Disclaimer: I do not own Overlord. That belongs to Kugane Maruyama, and all illustrations are made by So-Bin.

The world was ending.

Surely that was reason enough for someone to cry, even a grown man like him. It was enough for someone to rage, panic, and scream into a pillow that life wasn't fair.

Everything that Suzuki Satoru knew was ending tonight as the servers to his world would be shut down forever. The greatest game to ever be created would go offline at midnight, and to the remaining, dedicated players that still called that place home, it was a death sentence.

Satoru had spent over a decade—all of his adult life, in fact—in the game that was to him the real world. He had even doubled down by investing everything he had, saving only the bare minimum required for upkeep on his apartment, utilities, food, and enviro-gear. Everything else he earned had eventually ended up as an investment in the game store, buying a plethora of cash shop items, character cosmetics, gameplay aesthetics, and any other experience enhancing gimmicks that caught his wandering eye. If he had never bought the dive gear, or made the ridiculous amount of in game purchases he had, he might have saved enough by now to upgrade his lifestyle.

'Like that was ever going to happen.' Satoru snorted through his breathing mask.

He skimmed through the murky street ponds that settled like bogs amongst the towers and mounds of refuse. He made his way through the well-worn trails carved into the garbage piles spread throughout all cities the world over, returning to his apartment from the main work office.

Unfortunately, today was one of the few days he was called into the office, having to venture into the dreaded outside world, and show face when summoned by his bosses. Worse, he was called into work on the day that the Yggdrasil servers were being shut down. He would have been content to have worked from home, filing the minimum hours before immediately diving back home for the rest of its up time. Instead, he had to work late in the office, before making the trek home for a very late night dive.

Satoru swerved around a puddle that had the telltale shimmering fluorescence of a chemical spill. He may have been in a hurry to get home, but he was always careful never to set foot into the more obvious hazards. His boots were rated for some serious industrial level corrosives, but stumbling into every glowing or frothing puddle was a sure way to die a horrific death.

At least it wasn't raining.

Taking another peak at the sky through his fogged-up breathing mask, Satoru noted that the ever-present cloud cover hadn't the right shade of green or pink of an impending deluge. The corroded outer shells of the buildings in this district told a tale of budget cuts, misappropriated funds, and an underpaid workforce, apparent as it was in the great gouges through the structure caused by the chemical rainfall. Exposed anodes meant to protect the structures in the now defunct thirty first arcology showed signs of having never been maintained or replaced. Humming from transformers built in the surrounding walls hinted at high power transmission lines buried not far under the surface; an explosion waiting to happen.

Satoru paid it no mind at all. He was used to these conditions in this lower class arcology, and especially in this abandoned, condemned district. His only concerns were the abundant hazardous materials lying about, but he was used to identifying the more dangerous substances while picking a safe route through it all. He considered himself an expert at it, seeing as he was still alive, unlike the owners of the odd skeleton or hazmat suit sprawled through the waste and the mud.

If Satoru had any friends in the office, they might have cared to notice that he walked to work, and that was concerning enough. If they knew he walked through the old abandoned and condemned districts, they might have even cared enough to intervene. As it was, Satoru had no such friends at work, and even if those theoretical friends cared to stop him from walking through the most dangerous place in the arcology, he would have refused them, anyway.

With all that he spent on Yggdrasil, he had nothing to spare on something as menial as safe transportation. Regardless, he could navigate these wastes with ease, and he hadn't died yet, so he stayed his route that got him to work on time, and kept all his earnings flowing home.

Speaking of home, Satoru had almost made it to his district, and was only a few blocks away from his section of the city. He ducked through the broken local checkpoint, past the security station, all while paying no mind to the guards inside who cared not whether some fool wandered through the condemned district.

If the guards ignored the trespasses enough, eventually, the problems sorted themselves out.

Returning to the relatively empty streets of his own district, it was a brisk walk before he made it back to his own complex. He ignored other pedestrians suited in their own protective gear, faceless individuals covered in chem-suits like his own, all making their way through the dark, corridor-like street floors.

Satoru brushed past the far too young girls curled up in the alleyway that was a shortcut back to his apartment complex, noting that they wore far too little, and were even more still. He was only glad that the mask he wore was of the fitted and sealed kind, keeping the stench of their rot from reaching him. He could have sworn that they were alive just three days ago, but he guessed they hadn't been able to find shelter before the brief drizzle over the weekend, as decayed as they were. Regardless, such sights weren't too uncommon in the back alleys of this district, and it had been a while since the sight of corroded bodies unnerved him. As soon as they were out of his sight, they were out of his mind.

