Bryce Maguire wasn't born into brilliance. He didn't grow up as a prodigy who could code before he could walk. No, Bryce started his journey the way most underdogs do—scraping by and clawing his way up the food chain, one keystroke at a time.
His first job as a junior programmer at ByteForge Studios was about as glamorous as a rusty keyboard in a dimly lit basement. The pay was barely enough to keep his fridge stocked with energy drinks, and his apartment often looked like the aftermath of a hurricane—pizza boxes scattered, wires tangled, and an alarming number of sticky notes plastered everywhere.
Still, Bryce loved it. Every late night spent debugging broken scripts and rewriting sloppy code was a step closer to the dream he chased relentlessly—a dream where his work didn't just exist in the shadows of someone else's vision. He wanted to create. To build worlds. To make games that people lost themselves in, like he once had as a kid.
But success didn't happen overnight.
It took years. Years of menial tasks, forgotten credits, and ideas that got shot down in meetings before they even had a chance to breathe. He watched as others climbed the ladder faster than him, riding connections or luck. Meanwhile, Bryce put his head down and kept coding.
Then came the promotion.
It wasn't flashy—just a step up to Lead Systems Programmer. But it was enough. Enough to turn a few heads, enough to buy himself a better setup, and enough to convince his friends to drag him out for celebratory drinks.
"Dude, you barely beat Taylor by what? Two points?" said Adam, one of Bryce's closest friends and coworkers, slamming down his glass.
"Three," Bryce corrected, grinning smugly. "And those three points mean I'm the one with a corner office now."
"Corner office my ass," Taylor cut in, though she raised her drink in mock defeat. "You get a slightly bigger cubicle and one more monitor. Don't let it go to your head."
Bryce laughed, but the drinks kept coming, and by midnight, things blurred. His friends had a bad habit of pushing him toward women at the bar, and somehow, he always ended up waking up beside someone he barely remembered.
It was a cycle he despised—empty nights and hollow mornings.
But this time, he planned ahead. Before the drinks even started flowing, he made his coworkers promise to cut it out. And for once, they listened.
When he stumbled back into his apartment at 2 AM, it was alone.
Small victories.
.....
Bryce woke up one groggy morning, he had received an wide spread email. And urgent email, that regards to a big step up in the company.
The email hit his inbox like a sledgehammer:
URGENT: Company-wide pitch meeting for new MMORPG project. Submissions due in one month.
Bryce's heart raced as he read it. This was it—the big leagues. The kind of project that could put his name in the credits for something groundbreaking.
Ideas buzzed in his mind like swarms of angry bees, but none of them stuck. Days turned into weeks as he scrawled notes and filled whiteboards with concepts that felt too bland, too generic, too done-before.
It wasn't until he sat up at 3 AM, half-delirious from caffeine and stress, that the idea struck him.
Runes & War.
A dystopian fantasy MMORPG. A world teetering on the brink of chaos, where ancient runes held unimaginable power, and wars erupted between races—humans, elves, beastmen, dragon kin, and even celestial beings.
The name fit. The premise sang.
And for the first time in weeks, Bryce slept with a smile on his face.
Getting the green light from his boss was the easy part.
The hard part? Turning the concept into reality.
For the next three months, Bryce became a ghost. He stopped going out, stopped answering calls, and practically barricaded himself inside his apartment.
His desk became his altar, covered in keyboards, monitors, and empty cans of energy drinks. He coded through the night, tested mechanics at dawn, and wrote lore until his fingers cramped.
Combat systems, crafting mechanics, world maps—everything had to be perfect. Bryce wasn't just making a game; he was pouring his soul into it.
But the human body has limits.
Sleep deprivation caught up to him, but he pushed through. The pounding headaches, the blurry vision, the way his heart sometimes skipped a beat—he ignored it all.
Because this game wasn't just work. It was his legacy.
...
Late One Night.
Bryce sat at his desk, staring at the glowing words on the monitor:
Runes & War – Alpha Build Complete.
He had done it.
Or at least, that's what he told himself as his chest tightened and his breaths grew shallow. His hands shook as he reached for another energy drink, but it slipped from his grasp and clattered to the floor.
"Just… need to rest," he muttered, leaning forward and resting his head on his arms.
The world tilted.
His eyes felt heavy—too heavy to keep open.
Five minutes, he thought. Just five minutes of sleep.
But his body had other plans.
The thundering of his heartbeat slowed. His breaths grew faint. The weight pressing down on him wasn't exhaustion anymore—it was something deeper.
And as the glow of the screen dimmed in his fading vision, Bryce Maguire slipped into an endless sleep.
No dramatic accident. No big fuss. Just silence.
The monitor continued to hum softly, the title screen of Runes & War flickering like a heartbeat.