Something's Rising and it's not Shield Hero

At some University in some city, 3 men walked down the street with their school bags over their shoulders. They joked and made fun of each other and talked about annoying classmates or teachers, as they made their way to a restaurant. The 3 were friends since high school and ended up going to the same University. They were close and although they had different lives they always made time at least once a week to hang out.

They entered the restaurant and ordered food as they continued their chatter. As they ate the topic of video games came up, a hobby they all shared. They all liked to play solo at times but would group up when it came to dungeons that needed to be cleared with a party. "Hey Jax, did you get SR as well?" A young man with glasses and short brown hair, named Derek, addressed a bigger guy with messy, dirty blond hair and greyish blue eyes.

"Of course, I plan to play the same as always." Jax smiled and put another fork full of spaghetti in his mouth.

"You bastard, your playing style is so annoying. HAHAHA!" The third guy was named Kyle and he was a redhead which was long enough to tie in a man bun. He had a build in between his two friends and sleeve tattoos on his arms.

"I agree, when I know you're in the area, my blood pressure increases," Derek added while pushing his glasses back up after taking a bite of food. "I don't know why you enjoy PKing so much, although you get a lot of goodies from players, you end up dying to the point of being reset basically. I don't see the point in it." Kyle grumbled as he didn't like it when big guilds or top players would go out of their way to kill his friend just for a couple PKs.

"It is what it is. We play games cuz it's fun for us. Games are fun for me because I see PKing as a challenge, and I like a good challenge." Jax answered as all 3 continued eating. The 2 opposite of Jax thought that would be the end of it, but were surprised when Jax continued. "However, I will be playing safer this time."

Jax's voice was a more serious tone, and the two boys knew why. Jax's family went through tragedy a couple years back, starting with his father falling ill and passing away after getting a loan from the bank, putting them in debt as his father also used his own retirement money, and other valuable assets to start up a new business.

This is what happened on the surface, but Jax knew there was more to it. There were too many coincidences for this to be a simple illness and passing of his father. The business his father wanted to go into was the VR gaming industry. It was starting to pick up when he decided to pull out the loan, he even talked about a plan for his game and talked about it with Jax so he knew the basic premise of the game.

When his father got ill, it was way too sudden, he was very healthy and had no history of health issues. What made his illness the most suspicious, was that the family wasn't allowed to see him in the hospital. There should be no reason we couldn't see him even if he was contagious with something serious, we would be told to wear hazmat suits or something or see him only through a window, yet they refused us entirely.

After he passed, Jax's mother found out she was pregnant, and the stress of her husband's death led to their new daughter, Jax's sister, being deaf. This piled up even more debt as Jax was in school and his mother now had a child to take care of. He was lucky enough to have such good friends, as they let us stay with them until the child was old enough for his mother to work again.

The cherry on top of all of the conspiracies was when Sentinel's Rising teaser came out, not even a year after his father's death. A game that was almost a carbon copy of his dad's vision.

The game company, AX gaming, was where his father worked before he decided to make his own game. The only thing different about the game so far was the title. Changed from God's Rising to Sentinel's Rising. God's Rising was the game his father first thought of but planned to change it later as it was cliché. Everything from the trailer he watched was similar to what his father planned.

The classes, stat types, monsters, kingdoms and cities, as well as the general layout of the map of the entire game. Everything the same with minor changes from his father's vision. It was too coincidental.

Jax had no idea what happened between his father and the game company he worked at, or how they found out about his father's plans, but he knew some sort of foul play was involved. Unfortunately, he had no proof, no money, no status or power of any kind to even fight back against such enormous power.

At this point, he had given up on getting revenge. He knew he wouldn't stand a chance, and he didn't want to drag his family into this mess. He didn't know if his mother knew anything about this, and he had yet to talk to her about it. So, he only planned to milk the company as much as possible of money from inside the game and try to sabotage it if he could.

That was the only solution he could come up with and it didn't change his playing style at all. The only difference being he would focus more on taking money rather than lives.

"I think it might be time that I become a professional player."