Chapter 102- The Truth.

Chapter 102: Chapter 102- The Truth.

Elona turned away from the exit, heading deeper into the building. The secretary grabbed her arm. "Ma’am, you can’t—"

Elona met her eyes and pulled free. "I have to go. You should evacuate everyone else."

She pushed through the door and into the burning building with no fear.

Leo watched her run straight toward the fire and, without really deciding anything, he followed behind her into the stairway. Half worried, half curious...

The secretary opened her mouth to stop them, but they were already gone. She turned instead to getting everyone else out of the building safely as Elona asked.

The stairway connected Building Four where Elona’s Private room was..... to the building seven where they were currently. Elona was halfway down the stairwell when the second detonation hit.

Building Four’s secondary fuel cell—a smaller reserve tank holding thirty thousand gallons of liquid oxygen and RP-1 Engine—caught the edge of the first fireball’s thermal column. What followed wasn’t an explosion in the usual sense. It was a pressure wave, a wall of force that ripped through the connecting corridor between Building Four and Building Seven like a fist punching through paper. The stairwell shook violently. Dust sifted down from the ceiling in sheets.

Elona didn’t slow down. Her steps stayed fast, steady, purposeful. She hit the ground floor and shoved through the fire door into the corridor beyond, where emergency lights strobed red against a wailing alarm. Workers streamed past her in the opposite direction, faces tight with fear.

Elona pushed against the stream of workers coming towards her as she made her way forward. Leo right on her trails, but he was easily moving past the workers with ease.

The corridor split ahead—one path toward the main evacuation route, the other toward the administrative annex, offices, and Elona’s private quarters. The heat here was worse. Leo could feel it pressing against his skin like a physical weight. He couldn’t figure out what she was risking her life for. What could possibly be worth this?

Elona reached for a door handle.

Above them, the steel groaned—the entire truss system straining under the heat, beams sagging under their own weight. A fifteen-foot I-beam rated to hold ten thousand pounds was bending like it was made of rubber, the bolts that held it in place already softening and giving way.

Leo watched Elona step directly beneath it.

The beam let out one last shuddering groan as the last bolt melted through—and then it came crashing down.

Leo moved before he even finished the thought.

One second he was behind her. The next, he was in front of her, arms raised, catching the full weight of the falling girder against its flange. His knees buckled under the impact.

The beam had to weigh at least six hundred pounds, probably more, and gravity plus the height of the fall made it hit even harder. His muscles screamed, his shoes skidded against the floor—but his grip held.

Elona had been certain she was about to die. Eyes shut, arms raised in a useless brace, she was still screaming when she realized the impact never came.

She opened her eyes. "Mr. Stone? What are you doing here?"

"Heh... hey." Leo forced the word out through gritted teeth. "You should probably move. Now would be good."

"Wait—just one second—" Her eyes were wet, pleading, and before he could argue she’d already thrown open the door in front of them.

A dog burst out—white and brown, a broad-chested pit bull with a wide head and soft eyes, tail already wagging the instant it spotted her. Seconds earlier it had been cowering, whimpering, terrified—but all of that vanished the moment it saw Elona.

It leapt on her, licking at her face. She was crying now, but with relief, running her hands over its fur, checking it for injuries.

Meanwhile, Leo was still standing there holding an entire steel beam over his shoulders.

"Um. Can we go now?" he grunted.

For a moment he just stared at her, stunned. He’d just risked his life to save her, and she was busy playing with a dog.

"Oh—right. Bubbles, come." She grabbed the dog and hurried toward the corridor, and only then did Leo finally set the beam down.

"Wait." He caught up to her. "Don’t tell me you went back in there just for the dog."

"Yes," she said simply.

Leo stood there, momentarily speechless.

So she risked both our lives for a dog. Great. Guess Bubbles ranks higher than me.

He wanted to be annoyed, but then he thought of the two cubs back in Myth Online, and found he understood her a little better than he wanted to admit.

