Dead or...not?

"Cosmic-tier magic: [Shattered Reality]" she said and the dome-shaped magic circle around her expanded.

The spell that crossed the very definition of tiers went off.

—KRUNCH!!

With a loud sound, the world around them broke as black cracks appeared everywhere. Their surroundings were looking like a broken mirror.

"W-What was that spell!" he said, his voice trembling. He knew what cosmic-tier spells were but this specific spell...this was something entirely new to him.

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FEW HOURS EARLIER

YEAR 2027

The sound of someone typing on a keyboard could be heard in a small dark room. The only light which was present there was coming from three monitors placed on a desk.

"Ah! My fingers hurt!" said a boy; he was the one who was typing.

He leaned back on his chair and closed his eyes as an exhausted sigh escaped his mouth. He was typing for 13 hours now; it was obvious that his fingers were hurting.

He was writing the code for his own VRMMORPG game, he was working on it since he was 15 years old; that was also the time when his obsession with anime and fantasy stories was at its peak.

It was his dream to live the life of an isekai protagonist in a fantasy setting, but sadly, he couldn't build up the courage to throw himself in front of a truck so he decided to create his own world in the virtual realm.

Due to him having an introverted personality, he always had problems in school. He didn't have any friends so when he started working on his game; he quit school and spends the whole day and night being locked up in his room.

At the current age of 17 years, he has successfully developed a full-dive VR headset and completed 80% of his game.

"Come on! Just a little more and then I can rest!" he said, trying to cheer up himself.

With that, he started typing again.

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30 MINUTES LATER

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"Phew! Finally it's done," he said as he took a sip from a can of energy drink he was holding.

"I can get some sleep now—HUH!" his eyes widened when he pressed [ENTER] to save his work.

The reason behind this shock was a message which popped up on his computer screen.

[ERROR: Unidentified body found! Please re-check (players.cpp)]

"No! No! No! No! I can't do this anymore! But if I sleep now I won't be waking up for 2 days at least."

"Guess I have no choice," he mumbled and starting looking through the code he just typed to find the error.

"This is strange, there's nothing wrong with the code here."

"Should I check it from inside?" he questioned himself as he looked at the VR headset which was on his desk.

After thinking for a while, he took the VR headset and wore it.

The full dive headset connects the user's consciousness with the game by sending and receiving brain signals at a certain frequency.

He dived into the game and entered the virtual world, he had logged in into the last level of the game into a castle.

As he opened his eyes he found himself in the throne room of a castle. His character was sitting on a throne, resting his right leg on the left one.

With jet black hair and deep brown eyes, his character was looking like a boy in his mid-teens. He wore a cloak over his clothes and had a katana tied on the back of his waist.

He tapped his left hand and a console window appeared, then he wrote some commands to find on which level the error was.

The error was coming from level seventy-four; something very big was there because a huge amount of processing power was being used on that level.

He used the console to teleport to that level, when he did he was surprised. The level seventy-four he designed was not there, instead, there were some strange white coloured buildings while the ground was filled with grass.

"What the hell! Wasn't this level supposed to be a dungeon?" he said while taking a closer look of his surroundings.

—Boom!

A sudden explosion occurred, taking him under the area of affect. It was caused by an energy beam which was blasted at him from the sky.

After the dust which was blown into air from the explosion settled, he was still there standing just fine. He didn't take any damage from that attack.

When the beam was blasted at him he already saw it but choose to ignore it and focus on finding the error. This was because as a server admin he knew his HP won't go down.

As he looked towards the direction where the beam was blasted from he saw a humanoid figure floating in the air.

"I am pretty surprised that you endured that attack," the figure said, it was the voice of a female.

The figure came down and when it reached his render distance he saw that it was a girl. Her hair and eyes were red and she was wearing a weird outfit, it was like the outfit of a goddess from a fantasy novel.

"Who the hell are you? You don't look like an NPC and I don't remember adding multiplayer in this," he said and looked at the figure with suspicion.

"I am Iris, the goddess of fire and I should be asking you the same question. You look like a human, how did you reached this place?" she said in an arrogant manner.

"How shameless someone can be! Calling yourself a goddess just because you have an avatar of a goddess, now tell me quickly how you came here before I ban you," he said, mocking her.

