Reality overload Chapter 5: “OH COME ON!”

Read chapter 5 of Reality overload by Namizou on NovelPedia.

I was floating. Not peacefully, not serenely. more like a corpse someone forgot to finish drowning. The sensation was weirdly weightless and nauseating at the same time. I had no idea how long I'd been here. Minutes? Hours? A full server maintenance cycle? A glitch? No telling. "Oh... right. We were fighting that scary‑ass orc... and then... then what?" My memory coughed up a flash of pain, the sensation of falling, and then... _________________________________________________________ SYSTEM ERROR: MEMORY CORRUPT. ———————————————————————————————————— Nothing. "Hugh... my head." I groaned. The pain felt like someone was trying to carve their initials into my brain with a rusty spoon. I stayed curled up in agony until it finally ebbed to something less murderous. When I dared to open my eyes, I was greeted by... white. Just white...? A vast, endless, soul‑tax‑audit kind of white. No color. No shadows. No textures. Just pure, existentially offensive emptiness. Then a voice rippled through the void. "It would seem you are finally conscious." I froze. The voice was feminine, calm, lilting. The kind of voice that could soothe a rampaging dragon or convince you to sign a suspiciously long contract, with fine print you could barely read. It echoed from everywhere at once, like a choir of one, but somehow not? IDK. My brain was to mushy right now to care why or how. "W‑Who's t‑there!!" I squeaked. Yes, squeaked. My manly dignity was clearly still buffering caught at 99%. The voice chuckled...warm, amused, and absolutely omnipotent. "Do not fear, little fragment. You stand before She Who Shapes Worlds, the Architect of Souls, the First Light of Creation... though most mortals simply call me the Goddess Hestia" A soft chime rang in my ears. _____________________________________________________ [NEW ENTITY DISCOVERED: Goddess of Creation]. | Level: ??? Threat Level: Please Don't Annoy Her. | —————————————————————————————————- My stomach dropped. Great. I died, and now I was in a cosmic customer service lobby with the games literal goddess of creation. Because of course I was. So...You meet the in‑game goddess when you die. Man, the devs really thought of everything. Like, "Hey, you died horribly — here's a cosmic customer‑service rep made of sparkles." Talking to no one in particular. "I brought you here for a reason," the voice said, with a laugh smooth as silk and twice as alluring. "Under normal circumstances, you would have died. The strain of the link between almost snapped your fragile mind." Fragile mind? I thought Rude, but fair. Before I could complain, reality hiccuped, like someone hit Ctrl+Z on the void, and the Goddess appeared in front of me. Not descended, not materialized, not phased in. No. She popped into existence like a magician's trick in reverse. Instead of pulling a rabbit out of a hat, she shoved the entire universe into... the hat? The rabbit? "Ahh!!," I sighed. my mind not able to keep up. Better to not think about it while I'm having an existential crisis. My mouth fell open in stunned silence. Exe. Brain error. [SYSTEM MESSAGE: Cognitive Processing Failed. Rebooting...] She was beautiful and ethereal, made of starlight and... marshmallows? Yes. Marshmallows. Like someone took the night sky and added a suspiciously whimsical dessert aesthetic. Her face was like a porcelain doll, flawless, majestic, and absolutely the type of face that could smite you for mispronouncing her title. Her hair flowed like the Milky Way, shimmering with tiny points of light that shifted whenever she moved, like galaxies politely rearranging themselves. And her eyes... Her eyes were twin stars.Warm, blazing, fierce, annd unflinching. The kind of eyes that said, "I could create a world with a thought... or delete you like a corrupted save file." A soft chime echoed in my head. _________________________ [STATUS DEBUFF] affects: / reverence: