Jax ignored her, his vision blurring as the eShop’s digital ghost-code flooded his nervous system. "The client wants the source code. They want to know why the first generation mutated." "They mutated because they played God with a gamepad, Jax!"

He slid the —a rare, black-market physical backup of a digital ruin—into his deck. The console hummed, a sound like grinding teeth.

The world shifted. The grimy alleyway dissolved into a top-down nightmare of shifting corridors and neon-drenched monsters. This was the game's reality—a rogue-lite hellscape where every death rewrote your biology. Jax felt his arm lengthen, skin hardening into chitinous plates. His sidearm fused with his palm. Mutation acquired: Shell-Shock.