Why Alyx Grey is the Worst

To understand why Alyx Grey is not a good person, you need to understand his world.

Take the three people currently experiencing devastating shock, panic, and agony at the moment.

These Brawlers have exoskeletons that serve as body enhancements.

While wearing them, the user's physical "stats," like strength, agility, stamina, are improved from a functional perspective.

The Nerve Network is not a vrmmorpg, however. It was designed to allow human beings to live and exist in the virtual world.

To do this, it uses the user's real brain and nervous system to control their body.

In short, when someone walks into the Nerve Network, they are the same person with the same physical abilities from a functional perspective.

A user's nervous system is trained to interact with their body in the real world.

If their body's capabilities changed, it'd train their real nervous system how it should interact with their new body. Then, when they logged out, their body wouldn't function properly.

The person would misinterpret how much force they needed to lift a box or how much force to apply when cutting a vegetable. Needless to say, this is an independently dangerous factor.

While someone's physical body cannot be changed, the same is not true of experiencing sensory interaction.

If someone gets hurt, the nervous system and brain react to that trauma and treat it like reality itself.

In effect, while someone cannot get physically hurt, they can experience pain, and their brain and nervous system treat their physical body as damaged.

As a relevant example, if someone goes blind in the Nerve Network—due to staring at a bottle of water when it explodes with an unnaturally hot steam—the nervous system and brain register that the eyes don't work anymore.

The mind and nervous system are instantly shocked and trained to think the eyes no longer work, so the brain stops attempting to use them.

That's the seriousness of this network and the virtual worlds contained within it.

At this moment, two people in front of Michael are crippled for life in both worlds.

Considering these people make money off robbing people, they're officially unemployed.

If they're chipped and can't log out—the selling point of Dark Paradise—well, they'll probably be enslaved or on the menu at The Rack by tomorrow.

The fact that Alyx Grey won't intentionally kill these people doesn't make him a good person.

While users can't change their stats in this world, they can borrow power.

Imagine someone walking around in a Gundam robot. Their stats as a human didn't change, even though the stats they're using have. In short, they're borrowing stats to complete their desired actions.

People need technology and advanced hardware to perform operations in the real world. In the Nerve Network, you only need items.

Items are just 'physical' objects like swords with attributes like gravity modification, hardness, and speed added to them.

The exoskeletons the Brawlers are using are physical objects that have been implanted and connected to their real bodies.

The enhancements increase stats with the attributes while reducing strain with counter attributes.

For example, the metal structures on their legs increase acceleration and force, allowing a user to jump 30 feet into the air.

However—

While an attribute might force a physical reaction to teleport into its final reaction, the moment it gets there, it's right back into the world of standard physics.

Therefore, there needs to be an additional set of attributes that protects the user from their actions.

For example, jumping 30 feet and not having enhancements that can absorb the landing will kill you if you don't create enhancements to absorb the fall.

Or if you apply gravity to a shoulder that cannot withstand it, and the arm moves unnaturally fast anyway, it'll rip the arm off at the shoulder.

If someone doesn't add these protections to the items they create—they are not a good person.

The Nerve Network is not a fantasy world where someone can slap an attribute and level it up.

You can't add a heat attribute to a sword and level up the heat stat to level 10. If someone does that, the user's hands will be encased in molten metal and will stop functioning in both worlds.

However, if someone's not a good person, like Alyx Grey, they'll slap the heat attribute on someone else's sword and instantly level it up.

Adding an attribute to someone's body, weapon, or armor on the spot is known as "dry modding."

Both Saison and Grey had attempted to dry mod another person in the last 10 minutes. But, judging by the results, only one of them was successful.

When Saison approached Grey, he was holding a branding patch.

It was like the patch that Grey used, but it specifically applies scorching heat to skin to brand someone's logo onto a person's body.

When he touched Sebastian, the patch came in contact with "Attribute Trigger." This item is an oil that Grey modified to intentionally activate whatever attribute in a dry mod patch.

Additionally, when an object with an attribute comes in contact with the oil, it turns into an extremely powerful adhesive that sticks to the individual's skin.

Simply put, the oil sticks the dry mod patch to the user's hand and then activates it.

But it's worse than that, so, so, so much worse.

Saison's experience exemplifies how remarkably brutal Grey's programs are.

A branding patch's requirement for turn-on is its application on clothing fibers or human skin. Its shut-off requirement is skin that's burnt to the point of a "good branding."

The oil tricked the branding patch into thinking it was human skin.

While the patch burned Saison's hand past the shut-off trigger, the "skin" the oil was emulating was "unburnt," so the patch maintained the heat output.

A branding patch normally takes a few seconds to turn off. However, Sasion's hand burned at full temperature for at least a full minute.

In fact, if the patch didn't melt, it would have kept burning until the oil was gone.

Attribute Trigger is less of a defensive measure and more like an excessively brutal preemptive strike.

It's like someone trying to punch a person in the face only to find that their hand was blown off before it reached them. The relevant case study proves that.

If Saison's example wasn't enough, he used a dry mod on Eloguent.

Unlike the branding patch, which maimed a person, his patch ripped a 7-foot man's shoulder off.

Its turn-on requirements were a point where the velocity of his arm reached an unnatural level.

It's turn-off requirements… well, there were none.

The patch was still applying around 300 pounds or more pressure to Eloguent's shoulder.

Needless to say, the fact that many of his programs don't have shut-off triggers is a testament to the fact that Alyx Grey was not a good person.

The fact that he only uses these programs on horrible people doesn't change that.

As these examples demonstrate, Attributes can be excessively deadly when used incorrectly.

For this reason, developers who can make attributes work within the Nerve Network are extremely well paid.

As a result, body enhancements and op items are rare. Someone has to create those items, and they can have dozens of different attributes operating under thousands of different parameters.

The exoskeletons or swords the Brawlers were using were not cheap. In reality, those items probably sold for millions of credits.

The only reason that people were walking around with them in Dark Paradise is that there were billions of dollars running through this server every month.

Simply put, everyone here was strong because everyone was rich and needed to be strong.

Every person who comes here has to pay for op gear can turn a business professional into a god to survive. It wasn't a show of wealth—it was a requirement.

Alyx Grey made the type of op gear that these professionals were wearing. In fact, he was far better than the developers that made the multi-million dollar exoskeletons people were wearing.

He could create the most absurd weapon or armor that a user could use in a safe and controlled manner. Moreover, he could use attributes to create weapons that can not exist in the real world.

Alyx Grey had the skill to create just about anything within the Nerve Network using the laws of physics.

The fact that he mostly used those skills to hurt people with intentionally bad physics made him [the worst].

That said, he was currently being the worst in Dark Paradise, which was the worst place in existence. That's why people love him.

Alyx Grey is not a good person, but that doesn't matter.

People don't love him because he's a good person. They love him because he's the worst, and he's taking out the other top rankers one by one.