Turning out of the side alley, he swerved past a man without a mask who had a horrifically pitted face. Satoru knew there was a phobia of something with clusters of holes in it, as there was a trap designed that way in Nazarick, but couldn't remember the exact word. The man seemed to have the bare minimum amount of gear to him except for a mask and a fitted hood. Protective gear was cheap, relatively, as people needed to work, and work couldn't be done if everyone was dead. However, it seemed this man couldn't even afford such a bare necessity, judging by the clear deformity of his face.

Satoru made his way into the first complex of the block, where his unit was, paying no mind to the provocatively dressed people offering their services to others passing through. He had long ago made it clear that he wasn't interested and so they left him well alone. It definitely wasn't because he was too embarrassed. Not that any of them were attractive. All the actual beautiful people, men and women, young or old, found proper establishments. Most of the alleyway entertainment were thieves, bedside killers, doors, or riddled with enough diseases to incite a quarantine in a higher class of arcology. He would never indulge in any such activities with the local roughs, and he never cared to, either.

Satoru made his way up to his own floor, ignoring the love hearts scrawled around every other unit number, and especially the rooms with socks knotted to the handles or the rooms with pungent smoke and fumes seeping through cracked doorways. He finally made it to his own unit after an uneventful trip home, noting with only the faintest regard that it was raining outside, and briefly wondered if the guy without the hood found shelter in time.

He glanced up and down the hallway, before he swiftly unlocked his apartment and dashed inside, having learned his lesson long ago when it came to entering without first making sure there wasn't anyone lurking nearby. He took off his enviro-gear, hanging it up after giving it a brief once over for anything glowing or otherwise growing on it.

Satoru dressed down entirely, before showering after having been outside, and picked out a plain shirt and pants to stay warm in his spartan apartment. Walking back into his main room, he fixed himself a quick bite of cheap but flavoured nutrient paste, washing it down with even cheaper coffee. He wanted to make sure he was full and sated, taking care to finish his pre-dive ritual before jacking in. Finally, he checked his nanomachine count; the nanotech being integral to all neural augmented technology.

Nanomachine technology was almost as large a breakthrough in deep immersion virtual experience technology as the dive gear itself. Nanomachine technology and dive technology were two independently developed fields, the former developed in the medical field and the latter in the information processing field, but their true value wasn't discovered until the two fields overlapped.

Originally, nanomachine technology was designed to monitor and diagnose the host body of its condition, keeping track of all the body's information from the many different cell counts, foreign contaminants, trauma, vitals, and even neural processing and brain function. It wasn't too long after that the technology was refined enough to even augment the nervous system to improve body functionality, or even bypass certain impairments such as paralysis.

Likewise, the dive gear was originally designed hoping to remove the need for spending years in education. If one took the time to dig through the sales pitch, the propaganda, cover-ups and corporate bullshit, one would find that it was developed with the intent of efficiently constructing a standardised workforce.

It would allow children to be educated with information uploaded directly to their minds in weeks instead of years, with the poor learning enough to be kept as lower-class workers while the rich maintained their power through the unrestricted knowledge of centuries of human innovation and development. Fortunately, or unfortunately, the results soured, and grew worse with every breakthrough in the field, and that area of research was ultimately abandoned.

Dive technology, being the successor to old virtual reality technology, was a byproduct of a failed attempt at manufacturing human resources.

The combination of the two paved the way for a revolutionary branch of technology. The Deep Immersion Virtual Experience.

Combining a system capable of connecting your mind to a machine, in tandem with nanotech that enhanced the user experience to the point of realism, divetech revolutionised the human-machine interface of all systems everywhere.

From industry and digital design to art and the centralisation of home utilities, divetech connected the world on a level that hadn't been seen since the reinvention of the internet. The teams that devised the systems were swiftly snatched up by the megacorporations, and global assembly and distribution put one into every home, every office, and one for every student in every school. Menial labour, like paper pushing and office work almost became ancient history overnight, and people in the digital entertainment development sector became billionaires in weeks.

This was all because of the emergence of the penultimate purpose of divetech; gaming.

Rather, diving into fantasy realms, war games, h-games, fps, or whatever adventure suits your fancy. There had always been shoddy virtual reality gaming, but that was just a screen in front of your eyes, and the gameplay correlated to real world actions. Diving took you into the game, leaving behind your body in a resting state while you immersed yourself in a digital one.

At first, games were merely being adapted to allow for a dive experience, but they weren't designed for the dive. It took nearly a decade to perfect gaming with divetech at its core, but it would be another five years before the culmination of divetech and gaming would arrive at the mountain above all others.

Purpose-built dedicated divetech.

Divetech designed not only for its purpose, that being to enable players to dive, but dive gear that was designed specifically for a particular game, tuned and customised for the specifications required for the game engine software.

Upon this mountain sat a throne.

