212 Invasion on Urbanite [Gameboy]
212 Invasion on Urbanite [Gameboy]
To say I was annoyed would’ve been a grotesque understatement.
Something that should have been a simple operation had spiraled into an irritating knot of loose ends and wasted preparation. I didn’t mind losing the Foresthome capes. They were pragmatic, cautious, and frankly boring. Their retreat would have been clean and acceptable.
Candyland stung a little more.
I’d put work into that one. Layers of bait, just the right emotional leverage, and a perfectly placed cure rumor. Hah~! If they were foolish enough, they’d fall for the trap or probably end up cussing my name for the dirty trick I just pulled! Yes, watching them slip through my fingers had been unpleasant, but still within tolerance.
But the Kingdom?
That was unforgivable.
I’d dangled a delicious morsel in front of them, one I was certain they couldn’t resist. I basically used myself as bait, but they just had to go…
The Witch. Cordelia. She was a problem so perfectly aligned against my own power that eliminating her would’ve been both necessary and satisfying. I’d even prepared a proper spectacle for it. A tournament arc. Blood, desperation, and escalation. The kind of story players lived for.
And now?
Nothing.
All of it unraveled because of him.
Eclipse.
Even trapped inside this place, even bound by its rules, that man remained a splinter in my mind. A variable that refused to behave. I could’ve lived comfortably in a secret world, curated my paradise, played god without interruption, but no. He existed. And as long as he did, things broke!
I exhaled slowly and sank deeper into the cushions of my sofa, the leather molding to my body. One hand idly worked a game controller, my attention split as I puppeteered an NPC several districts away. Through their mouth, I issued a nonsensical fetch quest to a cluster of eager players. They accepted it without question, scrambling like ants.
A voice broke the rhythm.
“Snap is dead,” the System Administrator said flatly. “Foresthome has retreated.”
I didn’t look up. “Shame. I liked Snap.”
She stood nearby, clipboard tucked under one arm, her expression carved from boredom. Pages flipped themselves as she checked off invisible boxes.
I sighed. “So that’s it, then. The Witch lives. The Kingdom slinks away. Candyland escapes my net.”
“You failed to account for interference,” she replied. “Repeatedly.”
I shot her a look. “I accounted for everything. I even planted modified NPCs in every faction.”
She raised an eyebrow but didn’t interrupt.
“Candyland fell for it,” I continued, irritation creeping back in. “Hook, line, and sinker. Foresthome figured it out almost immediately, though I’ll give them credit how they reversed the modification. Sloppy, though. Left the cape with brain damage.”
I snapped my fingers absently, pulling up a memory. “Boarhead, I think his name was. Real pity. Highly adaptive shapeshifter. Biokinetic, too. I’d been grooming him to kill the Divine Forest King.”
The Administrator hummed noncommittally.
“And the Kingdom,” I went on, scowling now, “saw right through my spy. Turned him into a double agent and sent him here! I decided not to touch him and forwarded him to Foresthome instead. Let him sit there as an eavesdropping node. Surprisingly, the Divine Forest King didn’t find him as a spy! Kingdom probably did a bettery job than us, huh?”
I finally set the controller down and leaned back, rubbing my temples. “So much effort. So many moving pieces. And all of it ruined.”
I glanced at her again. “That’s everything, right?”
She flipped one final page on her clipboard. “Yes. Also, re-education of Rachel and Selena has concluded successfully.”
That earned a smile.
“Good,” I said, at last sounding satisfied. “At least something worked the way it was supposed to.”
There were very few people I trusted.
The System Administrator was one of them.
From the outside and inside, Urbanite looked simple in hierarchy of power Players thought I was the top dog, the sole god of this city-sized playground. That misconception was useful. The truth, however, was far less theatrical.
Urbanite had two bosses.
Me, and her.
We didn’t share a past outside Lockworld. We didn’t come from the same world, the same timeline, or even the same circumstances. What bound us together wasn’t friendship or ideology. Instead, it was survival. Lockworld wasn’t a place where lone rulers thrived. It was a cage full of unreasonable, grotesque monsters wearing the skin of factions.
