous guild of griefers in all of Vanaheimr.

Sybiler walked over to her own throne. When she first designed it, she had made it an unadorned wooden chair, only throne-like in its size. Now it was decorated with a colorful collection of magic items she had snatched off of her fallen victims. She sat down on the cushion, made from a half dozen magic cloaks bundled together, and laid her forearms on the sheathed legendary swords that covered the armrests.

As she settled in, an army of NPCs began to flood into the room through the double doors. They marched in orderly lines, their faces blank and lifeless. NPCs personally created by any of the nine guild leaders split from the group and fell in line besides their original creator's throne. Sybiler preferred quality over quantity when it came to NPC creation, so she only had one entirely to her name. He was a young man who appeared about twenty years old, with wild, bushy brown hair and plain peasant's clothing. A small, sharp snagletooth hanging over his lip was the only visible sign of his werewolf race.

"Beta," Sybiler called. The werewolf approached her and stood before her throne. Although his eyes were on her, his attention was not; being a primitive bot with minimal AI, he had no real attention to give.

She opened her console and scrolled through Beta's NPC data. She'd forgotten many of the decisions she'd made when putting together his stats and abilities, but smiled at her own genius as she read through his file and reminded herself. Beta was intended to be the ultimate ambush boss in the Verdant Underbelly dungeon. Using advanced player-tracking behavior algorithms swiped from the internet, Beta was trained to silently stalk any intruders in the dungeon, analyze their abilities, and attack them at the exact moment when they were least prepared to deal with his offensive skillset. Back when there were guilds around who bothered to raid them, he had wiped out many parties singlehandedly after they wore themselves down on the rest of the dungeon.

She scrolled until she reached Beta's biographical information, and suddenly her self-satisfaction was replaced with a sad lump in her throat. She'd recognize those wall-like paragraphs of choppy prose anywhere. Like many in the guild, Sybiler never had the patience herself to write proper backstories for NPCs, so she handed that responsibility off to SevenLink. That girl always put so much care into the life stories of every NPC, from the strongest floor guardian to the humblest maid. Sybiler only made it through a few sentences of Beta's biography before she had to close her console.

Her gaze drifted over toward's SevenLink's throne—well, her raised platform. That girl never sat down if she could help it. SevenLink was the best of the guild, a shining star of kindness floating above a sea of soulless morons. Usually being a troll was a requirement for joining Ars Solanum, but she was so pure and precious that the guild had to make an exception. Originally she was one of Sybiler's own assassination victims, but when she discovered that SevenLink was a shy, lonely paraplegic who played YGGDRASIL to feel like she could walk again, Sybiler felt so bad about robbing her that she offered her membership as an apology. As far as Sybiler was concerned, it was the best decisions she had ever made.

No one had heard from SevenLink in four years. The guild knew she wasn't mad at anyone; one day she was as happy and enthusiastic as ever, and the next she was gone for good. She never logged on, she didn't join Furthest Reach, she never responded to a single message. The whole guild feared the worst but never got an answer about where she went.

Sybiler wished she could go around to every NPC and save all of their biographies somehow, but she knew there wasn't time. She at least had Beta's saved somewhere. Maybe if she contacted the developers later they could extract the data for the rest of them.

Now that she was on this depressing train of thought, every NPC was another grim reminder of SevenLink's uncomfortable absence. This grand hall was starting to feel stuffy and small. She glanced at the clock. Ten minutes left. She had an idea for how to fill the time.

"Everyone!" she called out to the NPCs. Dozens of them looked at her simultaneously, like creepy animated dolls in a horror film. She took a moment to shake off the uncanny valley discomfort, cleared her throat, and shouted another order. "Follow me!"

She strolled out of the guild hall, the guild's entire army of NPCs in tow. It would have been easy to teleport outside with magic, but she felt like taking the scenic route. Together, she and the NPCs marched through all nine levels of the Verdant Underbelly dungeon. They passed through thick jungles, open fields, forests of mushrooms and swamps teeming with carnivorous plants.

Finally, they reached the end of the first level, and Sybiler climbed the stairs that lead into the cabin. There wasn't enough room for all of the NPCs to fit in the cabin or on the porch, so she told everyone to stay back except for the floor guardians and Beta. She stepped out onto the porch and looked over the vast, poorly rendered wilderness once again. It wasn't Furthest Reach, but this place sure held a lot of memories.

Three minutes remained.

This seemed like a nice note to end on. She considered logging out, but she was too curious about what cheesy goodbye graphic might display when the servers finally shut off. Well, she could stand here and stare at the horizon for a little while longer, she supposed.

Two more minutes.

God, she was bored. A passing thought hit her; her inventory was bloated with items she had looted off of other players but never used. Before she had always been scared to spend them in case she needed them someday, but the chance of her needing any of them in the next few minutes was next to none.

Now that she thought about it, staring off into space like some edgelord was a whimpering end. She wanted to go out with a bang.

Sybiler opened her inventory and looked for the most powerful items in her possession. Most of them had ridiculously long activation times, but one of them looked reasonable—the Ancient Wand of Armageddon Firestorm, a single use divine item that blasted off a Super-Tier fire attack with an area of effect a mile wide. That sounded fun.

One more minute.

She summoned the wand to her hand with a flourish. It had a thirty second casting time, so if she waited a short while, she could make a raging firestorm her final sight in YGGDRASIL. She waited until the countdown clock hit 0:00:45, then activated the wand.

"Look out there!" she said to the NPCs, pointing into the distance with her wand. All of her followers dutifully obeyed.

