Chapter Text
Author's Note. Read before proceeding
This is an AU story, so a lot of things have been changed from canon stories intentionally. If you look for a fanfic that sticks absolutely to the canon of Overlord or Tensura, this one might not be for you. The story will have a slower pace compared to your average fanfic, so be aware of that as well.
I am rewriting Harbingers of Change because I had grown dissatisfied with many choices I made, the overall quality of the story, and that was one of the reasons that led me to creative burnout, which I am still recovering from. From now on, all my stories will be released on a volume-by-volume basis.
I know a lot of people will be unhappy that the story is getting rewritten, but at the end of the day, this is a hobby that takes a lot of time and energy, and if I am not enjoying writing the story, then it quickly leads nowhere. This time, I will not make promises, and I hope you'll enjoy my writing as is.
One more thing. I am not consenting to this story having an AI-voiced audio version. If you ever find one on this particular version of the story, it was done without me agreeing to it.
Chapter 1
The deepest reaches of the castle were quiet. One could hear their own heartbeat as loud as drums in the heart of the cavern repurposed as the mage quarters. This was a perfect place for meditation. Jaine sat cross-legged on the goat fur mat, her old bones aching from the prolonged rest in such an uncomfortable position. She, as the court magician of the Hero King Gazel, was no stranger to the exploration of the immaterial realms and subtle matters. Any magician worth their salt should be.
Breathe in. Breathe out. Her breathing was so precise and so practiced that a musician could have used it as the rhythm for a somber melody. The darkness behind her eyes started to fill up with a scene.
Jaine found herself standing in a decaying forest, derelict castles looming over the treetops in all directions. She could smell the rot, a pungent sweetness of an animal carcass mixed with compost, so potent the air felt liquid. Only dark clouds hung overhead. The crooked trees whispered her truth: the creator of this place had left without appointing a caretaker.
She had seen this exact vision more times than she could count, yet she still didn't know the meaning of it. And that was the thing with visions, she saw them again and again until she understood what she was seeing, whether it took days or centuries.
Most of the time, the vision just faded, but this time it was different. Jaine felt that the air was heavier than usual. Almost electrical. A mighty storm was brewing.
The sky rumbled, and lightning smashed into one of the castles, shattering the derelict building in an instant. Wind picked up, and rain began to fall. She was in the middle of the storm. Her breathing faltered, but the vision prevailed, so vivid, so real, she felt her clothing get wet.
Her breathing hitched again, almost stopping altogether. Above the trees, a towering, hooded figure appeared and reached out its hand, its fingers unnatural and bone-like. It seemed like Death itself.
Terror gripped her heart, giving her a near irresistible desire to flee as she started to pray to spirits for the vision to end. Her fear grew ever more intense, and her instinct screamed to stay out of the way of this figure and the hooded horsemen emerging from the trees.
The deathly entity moved, entire swaths of forests decaying away as it passed, and the storm grew more intense, lightning striking every heartbeat. The horsemen, wielding terrifying weapons of their own, the archer, the knight, the sorcerer, the shield, and the sage were all she could make out. Were there more? She couldn't tell, and together they swept away everything in their path.
The horsemen charged past her, continuing their grim duty. An immense reaper plowed the trees to her right and moved on, the being's shadow washing over her momentarily.
As he passed, fields of grass grew, new life springing out from the death and destruction that came before. However, the new life was still shrouded in the looming darkness overhead. The flowers planted would not bloom without the sunlight. Soon the horsemen charged down yet another entity. One who Jaine could not envision, a being cloaked in nothing but desire and destruction. It faced down death in defiance of it, but not in support of life. Death and its horsemen collided with the entity, but its strength proved too much; the horsemen were swept away, along with the fields their destruction had nurtured.
Her whole body shook, both physically and in the vision of a fright so overwhelming that she thought she would not, could not, wake from this nightmare.
The world was gone, reduced to an ashen wasteland, no life, no hope. The end of all things.
Jaine opened her eyes, tears forming in her old, tired eyes. It was just a vision, and they seldom were just straightforward, but the utter terror she felt could not be denied. There might be a future where the end of all things happens.
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Momonga: @everyone Yggdrasil servers are shutting down tomorrow on 2138.03.11. I propose we gather one last time to send off our guild base and the game.