The only way to enter this game was through a full-dive VR headset and there was only one headset of that type in the whole world and that was which he made himself.

"Don't you dare talk down to me you lowly human!" Iris shouted. "Now that's enough! No one has ever insulted me like this before; you have to pay by your life for this mistake!"

"So you want to settle this with a fight, well I don't have any problem with that. Actually it might be a good idea; I can check how the PVP system works by that!"

Iris shouted "Here is your divine punishment!" and created a ball of white flames between her hands and blasted it toward him.

As he saw the flames coming toward him, a smirk appeared on his face.

When the flames were about to hit him, they clashed with a transparent barrier and extinguished.

He didn't take any damage from Iris's attack, not even his clothes were damaged.

"Magic nullification," Iris whispered.

"Huh, what are you talking about? I don't need to use magic nullification on such a weak attack; your attack just clashed with my personal barrier. Is this all you've got and you are calling yourself a goddess?" He said in a sarcastic manner.

"I'm just getting started!" she shouted and chanted an incantation.

She pointed her right hand towards him and a magic circle appeared in front of her palm.

Suddenly red coloured flames emerged from the ground where he was standing and formed a tornado. The tornado was going all the way up to the sky and soon swallowed him inside the flames.

Inside the flame tornado, he grabbed the handle of his sword and took a step forward. "I don't even need to use a spell to counter this attack; it's so weak that my katana will be more than enough."

He allowed some mana to flow in the sword to charge its attack, after a second he pulled out his sword from its sheath and slashed the air with it, delivering a one-handed swing from lower-left to upper-right.

The attack slashed the tornado along in half and the fire disappeared, his katana was originally black in colour but it emitting a white glow due to the mana flowing in it.

He then put his sword back in its sheath and looked toward Iris with a smirk on his face.

Seeing him standing there with ease Iris's face was expressing shock and fear.

"How did you… that spell was a tenth-tier magic spell?" she said.

He then used teleportation magic and teleported himself in front of Iris. He was also using flight magic to keep himself in air.

"Enough of this, I can't waste much time on you and you can't win against me anyway," he said.

"How can you say that with such confidence?" Iris asked.

He stared at her for a while.

"What are you? A kid! I'm the one who created this world, and its common sense that you can't beat the game master in his own game. Now get ready I am going to ban you from the server," he replied.

"HOW DARE YOU INSULT THE GREATER GODS!" Iris shouted at him, she was boiling with anger after hearing his reply.

She thought that by saying 'I am the one who created this world' he is trying to say that he is more powerful than the gods and is trying to insult them.

"I am never going to forgive you for this!" She said in a frustrated tone.

"Limit Break!" she said. As she said that her mana pool increased immensely.

'Limit break' was a technique by which you can increase your mana for a limited amount of time to use high-level magic spells. But limit break turns one's life force into mana so only immortal beings can use it efficiently as they have infinite life force.

If human or a mortal being used limit break their life span will be reduced to half or even more.

After using limit break the density of her mana increased so much that it was visible around her body in orange colour like she was burning with anger.

"Cosmic-tier magic: [Shattered Reality]" she said and cast a spell.

A dome shaped magic circle appeared around her with translucent rings around it.

—Crunch!

Their surroundings cracked with a loud noise, black coloured cracks could be seen in every direction. The world around them was looking like a broken mirror.

"Wha—what did you do, what was that spell?" he asked her in confusion.

"Ha-ha-ha, that was a cosmic-tier spell which can destroy entire reality!" she replied.

He was scared, just scared. The world he spent two years on was falling apart in front of his eyes.

"What is this? I know about cosmic tier magic but 'Shattered Reality'? I don't remember adding a spell-like that in my game," he mumbled.

He tried opening the console window to log out but it wasn't working.

Meanwhile, Iris was now also scared. She realized that she released a forbidden spell and now the other gods will seal her in another dimension.

She was unknown to the fact that this was a virtual world created inside a computer.

Suddenly all the things blacked out and he lost consciousness.

The game collapsed and the full dive system crashed.

But he was still lying on his chair wearing the full dive headset.

It was sure…. He was dead.