She grinned, despite the sad tightness in her chest. Goodbyes always sucked, but maybe an explosion would make it better. "It's been a pleasure," she said to them, as if they could comprehend her words. "You've all served Ars Solanum well. You even defended this place after we all ditched you, which is more than we expected. I say we celebrate a job well done and all the fun we've had over the years."

The tip of the wand burned with white-hot fire as the casting time ran close to its end.

"And every celebration needs some fireworks."

Sybiler pointed the wand forward and up, and a small marble of magic blasted into the sky like a shooting star. She cackled like a maniac and awaited Armageddon.

Nothing.

She could still see the little dot of fire magic arcing through the sky, but none of the hellfire she was promised rained from above. Only then did she remember an important property of the wand—the firestorm wouldn't activate until that little marker that the wand shot out hit a solid target. There was no way it would hit the ground in time.

Her arms dropped to her sides in disappointment. "Fucking blueballs," she hissed to herself. She tossed the wand onto the ground with a satisfying clatter. Five seconds.

She supposed this was what she deserved. After nearly a decade of trolling, it seemed appropriate for the game to troll her back. She laughed at the irony, smiled, and held out two middle fingers for this whole damned world to see. "Love you too, YGGRASIL!" she shouted at the top of her lungs. She sounded sarcastic, but deep down, she meant it.

The clock hit zero. Sybiler blinked.

Faster than her synapses could fire, the scene before her changed. One moment it was a wild, untamed forest without a sign of civilization, and the very next it was idyllic countryside with a healthy mixture of forest and farmland. From her vantage point on the mountain she could see a sizable village a few miles away, which was styled more like a Midgard settlement than anything from Vanaheimr. Even the sky was different; the sparse stars had been replaced by a vibrant, glimmering slice of the Milky Way. The only things that stayed the same were the porch beneath her feet and the spark from her wand, which continued to fly on the same trajectory.

She blinked a few more times, baffled. "What the fuck?" she muttered to herself. Her first instinct was that someone had teleported her as a prank, but even if that were the case, the server should be shut off by now.

After a few stupefied seconds of thought, the best explanation she could think of was that this was some preview for a YGGDRASIL sequel—one with much, much better graphics. God damn, the resolution on this put Furthest Reach to shame. She leaned against the railing with an excited grin, eyes on the sky looking for a logo reveal, ears tuned for an announcement echoing across the world.

After a tense few seconds, Sybiler noticed that her little Armageddon spark had finally fallen and vanished somewhere around the village. She paid it no mind. Since this was some preview or tech demo for whatever the YGGDRASIL developers had in store next, she assumed the magic would fizzle out. If they dumped so much money into making a forest and village look this unbelievably cutting-edge, there was no way they had already figured out explosions.

The twinkling stars began to dim, and her chest tightened with excitement. This was it. She wondered if they were going to stick with the Norse mythology theme in the next game, or go in a totally new direction. Black clouds began to swirl, blotting out the night sky entirely. Deep red lightning rolled within the clouds, like lava under a cracked shell of freshly dried volcanic stone.

As wonderful a spectacle as it was, Sybiler was less concerned with the visuals and more focused on the atmosphere around her. The magical storm whipped up gusts of wind that blew in a vortex around the area. The trees bent and shook with far more realism than before, on par with reality. But by far the strangest part was that she could feel the air pushing against her cheek. Did she leave the fan next to her bed on? No, if she did, she wouldn't just be noticing now.

Gripping the railing tighter, she realized that she could feel every bump and groove of the wood, as if she were touching a real wooden pole. This haptic feedback was incredible, but wouldn't that require new Dive hardware? There is no way they could get this level of detail with just a software update.

Before she could finish pondering this, the sky opened, and fire poured down from the clouds with the force of a geyser. A pillar of flame a mile wide engulfed the landscape, its bright light so overpowering that no color existed except for burning red. The very ground beneath her feet shook violently, make the cottage creak, but she could barely hear that over the low, deafening rumble that swallowed everything around her.

That was an Armageddon Firestorm if she had ever seen one.

The pillar of flame convulsed, causing a visible shockwave to explode out of the firestorm. Tongues of flame were knocked loose by the force and scattered about in all directions, setting even more of the forest ablaze. Trees bent and snapped as the shockwave flew towards the porch. It hit, sending the cottage shaking and shuddering, threatening to collapse it into a pile of sticks. Sybiler stumbled back as the force hit her, barely keeping her footing. She became overwhelmed by the explosive pressure, the acrid stench of smoke, the wave of smoldering heat that she feared would light her on fire with the rest of the forest. It hurt. It actually hurt.

A Dive game couldn't make her feel this way. Not just technologically, but legally. Sensations of this intensity, especially painful ones, were explicitly banned in consumer-grade simulations. This couldn't be a game.

And then, a suddenly as it began, the firestorm faded. The clouds dissipated and the stars crept out of their hiding spaces. The distant village was gone, now replaced by a mile-wide circle of scorched earth, bordered by still-burning trees.

Sybiler gawked at the destruction. That felt real; that was all so unbelievably real. She couldn't even convince herself that she was dreaming. In a normal dream, a climactic, painful moment like that would have woken her with a start. This was something else entirely.

The adrenaline rushing through her veins forced her to take the scene before her seriously. If this was real life, then that was a real village. With real people. People who were, in all likelihood, now dead, because of the wand she activated.

She had killed them.

A/N: Hello! I'm just some nerd trying to rediscover my love of writing, and this is very fun to write. I know everyone is tired of OC stories, but I'm just here to have a good time. For those hoping to see some Nazarick action, Ainz and friends will be showing up later, but probably not for a number of chapters.

EDIT: Thank you PatProtecc for alerting me about the formatting problem. Hopefully this fixes it.