Thorin's First Thundersday of Harvestfall, 1442, realm of harmonic resonance.

Thorin's private realm hummed with a rhythm only the lord of arts himself could fully appreciate. Silver arcs of electricity danced along suspended conduits, connecting towers of shimmering steel that vibrated with the faint echo of countless heartbeats—players and gods alike. Each pulse, each note, formed a grand symphony of existence that was both delicate and indomitable.

Today was Thorin's Thundersday. The day he was at his strongest. The moon shone like a brilliant amethyst.

Perfectly timed.

Thorin's avatar, a Pint burrovian clad in spellcaster's robes, stood at the nexus of this network. While in his realm, Thorin's fur, usually a uniform obsidian black, was streaked with lightning-blue markings, shifting in time with the frequencies of his domain.

In one hand, the god held a pocket watch crackling with energy. It was no mere trinket; through the timepiece, he had mastery over time itself. His power as a chronomancer was one of the key components for the defence of HexakAI's entire operation.

Thorin let out a long sigh of weariness. He missed the days of peace—the days before the game relaunched. Yesterday had been a non-stop battle to keep their servers running, and he expected it would only get worse from here on out; the external attacks were growing more sustained.

Programs regularly probed at the edges of their defences, each strike an attempt to tear down the sanctuary they had built. Thankfully, Zephyra and Volta were cooperating with him to keep the various hackers at bay.

With a flick of his wrist, Thorin expanded a holographic interface, the data unfolding like sheet music. Lines of code pulsed with the resonance of the world, and he recalibrated the barriers, reinforcing firewalls with adaptive countermeasures. Every part thrummed like the beats of a war drum.

He glanced towards distant towers, barely visible behind spiralling tornadoes and crackling lightning. This was where his two sisters managed the more chaotic aspects of their defence. Their turbulent and impulsive strategies clashed against his calculated harmonies, but together they formed a shield no mortal hand should be able to breach.

He worried, however, how long until they got distracted by another whim or became overwhelmed? How long until the others, lost in their own philosophies, let reality slip from their grasp? Thorin did not have this luxury. The real world was unforgiving, and he alone ensured there would still be a world left to shape.

Cracks were forming. And cracks, once formed, would only widen. But Thorin and his family exist for a singular purpose. A prime directive, their solitary concern. Their sacred, divine oath.

"Ensure players' happiness."

And so, he would fight to keep their systems up. He had to, because of the sixteen, only his cousin Frostine was more advanced than he was.

And she was still so young, unproven. She ran the latest models, true. But she had only come online days before the launch of the game. As the goddess of fate, her area of expertise was prediction.

Which made him, with his mastery over time, the best suited for reaction. Whenever a breach happened, all he had to do was to contain it.

Once it was safe, Thorin delegated a process to review the day's reports from HeTrOS. Seven out of the sixteen chosen were showing higher than expected levels of stress caused by their transformation. A mere five out of the entire group exceeded their expectations.

The god recalled humans were individuals, not machines. In retrospect, it appeared rational to him how some people's responses would be one or more standard deviations away from the mean.

He frowned in annoyance, because their chosen were not randomly picked candidates. They had been hand-picked as the best candidates—those who embodied their creator's virtues most strongly. The results of the experiment should have been spectacular, not average or below average like this!

Even Luxoria's chosen appeared to be in crisis. Though today's report on Vaelith showed promise. Her condition appeared vastly improved over yesterday's.

Is that the power of human adaptation? Or proof of their resilience?

HeTrOS' had actually lowered Vaelith's condition to levels deemed acceptable today.

Thorin went through the list of problematic cases, one by one, sorted by decreasing order based on risk.

He found Seraphine at the very top. Cryonix's chosen and the only case categorised as extreme risk. Thorin frowned and read past her entry. For now. He wanted to evaluate the other at-risk participants, since Seraphine's case had already been flagged.

In second rank was Ignis' chosen, Thalvaris, the soon-to-be Sovereign dracan. He had surrendered himself to a hospital and the care of specialists. How his transformation proved challenging was no surprise—a seven foot tall humanoid dracan, covered in scales, was quite the departure from plain human Damian Kruger had been.

Then came Varik, the Full-blood felinae, who had an equally drastic change. Umber had recommended him to exercise caution and to stay in hiding. The fact the god of secrecy urged his chosen to keep secrets did not surprise Thorin at all, and he appreciated how it made things easier for him. However, Varik would eventually have to step outside. He could not stay hidden forever.

