Chapter 1: Chapter 1: Pregame (part 1)

The 4X genre was my favorite genre ever since childhood.

eXplore

eXpand

eXploit

eXterminate

Admittedly, it could have been called the 4E genre and confused fewer people, but 4X just sounded better. Not to mention that 4E usually made people think of tabletop roleplaying game editions instead.

But that didn’t matter. What did matter was that I managed to make it to the final round in a tournament for my favorite game, Endless Empires III. It was the latest entry to the Endless Empires series and was regarded as the greatest 4X game of all time, which was pretty impressive considering how picky 4X players could be. It was probably a tie between 4X and MMO players when it came to who the hardest to please was. Especially when it came to their competitive communities.

Surprisingly, though, Endless Empires III was a massive success when it came to pleasing everybody. It offered viable builds for every playstyle, made sure that every match felt fresh and unique thanks to the map generation and diversity of factions, units, and technologies, and it was given frequent content updates that managed to always give players more variety without invalidating any earlier content or breaking the balance.

If I was told to bet on one of two things happening between such competent game developers existing or God personally descending upon Earth and proving his existence, I would have put money on the latter. Fortunately, the former was what reality turned out to have.

As for the tournament, I stuck to my favorite build for it. I preferred a tall playstyle where I focused entirely on taking a single city and pushing it to its absolute limits while befriending the minor factions around me and supplying them with resources to boost their armies. It was one of the more diplomatic ways to play the game. My sole city was buffed to the heavens and surrounded by NPC-controlled, minor factions who would gladly die to protect it.

Those minor factions also helped me out in my own empire by giving access to unique technologies, buildings, and units by befriending them. Not to mention that they would migrate to my city to give it even more workers.

It was a playstyle that I believed captured the American spirit the most. Building up your own city to be a powerhouse capable of standing on its own, accepting migrants from all the other factions to give you even more options by integrating their technologies, and privately funding smaller nations to fight for you. All while also heavily focusing on economic policies, technologies, and buildings to make sure that you never run out of money.

The only things missing to really make it a truly American playstyle were steak and bourbon.

That being said, I had victory secured. All those smaller nations I befriended were so well funded by me that they could spam out raiding parties to harass my only remaining competition. My competition was a single player who owned more than half the map with sprawling cities while I owned less than a tenth of the map, but my one tenth of the map was a single, massive city infinitely growing in size. Not to mention that owning so much territory didn’t matter when my opponent couldn’t protect it from all of the armies harassing it.

I didn’t even have to do anything. I could have waited it out and won since my enemy couldn’t keep up with the army spam raiding his territories.

But I wasn’t going to make him wait. Besides, it was boring to the viewers watching if I didn’t do anything. That was why I cracked my neck, my knuckles, and stretched my arms above my head before revealing what would seal the deal and finish the match.

And that just so happened to be an excessive number of nuclear missiles. So many nukes that even Gandhi would blush like a schoolgirl looking up at Mount Rushmore.

All I had to do was click a single button to launch the nukes.

But I was never going to get to click it. Before I could, a voice that sounded like it came from everywhere at once filled the ears of everybody around.

“Your world has been nominated as one of the prizes for the upcoming Dominion Expansion game! Please remain calm and carefully read all of the following information to understand what is happening. Thank you for your cooperation!”

Everybody in the tournament room froze for a moment before looking at one another and talking to try and figure out what was going on. The moderator for the tournament match paused it until we could figure things out.

That was when something that looked like a status screen from a video game popped up in front of me. Not just in front of me, but in front of everybody. One for every person.

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I couldn’t even finish reading the first page before members of the audience were panicking and running out of the building. Unfortunately, it looked like I wasn’t going to claim an official victory since the game moderator was one of them.

“He could have unpaused first,” I said before sighing and standing up.

My opponent, who was sitting at the desktop across from me, stood up with shaky hands. “Do—do you really think now’s the time for that? Didn’t you hear what they said? Did you read what showed up?”

“Yeah. It’s probably a prank.”

“I don’t think the technology exists to pull a prank like this, man…”

I shrugged and held my hand out for a shake. “We might not have finished it, but good game.”

My opponent hesitated to shake my hand, but he eventually managed to.

“You call that a handshake? Are you a boy or a man? Put some more strength into it.”

“Ri-right.” He tightened his grip a little bit, but it was still disappointing. I felt like I was shaking hands with a premature kitten instead of an adult man.

But I could tell he was trying despite how shaken up he was, and that was all that mattered. “That’s more like it. Hopefully, we don’t get interrupted by some childish prank next time.”

“Do-do you really think it’s just a prank?”

“As opposed to what?”

“I—I don’t know! Aliens, or—or God or something!”

“I’d sooner trust a redcoat to give up tea than I would believe in either of—”

I found myself in a completely foreign environment. One moment, I was standing on stage with my opponent. The next moment, I was on top of a stone slab in a red room with runes and pentagrams all over the walls.

“Huh.”

I was starting to think that maybe there was some legitimacy to something beyond a simple prank going on. Either that, or the water the tournament venue provided us was spiked with something causing us to hallucinate.

Then that window from before popped up in front of me again.

“Alright, that convinced me. This is a prank,” I said, feeling stupid for even beginning to think it might be anything else.

And it sounded like whoever was behind the prank was about to open the only door to the room.

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