A Gentle Bringer of Doom Chapter 1: Prologue, an overlord/オーバーロード fanfic

Yggdrasil

A word, a name that invoked many emotions. For some it was relief, seeing it in their rooms after a hard day's work. Others felt only rage, being cheated by the clever, the swift, and the powerful. All feel something when they see it, for it is amazing.

With a revolutionary system, great graphics, and a massive interactive world, it became one of the most popular games around the world. Every day, from morning to night, the game was filled to the brim with players. Nearly fifty-seven billion people logged in during the 7:00 to 8:00 time gap, and that wasn't even the tip of the ice-berg. So many people played the game for over twelve years and still the game was never fully explored. The next few years were suspected to be filled with revolutionary discoveries in Yggdrasil, some even foresaw the discovery of the monster that attacked the World Tree. It was meant to be an 'era of good feelings' for Yggdrasil.

Then they announced the shutdown.

Billions of players deleted their accounts, while others spent the remaining time working to their final goal. At the end, only a few players remained, like the last stars of a solar system collapsing in on itself. The shutdown was received the same way, just like the game, with emotions.

That was what the game was revolved around, emotions. Invoking so many that it was a maelstrom of feelings. Yggdrasil may have been a game, but it was a game that connected nearly a trillion people, there were even stories of marriages occurring both in-game and IRL because of it. Relationships were started, ended, and finished in Yggdrasil, enemies became friends, friends became enemies, and sometimes people you knew became something more to you. That was Yggdrasil, a sort of house were everyone went and anything could happen, all while having fun.

And it was ending.

"BULLSHIT!" A maelstrom of elements tore through an army of machines, millions of drones exploded, thousands of androids were annihilated, and hundreds of titanic sized machines were felled, holes the size of houses dotting their bodies.

"FUCKING BULLSHIT!" A single claw, space and time warping around it, sliced through thousands of Dwarven warriors, ending hundreds of lives.

"AHHHHHHH!" A shockwave of red and black energy exploded from a single point in a sea of enemies, a silhouette that vanished and tore through another thousand foes.

Vanaheim, home of the technologically advanced Vanir, was being torn asunder by a single Player. A Player renowned for his devastating AOE attacks ad one-hit-kill weapons, a Player who could raise hell and high water while remaining completely unscathed, a Player who manned the most dangerous dungeon in the whole game. A Player who was allowed Admin abilities.

Admins were the catastrophes of Yggdrasil, simply because Players could never predict what an Admin would do. They moved so fast and hit so quick that any contingency was never able to be put into play. Most Admins just ran around and played the game, never being allowed to interact with Players or environments, some Admins messed around with people by teleporting them to separate pockets of code where the Admin could mess with them as he saw fit, never being allowed to delete their accounts or do anything insane to them without reverting back to their original form after. Other Admins just screwed around in their own little data realms where they could mess around with the game engine.. Then there was Urasai.

Urasai was an Admin, who, enjoyed interacting with Players. Staging levelled raids on Guild bases, making battlefields for Clans to fight in, and having boss monsters duke it out in epic combat as hundreds of Players watched. He interacted with the world so much that his fellow devs actually put him into the game, calling him the Mad God or God of Tricks, they even implemented a system that randomized an NPC in the base game's reaction to him. And he loved them for it.

Even now, as he decimated a whole realm, he still loved his friends and family. His brother was the sort of Chief Developer in their office while his little sister was in Arts and Animations, he was with the Writers, although he barely contributed to the main game. His job was Ragnarok, the end times. He made the dialogue for every boss during the event, all the side characters that appeared during the event, and generally wrote the whole event itself. It was his Magnum Opus, his masterpiece, the baby he nurtured to adult hood.

Then this shit happened.

"MOTHERFUCKING FUUUCK! AHHHHHHH!" Another never-ending maelstrom of damage finished the last of the army off, it was another apocalyptic event, where the Vanir had lost control of their machines thanks to Loki and needed Players to hold the line while they dealt with the virus in their machines, there was also to possible 'destroy everything' route but the benefits were far outweighed by the time and trouble it would take to kill every single infected robot. Not for Urasai.

He ignored the World Item that appeared in front of him, ignored the congratulations that popped up above him, and pressed [Sell] on the item description for the Divine class gift item that was nearly as powerful as a World Item. He was done, finished, nothing was left for him.

He fell to the ground, his armor being so heavy that he actually sunk into the dirt, and closed his eyes. Rain began to fall, softening the dirt and causing mud and water to fill imprint, the sound of hissing filling his ears as the various fires where put out by the rain fall. Unfair, the word repeated itself in his head.

Unfair

"Where going to have to shut it down."

Unfair

"Well make something better, promise!"