The three of them—man, woman, and dog—made their way up through the smoke and heat, emergency lights strobing the whole way, until they finally broke into open air that tasted like scorched metal.

The parking lot was packed with evacuees—workers, security, a fleet of fire trucks throwing red and white light across the crowd. Overhead, the sky had turned a sick orange from the fire.

Bubbles sat at Elona’s feet, panting, fur streaked gray with dust. She smoothed a hand between his ears, the other resting against his back, and Leo noticed her fingers were trembling. She’d sprinted past her own security team and secretary and straight into a burning building—pure adrenaline carrying her the whole way. Now that it was fading, the fear was finally catching up.

She caught Leo looking at her shaking hands and quickly straightened, tucking both hands into her pockets.

That’s when the crowd parted, and an old man stepped through.

Master Rook?

He looked smaller than Leo remembered—short, stocky, wearing a plain gray henley and dark pants that looked slept in. He was barefoot, and had apparently walked the entire length of the SpaceZ campus that way—across gravel, asphalt, broken glass—without a single mark on his feet. His face hadn’t changed: weathered, blunt-featured, wearing that permanent squint of a man who spent more time watching things nobody else could see.

He stopped about ten feet away. His eyes landed on Leo and stayed there.

He exhaled—a long breath, like he’d been holding it for longer than he’d realized.

"You’re fine, brat," he said, voice flat. Elona turned to look at him too.

He crossed the remaining distance, the crowd seeming to part for him without anyone quite noticing they were doing it. When he finally stood close enough to really look at Leo, his eyes went wide.

"Last time I saw you, your qi was barely hanging on—like the last flicker before a candle goes out. And now look at you. Full. Brighter than I’ve ever seen it."

Leo turned that over for a second and figured it out: the thirty-minute freeze must have refilled whatever qi I’d burned through, and then some.

"Did you feel anything different, after getting logged out?" Leo asked.

Rook raised an eyebrow. "Different how?"

"Myth Online isn’t just a game anymore." Leo’s face stayed completely serious. "It’s bleeding into reality."

Silence...

Both Rook and Elona just looked at him like he’d lost his mind.

Then Rook burst out laughing. Elona, on the other hand, looked genuinely irritated—like she couldn’t believe he was cracking jokes in the middle of an actual crisis. She nearly snapped at him for it. Disappointed..

Seeing neither of them taking him seriously, Leo grabbed both their arms and pulled them off to the side, Bubbles trotting along behind.

"I know how this sounds. I know you won’t believe me. But it’s real. I think that thirty-minute freeze in the game sped up something—some kind of synchronization."

They both just stared at him, unconvinced.

So he raised his hand, and a golden flame flared to life in his palm.

"This. This is my fire—from the game. I can call it here now, in the real world. My strength’s changed too. I could lift an elephant if I had to."

He turned to Elona. "You watched me catch that entire beam when it came down. Did you even stop to ask yourself how?"

She paused. She’d genuinely forgotten. She’d been so consumed with worry over Bubbles that she forgot how she had survived....as that hadn’t even registered in her mind.

Something in her expression shifted—she was starting to believe him.

Rook, meanwhile, was patting Leo up and down, clearly hunting for wires, some kind of rig, anything mechanical that could explain the flame.

He found nothing.

"Brat. What exactly are you playing at?"

Leo sighed, turned to the wall beside them, and drove his fist straight through it.

"Hey!" Elona jumped back, startled. Rook just stood there, jaw hanging open.

"I’d need a full qi burst just to manage that," Rook muttered. "And you did it like it was nothing?"

Leo sighed again. "This is exactly why I didn’t want to tell anyone."

"The game," he said, "was a tutorial. A tutorial for something that’s coming."

"Everything we think we know is about to change. And it’s a lot less than we think it is. There are civilizations out there—cosmic ones. We were never alone in this universe."

He looked between the two of them, letting that settle before he added, "Once the mana saturates enough, the world wakes up for real. And the tutorial ends."