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

"How are we holding?" Kris asked, leaning over the set of monitors hastily rigged in the tunnel of Tom's making. Even though he held the highest rank in the place, he didn't bother to act haughty for no reason at all.

"So far, so good," a youth sitting by the monitor replied. He did so without even a single stop in his furious tapping on the keyboard. "It seems that they have yet to locate the leak, but they already know that something is wrong," the young man explained before tapping into his keyboard a few more times and invoking a completely new screen to the biggest of his monitors.

"Look at those two sets of numbers," the youth said, pointing his finger at the monitor. "The ones above are how the connection usually gets reported and updated. Those below are the ones produced by our connection," he said, turning silent after he did so.

Back on the surface