Chapter 101- The real world.

Chapter 101: Chapter 101- The real world.

Within a guest room of the Space Z building, a flame burned steady in Leo’s palm.

He willed it out, and the fire died down leaving the room gray again—just fluorescent light and silence.

Leo turned his hand over, checking. No burns. No scorch marks. And yet the heat had been real, undeniably real. He had felt it in his hands, with his skins.

So I’ve got flame resistance in the real world too? At least against my own fire, apparently.

Still, the flame had felt weaker here—smaller, less potent than it was in Myth Online?

Before he could chase that thought any further, a knock came at the door.

"Mr. Stone." A woman’s voice—the secretary, he recognized it. "Mr. Mosk would like to see you. Please get ready. I’ll wait."

"Okay, coming."

He crossed the room. He’d already cleaned up and changed into something presentable before she even knocked as he had to clean the waste coming out of his body, so there was nothing left to do but head out. His hand found the door handle, and he twisted.

The latch was steel—commercial-grade, the kind meant to survive decades of use. But under Leo’s ordinary, casual grip, it crumpled.....

Not broken. Not snapped. Crumpled, like it was made of foil. The steel folded inward with a sharp crunch as the mechanism inside gave way.

Leo let go instantly and jumped back.

"What the hell?"

The door swung open, hanging loose on its hinges, the latch now a twisted knot of metal.

Leo stood frozen. So did the secretary, staring at him from the hallway.

"I—" He was sweating bullets. "I didn’t mean to do that. Honestly, Ms. Mosk should hire a better construction company. That latch was a total scam."

The secretary just blinked at him, even more stunned by the excuse than by the door itself.

Leo glanced down at his own fingers. He knew exactly what had happened—he just had no idea how much strength he was actually carrying now, post-synchronization.

He exhaled and forced a casual tone. "Shall we get going then?"

A maid stood nearby holding a tray with a glass of water. Leo picked it up without thinking—then paused, a new thought forming.

His reflexes. He wanted to test them.

He let the glass slip....

It fell maybe six inches below his waist before his hand snapped out and caught it clean. The catch was so fast that neither the maid nor the secretary even registered the glass had fallen—if not for his muttered "Oops," they’d never have known. The water inside hadn’t even rippled.

Then he remembered the wall back in the room. The one his fist had gone straight through leaving the scattered dust and broken concrete particles on the floor.

"Oh—when you’re fixing the door," he said to the secretary, "you might want to check the wall too. I barely leaned on it and there’s a hole now. Whoever built this place cut some serious corners."

He was, in essence, telling a trillionaire’s staff that her mansion was cheaply built. His face went red just saying it, but he pushed through the embarrassment and kept his expression flat.

The secretary tilted her head. "You do realize there are security cameras in the corner of every room?" She let that sit a beat. "Hallways, lobbies, elevators, the vault—everywhere."

Leo froze mid-step.

"Don’t worry," she added, a small smile creeping in her face, clearly enjoying his panic. "The camera in that room only covers the door. It’s just there to log who comes and goes."

So the wall’s safe, at least. But the door handle—that’s definitely on tape. God, I really hope nothing with the fire got caught too.

They moved down a corridor lined floor-to-ceiling with glass, and through it Leo caught his first real look at the world outside: the SpaceZ camps sprawled across the Texas flatlands like its own small city—fabrication buildings, launch pads, office towers, the bare skeletal frames of half-built rockets. Workers in helmets threaded between the structures far below.

They rode a glass-walled elevator up to the forty-second floor, and the secretary led him toward the observation deck—Ms. Mosk’s preferred spot in the building. It was a glass-enclosed room overlooking the main fabrication floor, with twelve monitors cycling through security feeds, telemetry data, and news broadcasts. All the CC cameras had been being monitored and could be monitored anythime.

Elona Mosk stood with her back to the room, gray hair pulled tight at the base of her skull, dressed in the same severe black suit she always seemed to wear. Her plain steel watch caught the light every so often as she moved.

The moment Leo stepped in, her voice cut through, flat but not unkind.