I could still remember the war roughly 200 years ago against the reigning factions then…
Alone, I would’ve died long ago. So would she.
I leaned back on the sofa, staring at the ceiling while she stood nearby, clipboard tucked under her arm as always, composed and distant.
“Lockworld doesn’t forgive stagnation,” I muttered. “You know that as well as I do.”
She didn’t respond immediately, so my thoughts drifted inevitably to the others.
The Divine Forest King was a biokinetic abomination, one who’d long since abandoned anything resembling restraint. Cannibalism wasn’t a taboo to him; it was optimization. Every enemy consumed became a permanent upgrade. Over time, he’d rewritten himself so thoroughly that fighting him in Foresthome was a fantasy bordering on suicide.
Then there was Whimsy, AKA Candyqueen.
A junkie pharmacologist with a smile too wide and ideas too sharp. Candy manipulation sounded ridiculous until you watched her weaponize it. Drugs, candy soldiers, candy beasts… each iteration more refined than the last. She didn’t just command power; she engineered it.
And finally, the Kingdom.
King Lear sat on the throne, a puppet king waving from the balcony. The real ruler lurked behind the curtain, strings in hand.
Cordelia.
The Witch.
I turned my head toward the Administrator. “What do you think,” I asked casually, “about letting it slip that Cordelia is the true leader of the Kingdom?”
She finally looked up.
“No,” she said flatly.
I sighed. “Straight to the point.”
“Revealing that information now would be inefficient,” she continued. “You’re impatient. That makes you sloppy.”
I snorted. “I’m bored.”
Her expression didn’t change. “Then you have an entire city of women willing to entertain you.”
I waved a hand dismissively. “I’ve grown bored of that too.”
That earned me a brief, assessing glance.
Two hundred years of ruling would do that to anyone. Excess dulled. Repetition rotted excitement. And worse than boredom was the feeling beneath it, the itch.
The need to expand.
Every faction in Lockworld revolved around growth. The Kingdom expanded its walls.
Foresthome expanded its forest. Candyland expanded its confections.
Urbanite?
Urbanite expanded its city.
“I think it’s time,” I said slowly. “We accelerate the expansion. Push infrastructure, quests, population density. More players means more points. More points means more leverage.”
“And more attention,” she replied.
I smiled. “Attention is power, Administrator. You of all people should know that.”
Each reality warper paid a cost.
That was the iron rule. There were no exceptions, no loopholes, and no matter how grand the power looked from the outside. Anyone who believed otherwise was either ignorant or already dead.
Mine was belief.
Perception.
The act of being seen.
If people witnessed me do something no matter how absurd, and no matter how much sleight of hand or misdirection was involved… then I could do it again. And again. And again. The lie became truth the moment enough eyes accepted it as such.
That was my fuel.
Reality warping was the most misunderstood power category for a reason. People spoke of it like magic, like omnipotence, but it wasn’t. It couldn’t be. Something that powerful could not exist without a counterweight. Every so-called “miracle” was just reality bent by consensus, warped by expectation.
In truth, all powers were reality warping, if you stripped them down far enough.
Luck manipulation? Probability rewritten.
Phasing through matter? Physical law rewritten.
Even Eclipse’s intangibility was just reality politely stepping aside for him.
At the fundamental level, powers were unreal things forced to behave as if they weren’t. If I had to describe my own ability honestly, stripped of ego and theatrics, it was this: I could manifest ‘any’ power imaginable, provided I had the energy to sustain it.
And that energy came from people.
From their belief in me.
Outside Lockworld, I had used that principle to its fullest. I hadn’t ruled a city back then. Instead, I’d ruled a cult. I shaped an area around myself into a field of obliviousness, dulling thought, lowering intelligence, making outsiders simply… not notice us. We lived in a quiet paradise, invisible to the world, and safe in our collective delusion.
It worked beautifully, until it didn’t.
The paradise collapsed the day a strange entity tore through it like paper, chasing a man I’d never heard of at the time.
Eclipse.
Only later did I learn what that name truly meant.
Not a person.
A category.
A multiversal threat designation.
Organizations across realities hunted Eclipse-types relentlessly. Contain if possible. Kill if not. Entire worlds had been burned because one slipped through unnoticed. In hindsight, it was almost flattering that my little paradise had been deemed collateral damage.