Touch Me: What is tty I don't. Hhhhhh ////leav //leave.
HeroHero: I would love to, but I have to work. Maybe we can meet up in another game next Saturday?
Tabula Smaragdina: Are you still playing that old game? I thought it died a year ago? I didn't even know this channel was still active.
Bukubukuchagama: Don't be an asshole, Tabula. Hey, @Momonga, Pero, and I will try to make it, but I have a recording tomorrow, so I don't know how long I'll be busy, so no promises.
Ankoro Mochi Mochi: :potato:
Peroronocino: :potato:
Momonga: :potato:
Bukubukuchagama: Will you all shut up about the potato?! How do you even still remember that????
Tabula Smaragdina: Whatever. If anyone is playing Eternia 4, hit me up. Otherwise, see you all.
Tabula Smaragdina has left the server.
Warrior Takemikazuchi: If @Touch Me is not coming, I won't either. None of you clowns will give me a good melee fight.
Touch Me has left the server.
Blue Planet: 7leave server
Blue Planet has left the server.
Punitto Moe: @Momonga I can't, but we can play a Total War match next weekend and catch up.
Suzuki glanced over the chat log. No one else wrote after that.
XXX XXX XXX XXX
"I'm telling you, Night Angels is presenting a new dancer tonight. Hurry up, or we won't get front seats."
A group of younger co-workers rushed past his cubicle, discussing where they would drink after work. It was a social norm for coworkers to hang out after work, usually involving copious amounts of alcohol and other debauchery. Their youthful faces lit up in excitement, already unbothered by the tiredness of the long workday. He couldn't blame them; having fun with a group of friends was something everyone needed.
He, however, had not participated in such events. Satoru Suzuki had never been the most sociable person. Like an unseen ghost, he was overlooked by the people around him. Co-workers greeted him in the morning, but that was the extent of his workplace interactions most days. He wasn't ugly or repulsive in any way, just painfully unremarkable; average height, a somewhat round face, a standard haircut with no dye in his black hair. Already thirty-two with no social life to speak of, no real-life friends, no living relatives, and no significant other either. Just himself, his work, and his devices.
"Yeah, yeah. Just don't fall for a dancer again. We're already banned from the Sugar Bunnies," One of the young men in the group teasingly reminded the eager ringleader.
"Screw you!" Came an indignant response.
"I hope they have a special on sake…" Their conversation faded as they disappeared down the stairs.
Satoru was in no hurry. He packed his half-eaten lunch, the 'you won't believe it's not lasagna' synthetic block of goop, and put the packet in his jacket's pocket for later consumption as he glanced around. The majority had already left work, not wanting to stay another minute. Some stayed for overtime or to chat with managers to earn 'good employee points', hoping to be assigned better tasks in the future. The long rows of grey, lifeless cubicles and the bright, lifeless office lights above his head flooded his view; it was all there was to see. If there were an afterlife, this would be the very picture of purgatory. Not painful or pleasant, just dull, uninspired, and utterly devoid of creativity.
Another group of coworkers passed by, four young women dragging along a newer employee. Satoru had overheard that she was only thirteen and a recently orphaned girl. "Let's go to a karaoke bar, they have cheap cocktails, and there are always nice guys around who pay for drinks." One of them urged.
It wasn't surprising to see children working or drinking at such a young age. He started at twelve in customer service, if it could even be called that, as it only required basic reading comprehension.
Suzuki stretched his tired bones, feeling the strain of an eleven-hour work shift spent in a chair answering emails and writing reports. A job that could be automated, especially given the responses he had to write, but wasn't because an office drone was more cost-effective than an AI due to the electricity costs of running one. The depletion of the world's clean water supplies killed AI faster than it killed humanity, as with no pure clean water to cool their servers, they had to rely on heavy purification methods which drove maintenance costs through the roof. The irony wasn't lost on him.
He walked past a few people still present; no one paid real attention to him except for the floor manager, who sat behind the table by the stairs and said "goodbye" to anyone passing by without looking up.
"Goodbye," Satoru replied. "Have a nice evening."
"Mhm…" The girl didn't even look up from the screen as she marked Satoru leaving, utterly uninterested in holding a conversation.
