CHAPTER 264: GAME IN THE REAL WORLD

It didn’t take long for the alarms to reach the quiet rooms behind governments. Not the sirens on the streets, but the silent ones. The kind that lived inside servers, whispered through satellites, and buzzed behind encrypted doors.

Inside a concrete room six floors beneath the Pentagon, five men and women in grey suits stared at a holographic projection of the Eclipse Online UI.

"This," one of them muttered, "shouldn’t exist."

A pause.

"And yet it does," said another.

A security feed from Germany played on loop. A teenager leapt fifteen feet into the air, dodged a car, and landed without injury. Another clip followed from Nigeria—a woman stopped a mugging by forming what looked like a digital shield mid-panic. Tokyo. Cairo. Santiago. New York. More clips. More anomalies.

Every single one had the same thing in common.

Eclipse Online.

"Project Iris is awake," someone whispered. "It’s not just affecting cognition. It’s rewriting neurology."

"And more than that," the lead said, adjusting her glasses. "Reality bleed. That’s what the reports call it. Neural sync so deep the body responds in the real world."

"How is NovaCorp keeping this under wraps?"

"They’re not," she replied. "They just aren’t explaining it."

Silence again. Thick. Tense.

Then the decision came.

"We need to acquire it."

No one questioned it. That was just the next step.

Operation Blacklight was approved in less than twenty-four hours. Not an attack. Not a war.

A buyout. A takeover. Silent. Total.

NovaCorp’s core servers were located in NovaCity, a jurisdiction barely aligned with international law. Adams was untouchable by normal means. But that didn’t stop them from trying.

Encrypted messages went out. Offers. Promises. Threats wrapped in smiles.

Other countries did the same.

In Moscow, agents were briefed under frost-lit chandeliers. In Beijing, a round table was lit by pulsing monitors showing active Eclipse maps. Paris. London. Tel Aviv. Riyadh. Delhi. They all saw it. They all wanted it.

Because Eclipse wasn’t just a game.

It was the next arms race.

The question wasn’t who would control it.

It was who could convince Adams.

Back in NovaCity, Adams was watching the sun slide behind the skyline. His office was quiet. The kind of quiet that came after building gods.

The Eclipse core pulsed in the glass casing beside his desk. Not servers. Not wires. Just a floating orb of light. A digital singularity. The first true crossover point between game code and physical matter.

He knew the messages were coming.

And they had.

Diplomatic emails. "Urgent" encrypted calls. A few veiled threats. Even an offer to make him a political envoy for the U.N.

Adams just sipped his tea.

They didn’t understand. Eclipse wasn’t for sale.

He turned as the door opened.

Kieran stepped in, eyes low, visor under his arm.

"It’s starting," Kieran said.

"I know."

"They want it."

"Of course they do."

"What if they try to take it?"

Adams smiled, slow and tired.

"Let them try."

A private meeting was held somewhere beneath Zurich. Heads of several European agencies gathered in secret, speaking in hushed voices and cold logic.

"He won’t give it up," one agent said.

"He might," another replied, "if we offer him protection. He’s made enemies."

"He doesn’t need protection. He has Eclipse."

"Then we find someone who can beat him inside it."

They started drafting names. Gamers. Hackers. Operatives trained in mental warfare. Some were already in Eclipse. Most didn’t stand a chance.

Because Adams wasn’t just the man behind the game.

He was inside it.

And his character wasn’t ordinary.

Rumors whispered of a presence in the core server. A user ID that couldn’t be traced. A player who only appeared during resets. They called him Nullborn.

Some said he didn’t move. He just watched.

Others said he could rewrite zones just by standing still.

A few claimed he wasn’t human anymore.

In Tokyo, a tech minister laid a simple file on the table.

"We have two paths," she said.

"Go on."

"One, we partner with NovaCorp. We offer silence. Funding. Influence."

"And the other?"

She looked around the table.

"We build our own."

"Impossible," a man across from her replied. "We don’t know how they did it. The neural mesh, the sync rate, the bleed-over effect... it isn’t code. It’s something else."

"Then we take it."

Silence.

Then a quiet nod.

Three weeks passed.

Adams finally responded.

Not with a statement.

But with an update.

Eclipse Online 2.0

New patch notes included a curious line:

[International Territories Have Been Merged Into Core Realm. Players from all regions now converge. No borders. No firewalls. No restrictions.]

The governments lost it.

Their private trackers couldn’t follow users anymore. Regional logins were scrambled. The in-game economy was reshuffled overnight. Powers began evolving on their own.

NPCs showed sentience.

Some even remembered previous timelines.

A white room. Somewhere beyond what used to be a simulation.

Adams stood on a cliff.

The sky above him shimmered with binary auroras.

Behind him, the Nova Sentinel walked slowly, its golden eyes glowing dim.

"They’re scared," the Sentinel said.

"Of course they are."

"What if they come here?"

Adams turned, placing his hand on the Sentinel’s chest. "Then they come."

The Sentinel watched him.

"Will you fight them?"

Adams didn’t answer.

He just smiled.

Then he looked up at the sky.

His voice was calm.

"They don’t get it yet."

The sky responded.

A pulse rippled outward.

And the next stage began.

Not in-game.

But in the world.

And the only thing everyone knew was this:

The game was no longer separate from life.

And Adams wasn’t building a product.

He was building the future.

One patch at a time.

The news spread like wildfire, not in headlines, but in hushed whispers, dark corners of forums, and long-winded tech blogs.

Eclipse Online 2.0 was not just an update. It was a paradigm shift.

In the coming days, the world was forced to wake up.

Across the globe, players logged in, only to find the boundaries of the game had collapsed. The bright lights of New York mixed with the neon streets of Tokyo, the ancient ruins of Cairo were connected to the futuristic skyline of NovaCity. The Core Realm—a new name for the world within Eclipse—had swallowed up everything.

And nobody could escape it.

At first, the confusion hit hard. Players couldn’t log off. They tried—oh, they tried—but their systems simply wouldn’t process the logout command. Some tried hard resets, power-offs, even pulling their plugs. But nothing worked.

Eclipse had become more than a game. It was now a part of them.

In the shadows of government offices, a decision had already been made.

Adams wasn’t just playing a game anymore. He had become something else. And with it, he had unlocked something no one could take back.

A global arms race had started. Not for weapons, but for knowledge, power, and control over something far greater than anyone had anticipated.

And the world was starting to realize: Eclipse wasn’t just a game. It was the future.