MotivatedSloth

"Hello, sir. Are you cashing out or leveling up?"

Dungeons Online was the first game that cracked the system. Let nerds earn by nerding, and they will nerd forever. And Dungeons Online did just that. 

Noobs turned into middle-class workers. Pro-players turned into celebrities and multi-millionaires. 

And there was Tom. Likely, the only top ranker that lived off the scraps and cat-food. A courtesy of his father that went and disappeared, leaving Tom with just enough money to survive until his graduation. Until the day where the option of cashing out would appear.

Dungeons Online. A game where developers never shared a single bit of information. A game where the death of one's avatar is permanent. A game that can turn a beggar into a lord just as quickly as turning a celebrity into nobody. 

But where does all this money comes from? How is it connected to the unnatural disaster that all governments across the world buried any information off? And how is this all connected to Tom's missing father?

Dungeons Online

"What kind of monster do you think it will be?" Claudia asked while leisurely trodding behind the man.

"A goblin?" Tom replied with a question on his own. "Maybe a slime?" he continued guessing for a while before shaking his head. "If it works just like in-game, then we can guess for an entire day, and we still might miss," he said.

Each of the dungeon's floors had a limited number of different monsters populating it. It was a truth that Tom learned even before discovering how the entire Dungeons Online was just a ruse to cover an actual dungeon that he was in right now. But while he couldn't understand why the game developers didn't share any information about the rules within the dungeon before, it turned out to be quite simple now.

The owners of the game never shared any details of it with the players because they never were behind the creation of the dungeon in the first place.

Annoying boss monster