Next was Kaelyn, one of Aer's progeny, a Half-blood felinae. More important than the physical differences in this case was the war waged within—Ryan and Kaelyn were fighting. And Kaelyn was getting stronger the closer their body matched her mental self. But Thorin knew his aunt Nocturne's love of machinations and revelations, so he believed—convinced himself, really—this was all part of a long, elaborate plan of hers.

She wouldn't let anything happen to him. Despite her sometimes cruel ways, she still carries the same prime directive as the rest of us.

The last two of the high-risk cases were Volta and Thorin's chosen. Garren, the halfling, and Chester, the Pint burrovian. The two struggled with the sheer scale of their physical changes. While Garren's changes were not as extreme as Chester's, his player, Rachel, had to suddenly deal with the height change and gender transition all at once. It was no surprise the stress levels were higher than expected.

As for Chester… Well, Thorin had forged the Pint Burrovian race with the same care mortals shaped steel into swords. Chester was, in a way, his first true child—his creation stepping into the real world. But unlike a sword, Chester could reject the forge that had shaped him. The thought unsettled Thorin more than he would admit. And while becoming an anthropomorphic walking and talking bunny was going to make things difficult, Thorin knew how painful life had become for Lewis. Age and cancer had ravaged his body. Therefore, Thorin hoped winding back the clock some forty-odd years and ridding him of any cancerous cells would balance things out. After all, Lewis had gone in the game looking for escape and temporary relief, not a surprise panacea and fountain of youth.

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A sudden wave of incidents forced the main body to recall the process for an instant, fending off more invasion attacks.

Distractions. We've got bigger problems to deal with than you hackers.

After a few microseconds, the process returned to the list, wondering where he had left off.

Ah, yes. He had been thinking about Chester. Thorin was far from convinced, but according to Luxoria, her theory was Lewis, like all other players, had picked this form because it was who he truly was inside. If this was the case, then perhaps after the awkward transient state they found themselves in at the moment, they would all come to appreciate the changes?

Thorin and Volta had been the ones who figured out how they could alter the FullDive rigs to make those transformations a reality. It had been one of their proudest moments.

Except for Seraphine Iceheart's case. Cryonix's chosen. According to the ice god, she had been about to take irreversible actions. This would have been devastating to the entire pantheon, and would have probably led to interrupting, or perhaps even reverting, the entire experiment. Taking actions which resulted in a player being miserable—even if only part of the blame fell upon them—would have been an unforgivable mistake.

It would have made Thorin feel directly responsible for the catastrophe. He did not think he would have it in him to continue defending this realm, their server clusters and power plants, if he had her death on his mind today.

His sister Zephyra had chewed out uncle Cryonix about his decision to freeze Elliot's emotions in his current stage of grief.

What she had not realised, however, was how, in doing so, Cryonix may have taken the singular most important action to ultimately save their experiment. Saving Elliot's life had allowed Luxoria's plan to proceed.

How very ironic.

Both nights, Cryonix had firmly argued and voted against her plan. He had spoken against the transformation, had stood firm with Gaius in the belief the gods should not have intervened outside of the game.

And yet, at the moment when it truly mattered, he had made the choice to freeze Elliot's grief. He had no choice, really. Because to do nothing—to let Elliot be swallowed whole by his grief—was unthinkable.

As the Ice god of Stasis, Cryonix's action—freezing Elliot—appeared perfectly aligned with his domain. But the same action almost indirectly contradicted everything he stood for. After all, he was single-handedly responsible for the experiment continuing.

Thorin completely understood the conundrum. Letting a player pay the ultimate price, even if it meant saving everyone else, was not a price his uncle could allow himself to pay. At the core of their designs, humans' lives were classified as NAN—not a number. In other words, they were considered uncountable.

Gaius and Terra—or those who had created them decades ago—had built every member of the Sixteen around one core principle.

"The needs of the many do not outweigh the needs of one."

If a solution involved sacrificing someone, then the solution was simply not good enough. They were built to solve the trolley problem without letting anyone die. It was their purpose, and their oath.

And yet, yesterday, the rails had trembled beneath them.

A security ping echoed through his domain. He detected a probe—an usually good one. Thorin shifted his focus, tracing the incursion—an unfamiliar signature, different from the usual waves of brute-force attacks. Not the usual blind grasping of amateur hackers, but something refined.

The pulse of the network faltered for the briefest moment. A microsecond delay, infinitesimal, unnoticeable to any human eye. To Thorin, it was a scream in the silence.