I exhaled slowly, fingers tapping against the armrest of the sofa.
The System Administrator stood nearby, already ahead of me as usual.
“Eclipse is still in the city,” she said calmly. “We’re detecting anomalous energy spikes along the outer sectors. Same signature as before. It’s repeating in every week or so…”
I frowned.
That irritated me more than I cared to admit.
“Hey, tell me if you need anything to hunt Eclipse and I will happily provide.”.
She didn’t even look up from the interface she was skimming.
“We’re already committing every available resource,” she said flatly. “Surveillance layers, predictive models, psychic sweeps. He’s slippery, but not invisible.”
That was the thing about her. If I was the face of Urbanite, she was its spine.
She was a psychic of terrifying breadth, the kind that didn’t specialize so much as accumulate. It was her who helped me structure belief into something scalable, something repeatable. Without her, Urbanite would have remained a glorified slum full of delusional players. With her, it became a system and a machine that harvested faith, attention, and obsession and turned them into fuel.
Even capped at Rating Six, I could exert my power continuously because she kept the environment primed for it.
And in return, I let her borrow from me.
A feedback loop.
I lent her fragments of my reality-warping bandwidth, and in exchange, her psychic abilities sharpened to an almost obscene degree. We didn’t trust each other out of sentiment. We trusted each other because the math worked.
Whatever conversation we might have continued died abruptly when the building shuddered.
Not a tremor. Not a quake.
Explosions.
Plural.
The sound reached us a half-second later, a rolling thunder that rattled glass and made the lights flicker. I straightened immediately.
“What was that?” I demanded.
The System Administrator snapped an interface into existence, her expression shifting from bored to razor-focused.
“Multiple impact events,” she said. “Confirmed locations: Urbanite General Hospital. Urbanite Shopping Center. Urbanite Police Department.”
I stared at her.
Then someone from the wall behind her walked through it.
Reality folded inward like a curtain being pulled aside, and a man stepped through as if he’d been walking down a hallway that only he could see. He wore a tailored suit and a smooth porcelain mask, featureless except for faint cracks that reminded me uncomfortably of a doll’s face.
I felt my jaw tighten.
“Who the hell are you?” I asked.
The man tilted his head.
“I’m hurt,” he said mildly. “You don’t recognize me?”
The System Administrator recoiled a step, eyes wide.
“…Eclipse,” she breathed.
The man reached up and removed the mask.
“Tada,” Eclipse said in a flat, almost bored tone. “You’re under attack.”
He slid the mask back into place with practiced ease.
“What you just heard,” he continued, as if giving a lecture, “were the detonations of approximately three pocket nukes.”
My fingers twitched, instinct screaming at me to snap.
Eclipse’s head tilted again, just slightly.
“I’d think twice before doing anything dramatic,” he said. “I’ve placed another six throughout the city. And I brought one that isn’t exactly pocket-sized.”
My eyes narrowed.
“That’s a bluff,” I said coldly. “You expect me to believe you just found nuclear weapons lying around?”
Even digging through Urbanite’s deepest black archives, I couldn’t think of a single cape capable of stockpiling nukes. Not here. Not ever.
The System Administrator didn’t answer me.
She brought up another interface instead.
A live feed.
An empty stretch of highway filled the projection. In the center of the road sat a device that was unmistakably a nuclear warhead, its casing ugly and utilitarian, a countdown timer glowing red on its side.
Standing beside it was a blue-haired woman, smiling brightly and waving at the camera like she was on a game show.
My stomach tightened.
“He’s not lying,” the Administrator said quietly.
Eclipse nodded once.
“That’s Spoiler,” he said. “A friend of mine. She’s very decisive. And she’s standing next to a button she won’t hesitate to press.”
For the first time in a long while, I felt something dangerously close to panic claw at the edges of my composure.
I forced it down.
“This is insane,” I said. “What do you think you’re doing?”
Eclipse regarded me for a long moment, head slightly cocked, as if considering whether the question was worth answering.
Then he spoke, his tone casual, almost conversational.
“An invasion,” he said.