Unfair

"There isn't anything salvageable, I'm sorry man but it's the end."

"UNFAIR!" An orb of pure black exploded from his body, continually expanding and growing, sucking in the earth, water, and air that it came in contact with. An hour later and it was the size of a mountain before dispersing in a hail of black arrows, killing everything within a hundred miles of him. Once the orb was finished dispersing he fell, having been suspended in the air for the duration of the spell.

His body sank into the earth, the imprint being five feet deep. He didn't care for the water that filled up his hole, nor the mud, nor anything for that matter.

Not even the feeling of guilt he felt when his family came to mind, all of them coming together, helping each other, while he just stayed home and played the game. But they wouldn't understand, like a captain of his ship, he was staying with Yggdrasil till the end.

"At least one Admin has to be hear so the Players don't screw everything up." While that wasn't what Admins had to worry about, it was still the stereotype.

He pulled himself out of the trench, the water effects were annoying him, and just sat down in the mud. He just felt, broken, somehow. He was broken by the fact that he would never see the Players who could beat his Dungeon, his Sarlossa. He would never see a Player land the final blow on Diamura the World Eater nor would he ever see someone discover that one hentai Easter Egg and get killed by the Laura Croft's Changing Room trap.

He would never see the game have its true end.

All because the Smog got in Smog was perhaps a company's worst nightmare. With the amount of chemicals in the air, it wasn't a surprise when a new type of gas was created. It was the perfect catastrophe for this new age, because it caused precious metals and plastics to either melt or rust away, it didn't effect organics, save for a minor rash on the neck for people who use nanites heavily. This stuff ate away at equipment, and the dev team had discovered it had eaten away at the bank that held the account they created for the money they had made from sales of Yggdrasil. And so, one melted nano drive later, the developer team had lost all the money they had made, leaving them near broke.

That was why they were shutting down, with their funds being so low they couldn't afford to keep up the game for another year, they only had a few months at best, which was why they announced it only a week before it was happening, to keep the illusion up for just a bit longer. Most people knew about it even before the announcement, though they still played, knowing the end was near.

"It's just too damn unfair." It had taken them literal years to create the game, in this day and age where a 10/10 game could be created in a few months with the right amount of money and equipment, which was why Yggdrasil was ahead of its time, because it used old tactics to be a great game. That was another reason why they were called 'shitty devs' because only a shit head of an idiot would make a gamble like that, as it took so much money to keep the equipment used to create games clean and in tip top shape.

And where does that leave us? Where does that leave me? Sure, he was pretty good at video games, in fact, he was number one in some games. But everything paled in comparison to Yggdrasil, it was like you took the dedication of From Software, the creativity of Nintendo, and the world size of a Blizzard MMO and combined it into a single entity. Those companies where still around, by the way, they just didn't get recognized by their games fanbase, that was the same case for the devs who made Yggdrasil, ever hear anyone call them something other than 'shitty devs?'

None of that mattered anymore, all that was left was a few minutes of game time before the remaining Players were forcibly logged out and left to wallow in their tears. He checked the [Player Online] list one more time, only for the sight to hit him like a Shadow Frigate. Nearly every Guild Master in the top ten was still online, the Master of World Searcher being the only one of them offline, and it broke his heart. These were the people he talked to the most, who enjoyed playing the most, who could achieve the greatest things in this game because they were born to play this game.

All of them are staying at their Guild Bases, staying with their creations till the end…might as well he stood up and opened his [Teleportation] menu and pressed Sarlossa. A flash of white later and he was standing at the helm of his island sized ship, Sarlossa. Named after the very first Guild, it was a massive flying dungeon that could move, aptly named a ship. Its shape was like that of a remote, long and narrow, yet the inside was just as vast as the world it resided in. It was the hardest dungeon to ever grace the game.

Thousands of custom made traps, hundreds of NCPs, both known and unknown, and Ragnarok level bosses at the end, it was his nightmare for all to face. The Helm,, a single room in the back center of the ship, was filled to the brim with items that aided in sending orders instantaneously through the massive ship. This was also where he came to spawn various items and weapons he needed, but he found it tedious to do all the crafting.

So, to save on time, he created the Management System, the NPCs in this room where Managers, all of which had levels in anything involving long distance, and were designed to receive orders, filter them thought their system, and give orders to those under their command to accomplish whatever orders they were given. An example, he could go the Manager of Weapons and request 'pistols' and leave the Manager to their devices, they'll order every single NPC under them to make every single pistol variant that they are capable of creating, take every individual pistol, categorize them, and present them to him.

The system was a pain to create but it was so worth to someone who could create an infinite number of items but still required the skills and equipment to make something out of them. And so he stayed there, overseeing the usual work, until the game shut down.