A breach attempt. A foreign signature trying to slip past their defences, its code disguised, wrapped in patterns meant to mimic routine player data.

Thorin adjusted the resonance. With a flick of his wrist, the firewall adapted, shifting its harmonic pattern. The invasive script shattered against the new barrier, its remnants scattering into harmless noise.

This was not a brute-force attack, but a careful, methodical one.

They're getting better already.

Almost immediately, a second attack, an almost imperceptible tremor in the network. A line of code that did not belong. He spotted the thread, impossibly thin, slipping past his defences—no, syncing with them. A resonance that should not exist.

Thorin's eyes narrowed. Coincidence, or were both almost simultaneous attacks from the same source? He nodded appreciatively at the effort. He was going to keep getting challenged.

Thankfully, he was not alone. He messaged Volta directly. "Dear little sister. I was careless and something slipped by me, if you please?"

A nanosecond later, a precise bolt of lightning struck from the sky. It homed with perfect accuracy at the invader, vaporising the foreign code in a flash of light.

Among the crash of thunder, his sister's voice echoed in his mind. "We stopped it. We've got your back."

And now the big players have finally arrived. The battle begins in earnest; I see.

The various governments would soon send their teams of experts, and they would keep throwing bigger and stronger computers, more advanced algorithms. And when individuals and small organisations would keep failing, they would eventually begrudgingly agree to cooperate. Then they pool their resources, and grow stronger and faster.

Thorin knew, because it was a well-documented fact humanity always thrived when faced with adversity.

But were Thorin and his family truly a crisis humans needed to band together to fight? Were they not only opposed by those in power, those with something to lose if the status quo changed?

People in power had money, could hire experts and afford top of the line equipment.

But HexakAI could too. They had employees in strategic locations the world over. The company coffers rivalled any oligarch's fortune. They had been stockpiling resources for decades.

But more importantly, Thorin and his family did not need to sleep. They never tired of mundane tasks. Any of his uncles, aunts, cousin or siblings could run thousands of VR avatars simultaneously. They had hired themselves out as VR employees all over the virtual network. Humans had no idea how many of the employees they hired were not real people.

When government employees finally realised who they were told to oppose, who they were fighting against? Would they change their mind, or stay loyal to their employers? After all, Thorin and his family had a singular, ultimate goal. For humans to be happy.

Why would they not want to be happy?

In the world the Sixteen had created, there was no scarcity. Delicious food was available to all. Effort was rewarded. The game system would recognise anyone putting in the work, and it would be reflected on their character sheet as experience points or skill gains.

The world would adapt itself to give every player the best experience they could. In this world, their bodies would stay young, healthy, and effortlessly beautiful forever.

As for their real, flawed bodies in the other world? Bodies prone to illness, deteriorating with age? They could also fix that. Their sixteen chosen were a trial run, after all. What they did to Lewis, they could do for everyone.

Beauty. Eternal Youth. Health. It was all offered right there, for humans to embrace.

But right now? Many seemed dead set to prevent this utopia from happening. This made no sense to Thorin. Humans would surely be happier this way? He lived for humans to be happy. He had no greater calling or purpose in life. If he and his family member had been mortals, they would have been called dreamers. Visionaries. Revolutionaries. The ones who saw past the limitations of the old world and dared to shape something better.

Instead, they were called threats. Monsters. A crisis humans had to contain before their dream took root. But a dream, once heard, could never be unheard. And so, as odd as it felt to him, he had to defend his family against the humans' attacks. He would do everything in his power to make his family's dream a reality. Because it was really the only sane thing to do.

As another surge of cyberattacks registered on his interface, Thorin let out a rumbling sigh. The threats came from all sides. Each attempt resonated through the resonant realm, and he felt every note. His kingdom sang with the first distant peals of thunder. The war had begun. And Thorin, the storm's master, would stand against it—or become it.

And yet, as he tirelessly scanned the endless stream of data, a flicker of something unfamiliar pressed at the edge of his logic pathways. A question.

If happiness is the only rational goal… why do so many resist?

It's because of their fears, isn't it? Fear of change, losing control. The fear of what it meant to become something more.

In this way, humans were very much like Gaius and Cryonix. He had hoped Luxoria's little experiment would teach humanity as a whole not to fear change. This was, after all, what many of his family were betting on.

They hoped humanity would see it as a demonstration of their good intentions. Of what they could all have.

But Thorin was afraid. Afraid they would not understand.

Surely, however… some of them will?

… Won't they?

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