DMMORPGs

Fantasy realms fit to be explored. Ancient copies of old favorites were remade, remodeled, and redistributed for the nth time. Skyrim, to be exact, on its fiftieth version of release. Many game genres fell to the wayside in the wake of the Age of MMORPGs, as the divetech's immersion allowed for what was previously only a sci-fi or pure fantasy fans dream. Traveling to new worlds, living in them, growing your own empire, writing your own histories, and the only limits being the game developers' efforts.

And on that throne sat the King.

Yggdrasil.

The first of its kind, and as far as Satoru was aware of, the only one of its kind.

What separated Yggdrasil from all other DMMORPGs was its freedom. Freedom of choice. Freedom of action. Freedom of customisation. Yggdrasil was a game where you could do anything and everything without restrictions or limits.

Within reason, of course, the developers weren't about to break any laws. But the game itself didn't have any laws.

There were your standard fantasy rules, attributes and classes, and what not. But as far as gameplay was concerned, you could do anything. With over seven hundred racial classes and two thousand job classes, it was impossible for two characters to be alike unless they were intentionally designed that way. There were currently over six thousand spells known so far and there were almost as many physical abilities divided amongst the physical classes.

As a power fantasy game, the developers wanted magic to be powerful, but had to give the magic classes various penalties and weaknesses to be exploited, so that they were neither the first pick nor overplayed. Given the chance, a caster who could successfully call down a meteorite could kill thousands of unprepared high level players, but risked being vulnerable during casting, carrying the deficit of good players being prepared for such obvious area of effect spells.

There was creation magic, which was considered to be hacks, as well as healing and resurrection, which was always a source of toxicity since the concepts were invented. Instakill magic, or instant death magic, was considered cheating, and magical buffs or debuffs were hell on earth. The developers wanted magic to be special, being the fantasy trope, so they did.

That wasn't even including the bullshit of super tier magic.

Conversely, physical classes were given the advantage of being simultaneously ridiculously simple and extremely technically complex. A warrior might only know fifty physical abilities and be comfortable only using twenty of them in the heat of battle, but there was no limit to their application. A warrior could use a single active lunge technique right-handed, left-handed, overhanded, underhanded, in reverse, backwards, upside down, dual handed, in opposite directions, mid spin, mid forward flip, mid backflip, leaping, rolling, strafing, or in any way the player could conceive.

Theoretically, any physical ability or skill, passive or active, could be used in any manner a player could imagine, making a warrior's potential infinite, and that was just for one skill. Players who could chain skills together moved like something only seen in high budget anime, and players who could do this with a powerful build to back them up moved like gods.

Yggdrasil was the power fantasy game; without exception. But it also dominated in nearly every other category, as well. It was the leader as a cultivation game, adventure game, survival and crafting game, and ranked high in most other genres. The only deficit could be considered the balance, or its lack thereof.

There was no balance, or rather there was no balance that could be appreciated, and that in itself made the game balanced.

The developers didn't want a game that could be boiled down to rock paper scissors. They didn't want there to be a counter, ability, or strategy that neutralised every player's precision tailored build and hard-won gear. They wanted the exceptional to excel, and the triumphant to rule.

Of course, as game developers, designing an intentionally balance broken game would ruin the game itself, if players got sick and tired of only the minority dominating while the rest were rendered side characters or considered resources to be exploited.

Games were a form of escapism.

Instead, their plan was to promote exploration and reward unique builds. High-risk builds often came with extreme advantages, but also had devastating weaknesses if one knew what to look for. With every rule the developers implemented, there always existed an exception. For every advantage and bonus, there was always a deficit and weakness. Every quality had its standard, and the average was always measured by the good and the bad. The game's real balance was that there was no balance; for those who put in the effort to overcome it.

Then they had the genuine balance breakers, something no other game had.

World Items.

Items, by design, that broke the game. Intentionally. Items whose sole purpose was to tip the scales and topple whatever plateau the game had settled into. Their scalability, abilities, passives, actives, and roles were held on a literal higher level above anything else, and trumped everything, ever. They were a part of what made the game so fun and risky, so dangerously exciting and horrifying to meet in battle.

Yggdrasil set the standard for DMMORPGs by having no laws except what was enforced by the players. Griefing, hustling, camping. Everything goes. If you don't like it, create a guild that polices it and punishes players that practice it. Yggdrasil had it all, and it was as addictive as both a gold mine and a sinkhole, dragging people in and only spitting them back out after years of abuse.

It was intoxicating.

Satoru mused further on the game as he registered his nanomachine count was in the green, and readied himself in the dive chair for a comfortable ride. The chair's sensors adjusted the room's lighting and temperature control to his preferences, and reclined for his comfort. He donned the neural interface headgear before plugging in the sensory link to his nervous system and within moments, Satoru plunged into the timeless world of Yggdrasil, where Momonga rose once more.