Chapter 2: The Email That Broke the World

Before he was Ragnar Vhagar, Demon King of a messy apartment, he was just Ragnar. No last name he could remember anymore. Just Ragnar, a university student drifting through a world that felt like it was slowly running out of battery. The world had been... gray. The birth rates had been falling for decades, and a quiet sort of exhaustion had settled over humanity. Ambition was a rare disease. Most people, like Ragnar, just wanted to get by without too much trouble. He went to his classes, sat in the back, and tried his best to be invisible. He was terrible at talking to people. His social skills were so rusty. His life was a predictable cycle of boring lectures, instant noodles, and scrolling endlessly through the internet in his small, lonely apartment. He was sitting in one of those lectures, about socio-economic theory, when his phone vibrated. He glanced down, expecting a spam text about a sale on pizza. But it wasn’t that. It was an email. The subject line was in bold, imposing letters. [Subject: An Invitation to The Aegis Mandate: A World Salvation Project] Ragnar blinked. It looked like a very elaborate phishing scam. He was about to delete it when his phone vibrated again. And again. And again. He looked up from his screen. Every single student in the lecture hall was looking at their phone. A confused murmur rippled through the room. The professor, a tired-looking man with a tweed jacket, stopped mid-sentence. "Is something the matter?" he asked, annoyed. A girl in the front row, one of the keen ones who always asked too many questions, raised her hand tentatively. "Professor," she said, her voice trembling slightly, "did you just get a... a weird email? About something called... ’The Aegis Mandate’?" The professor frowned and pulled out his own phone. His eyes widened. All around them, the quiet hum of the university was being replaced by a rising tide of chatter and vibrating phones. It wasn’t just their class. It was the whole campus. The whole city. The whole world. Within an hour, the news was chaos. The email was a global, synchronized event. Every person on the planet with an email address had received it at the exact same moment. Governments issued frantic warnings. "DO NOT OPEN THE ATTACHMENT!" screamed the headlines. "EXPERTS WARN OF UNPRECEDENTED GLOBAL CYBERATTACK!" Ragnar, of course, had already opened it. The email explained that humanity was stagnating and that a higher power was intervening to force its evolution through conflict. It was an aptitude test. A test to determine one’s role in the new world that was coming. For three days, the world held its breath. Nothing happened. The email just sat there. It was the planet’s biggest and most terrifying mystery. So had many others. Ragnar-like humans scattered across the world. The ones who stayed up too late scrolling, wondering if this was all life had to offer. Some clicked out of curiosity. Some because everyone else was afraid to. Ragnar sat in his apartment, staring at the email. He had nothing to lose. His life was a flat line. Maybe a little chaos was exactly what he needed. He clicked the link. The test was thirty-minutes long and had fifty questions. They were the most bizarre questions he had ever seen. Question 12: A train is heading towards five people tied to the tracks. You can pull a lever to divert it to another track, where one person is tied up. Do you pull the lever? "Classic trolley problem," Ragnar muttered, and clicked ’Yes’. Question 13: Okay, but what if the one person is your favorite pizza delivery guy who always brings extra garlic sauce? Ragnar paused. This was a tough one. He thought about Dave, his pizza guy. Dave was a hero. He eventually clicked ’No’. Sorry, five random people. The questions got weirder. Question 24: You have been given ultimate power. Do you use it to create a world of perfect order and peace, or a world of absolute freedom and chaos? Ragnar thought about it. A world of perfect order sounded... boring. Like his current life, but with better-behaved neighbors. He clicked ’Chaos’. Question 35: Would you rather fight one hundred duck-sized horses or one horse-sized duck? Question 41: If you were a tree, what kind of tree would you be? Question 50: Is a hot dog a sandwich? Please explain your reasoning in 500 words or less. His brain felt like it was turning into soup. By the end, he was just clicking answers at random, his eyes blurry. Finally, he answered the last question. The screen went black, and then a single word appeared in glowing red letters. [APTITUDE: CHAOS] Before he could even process what that meant, a wave of exhaustion hit him like a physical blow. His vision swam, and the world faded to black. He fainted, slumping forward onto his keyboard. He woke up in a void. There was no up or down, no light, no sound. It was just an endless, silent darkness. He wasn’t scared. He just felt... empty. [Greetings, participant number 9,457,831.] A voice echoed in the void. It was neither male nor female, old nor young. It was perfectly calm, perfectly neutral, like a GPS giving directions. "Who... where am I?" Ragnar asked, his voice sounding small in emptiness. [You are in a transitional space. Your aptitude has been assessed. You have been assigned to the Chaos faction. Congratulations. You are in the minority. This will make your journey significantly more difficult.] "Journey? What journey? What is this?" [The Aegis Mandate is a program of forced evolution. The human race will be divided into three factions. Law, who seek to maintain and enforce order. Neutral, who seek to survive amidst the conflict. And Chaos, who seek to tear down the old world and create something new from the ashes. [YOU ARE CHAOS.] The voice paused, as if letting the information sink in. [Members of the Law faction, now known as Heroes, will see you as a target to be eliminated. Members of the Neutral faction will likely fear you. Other members of the Chaos faction will see you as a rival. You will have to fight everyone.] Ragnar’s mind reeled. This was insane. It was a prank. A dream. "So I’m... the bad guy?" he asked, a hint of hysterical laughter in his voice. [Your new designation is Demon King. You will be granted a Domain, which is your seat of power. You will have the ability to create monsters and traps to defend it. Your primary objective is to survive. To facilitate a clean slate, all your memories of other individuals, such as family and friends, have been erased. Their memories of you have also been erased. You are now a ghost in the world you once knew.] The words hit him like a punch to the gut. His family... he tried to picture his mother’s face. Nothing. His father? Blank. He remembered having them, but the details were gone. A cold, terrifying dread washed over him. "You... you can’t do that!" he screamed into the void. [It is already done. Good luck, Demon King. Try not to die too quickly.] The voice faded, and the feeling of being in the void vanished. Ragnar’s eyes snapped open. He was back in his apartment, slumped over his desk. Sunlight streamed through his window. For a moment, he thought it was all a horrible dream. Then he looked at his phone. There was a new app on the screen. Black, with a glowing red sigil. And when he looked in the mirror, his reflection looked back, but something was different. There was a dangerous light in his eyes that had never been there before. He was no longer just Ragnar. He was Ragnar Vhagar. And his old, boring world was gone forever. Updated from freewebnovel.(c)om