"Mr. Stone." She lowered her sunglasses just enough to look him over. "I heard you broke a door handle in the guest wing."

"I gripped it a little too hard," Leo said with a shrug. "You should really look into a more reliable contractor."

Elona let out a short laugh. "Yes. Yes, I probably should." She turned fully now, studying him with something like genuine curiosity in her eyes.

"Sit." She pointed towards the sofa.

Leo nodded but didn’t move right away, his attention caught on the monitors—news feeds, satellite footage, cycling one after another.

Elona lowered herself into her chair, crossing her legs.

"Let me ask you something, Mr. Stone." She steepled her fingers. "Hypothetically. Say you’re a defense contractor. A nation-state offers you a contract worth more than your entire annual revenue. Nothing illegal about the work—but it’s morally... questionable. Do you sign it?"

What is this woman getting at? Leo wondered.

"Depends," he said.

"Depends on what?"

"On whether that nation-state is the one I actually need to worry about." He gave a small chuckle.

"That’s not really an answer."

She leaned back, recrossing her legs the other way.

"Let me try again. Let’s say that the world’s falling apart—real chaos, the kind that doesn’t get fixed. And you happen to have resources, information, leverage. You could use it to save everyone. Or you could keep it all for yourself. Which do you choose?"

Leo’s eyes stayed on the monitors as he answered. "I’d start forging."

"Forging?"

"If the world’s falling apart, people are going to need weapons. Tools. Someone has to make them."

Before she could respond, one of the monitors flickered and went black. Then two more. The satellite feed dissolved into static, snapped back for a second, and cut out again. A ticker appeared across every screen at once—not a news crawl, but raw data, the kind SpaceZ’s deep-space monitoring division only pushed out when something had blown past their detection thresholds.

SEISMIC ANOMALY — GLOBAL PATTERN DETECTED

A list of coordinates began scrolling rapidly across the screens. Leo read them as they came.

29.9792° N, 31.1342° E — Giza, the Great Pyramids.

24.5251° N, 76.9774° W — Bermuda.

11.3493° N, 142.1996° E — the Mariana Trench.

51.1789° N, 1.8262° W — Stonehenge.

25.3444° S, 131.0369° E — Uluru.

13.1631° S, 72.5450° W — Machu Picchu.

27.1208° S, 109.3497° W — Easter Island.

"Why are all of these ancient sites?" Elona murmured, half to herself.

Then the radar alarms went off—energy spikes at every single location, off the charts.

Elona was already on her feet. "Get me the Director of Monitoring and Implementation. Now."

The secretary dialed, and the call connected almost instantly.

"Ma’am." The voice on the line was thin, sharp, edged with panic. "Ma’am, we’re picking up energy signatures across every deep-space sensor we have. Whatever this is, it’s not seismic—the frequency doesn’t match anything in our database—"

The tremor hit before she could finish.

The whole building shuddered and swayed. Leo grabbed the edge of the table to keep his footing. Elona didn’t move an inch—feet planted, riding out the shaking like it was nothing new to her.

Then it stopped.

Silence.

And then, from somewhere deep within the building’s forty-two stories of reinforced steel, came a sound. An explosion.

"Fuel systems." Elona’s voice had lost its calm. "The rocket assembly section—Building Four."

Her aide was already moving, phone to his ear. "Fire teams are—"

The sound grew louder, and the monitors caught it in real time.

A camera on Building Four’s east side captured the exact moment a welded seam in the RP-1 fuel line sheared apart—stress that had been quietly building since the first energy spikes registered minutes ago. That seam had held for six years without issue. But something in the air, something that had no business being there, had made the metal brittle, tired. The tremor was simply the final push it needed to fail.

Fuel vapor met a live wire. The spark became a flame. The flame found more vapor and turned into a fireball.

The feed went white.

"Evacuate Building Four!" Elona’s voice cut through the room now—sharp, precise, no louder than before but carrying the unmistakable weight of someone who never gave an order she wasn’t certain of. "Secondary fire teams to the fuel depot. No one goes in without thermal suits. Get the assembly crews clear of the perimeter—now."