Elias selected "Survivor" and entered the queue. Usually, it took minutes to find a match. This time, the screen flashed white instantly.
There were no other survivors. No power keys to find. No Super Time Machine to activate. DRABALL-TBREAKRS-(USA)-NSwTcH-NSP-[3DLCPack]-Zi...
Elias tried to run, but his character’s stamina bar was already empty. He tapped the button to use a "Grappling Device," but the item icon turned into a red "X." Elias selected "Survivor" and entered the queue
He reached the edge of the map—the "Area Boundary" that usually blocked players with a blue grid. But the grid was gone. Beyond the city was nothing but a scrolling sea of code and raw texture files. There were no other survivors
A shadow descended from the static sky. It wasn’t a Raider Elias recognized. It wasn’t the perfection of Cell or the malice of Buu. It was a glitching, shifting mass of orange and blue—a "Goku" model, but warped. Its limbs were too long, its eyes were hollow sockets of white light, and its aura didn’t glow—it bled black pixels onto the ground.
Then, the proximity warning began to scream. The heartbeat sound grew deafening.
He wasn’t in the usual "Green Hill" or "Waterfront" map. He was in a void—a crumbling version of West City where the sky was a bruised purple, choked with digital static. His character, a simple human in a denim jacket, stood alone in the middle of a deserted street.