After descending twelve floors on foot, he arrived in the dressing area and retrieved his protective suit and breathing mask from the locker. The suit was on its last legs, some places patched up with spares from his previous suit and copious amounts of glue. Satoru knew he should buy a new one, but the suit still performed its main function, so he could justify his frugal decision to wait for a big sale or someone trying to sell his size on the second-hand market.
The breathing mask, on the other hand, needed new filters now. He had already ordered them online, but the pack had not yet been delivered. There was no one to complain to, as he knew very well that complaints addressed to corporations were dismissed or ignored, given that he did the same in his job.
If the office was purgatory, then the streets of Tokyo were hell. In the side streets lingered the undesirables, the ones left behind by corporations and by extension the society as well. The people without a home or a job, literally rotting away as the polluted air ate away at their insides, and the acid-filled rain melted their skin. They were the dying skin cells that coated the surface of this hellish world. The corporate hellhole he lived in kicked out 'undesirables' to the street about as fast as they died, and considering how short one would live without shelter, that was a fairly quick rate. The growing concern of many was the real possibility that more people were being kicked out to die than were being born in the first place. It seemed the entire society was on the verge of collapse.
Life in 2138 was short, harsh, and filled with hardships. Nature was all but gone, people lived in cramped megacities, and only the upper ten percent could afford to live in neighbourhoods protected from the hazardous environment. And even then, only the top one percent could afford to live in neighborhoods with actual plants, and the richest of the richest lived in greenhouses.
The main street, on the other hand, was a neon-filled sensory overload that would shatter the minds of those unwary and naive. The noisy and stench-filled bars, the always-packed gambling dens, the blaring yet dingy shops, and even the brothels with both male and female prostitutes presenting themselves in the large windows, clad in nothing but underwear, sometimes less. He had walked past them countless times. The temptation had been there, to experience the fruit of intimacy, but as like the fake food, paying for sex would feel just as empty. And at this point, he felt it was better not to know exactly what he was missing.
This physical nightmare wasn't his real life anyway. His life was in the digital realm of Yggdrasil, a Dive-VRMMORPG he had spent nearly all of his free time in his adult life in for the last twelve years. And today, the servers were closing. Today, it would end. He walked with heavy steps, feeling like he was heading towards his own funeral.
A gnawing emptiness in his heart that was gradually growing more unbearable, like a void sucking out his very being into the depths of nonexistence, leaving only a shell behind. For the last year, he had been playing alone. His guild, Ainz Ooal Gown, once a thriving community of friends and comrades in arms, was now but a collection of memories of good times once had. Out of the forty-one members, thirty-seven had quit and moved on, and the last three had not been online for a long, long time. He had sent an invite to every single guild member to come back online for one last gathering and witness the end of his beloved game - but there were no guarantees anyone would.
Satoru stared at the gray sky above as he walked. How much had he wanted to leave this place, this rotten and dying world. He knew he wasn't the only one; isekai was still the most popular fiction genre, surpassing even romance. A silly notion to believe that one could be summoned or reborn in a new, better world. But when you live in hell, it's the dream of paradise that carries you on.
'What a silly dream. To hope I would be isekai'd. Where's Truck-Kun when you need him?' Satoru chuckled at his own joke and returned his attention to the street ahead. He was almost out of the relatively safe commercial area and entering the working-class housing district, where the homeless and the gangs roamed free, pillaging and robbing for sustenance.
In this realm of dog-eat-dog, his disheveled and run-down appearance worked in his favor. If one looked like he had nothing to lose, he was less likely to be harassed, as even the predators didn't want to risk getting stabbed in the face by prey just for a few yen and a half-eaten lunch.
There were some curious gazes as usual, but he reached his home safely. The one-room apartment with a bed, shower, kitchen, and a VR chair was all he had, despite the massive rent he paid each week. Satoru put his protective suit on a rack and, after a quick routine and a shower, he was ready for the last visit to Yggdrasil. He put on the VR helmet, logged in, and let his body go limp.
Proofreading by MFKZ_rocker, SwissChocolates, Skalgrim Fellaxe, fvvck, clagan, DrOxykush, drrx, jutan, and Ervinas.
Editing by drrx and SwissChocolates.
Discord link: https://discord.gg/ehheFyJa88