Draven Steals My Game Then Hell Takes Us novel · Chapter 1 of 17
Chapter 1: Sunset Clause
Draven launches Hell Paradise at sunset on the day Andrew's forged noncompete expires. The screen tears open and the whole company is pulled through into the Judgement Hall.
The email came at 5:58, two minutes before my agreement died.
From: Draven Hale. To: All Staff. Subject: Launch night. Mandatory.
I read it standing at my desk with my coat already on.
Seven years. Seven years of code with my name stripped off it.
At 6:00 the forged noncompete expired. I had counted the days since I was twenty-two.
I should have walked out at 5:59 and never looked back.
Instead I stayed, because the whole floor was already standing up.
"Everyone to the main room," Draven called from the doorway. "Big screen. Company history."
He looked right at me when he said it.
Draven was thirty-four and soft around the jaw, in a rumpled olive jacket that made him look like everyone's favorite uncle.
He had been project lead on nine of my games.
Nine. I had the commit logs to prove every one of them.
The main room filled with forty people and the smell of cold pizza.
I stood at the back by the fire door, the one nobody used except me.
The VP stood at the front with his hands folded. He was Draven's father, and he did not look at me either.
I had worked under that man for seven years and he had never once said my name.
"Seven years of Gamex," Draven said. "And tonight, the best thing we've ever made."
He clicked the remote.
HELL PARADISE: NO ONE ESCAPES JUDGEMENT.
The title filled the screen in red.
My title. My game. My final year, built in secret, every line of it mine.
I had never shown it to anyone. I had never even said the name out loud.
The room clapped.
Draven turned and found me at the back, and he smiled.
That smile had been in my life since my first week.
It was the smile he used when he was about to take something.
"Servers are live across the whole building," he said. "Every floor. Let's log in together."
People pulled out their phones.
I stayed where I was, because I knew what I had built.
I had built it with no cheats, no shortcuts, no pay-to-win, no loopholes for the rich.
That was the whole point of it. That was the thing I believed.
Money does not tell a good player from a bad one. Only play does.
The screen flickered.
A thin black line opened down the middle of it, like a seam in cloth.
Someone laughed. "Is that the intro?"
The seam widened.
Wind came out of it.
Warm wind, and it smelled like dust and old stone and something underneath that I did not have a name for.
The lights went out.
People screamed.
I grabbed the fire door handle and it was not there.
The floor tilted and the whole room slid sideways into the screen.
I fell a long time.
I hit stone on my shoulder and rolled onto my back.
Above me there was no ceiling, just a dark that went up forever.
The floor was black marble, veined with something that moved.
Forty people lay scattered around me, coughing, calling names.
I sat up and checked my hands. Ten fingers. My coat was still on.
Draven stood up first, because of course he did.
"Nobody panic," he said. "This is a demo. A projection."
"This is not a projection," the VP said.
He was on his knees, and his voice had gone thin.
Two women from accounting were holding each other and crying.
A man near the wall was calling for his wife into the dark and getting nothing back.
The far wall was a door. Forty feet high, carved with seven figures.
Each figure held something. A crown. A cup. A blade.
A boy in a dark coat stood in front of it, watching us.
He looked twenty-three. He was six-two and built like he had been made for something physical.
His hair was black and swept back, and his coat went up to his throat.
He did not smile.
"You're early," he said.
Draven stepped forward and put his hands up.
"Whoever you are, we're Gamex. We have lawyers."
The man looked at him the way you look at a stain.
"My name is Fin," he said. "I appraise this Hall. You are all in it now."
The door behind him began to open.
Fin's eyes moved across the crowd.
They stopped on me.
"Seven trials," he said. "One for each sin. No cheats. No loopholes."
He walked toward us, and people moved out of his way without being asked.
"The pure may reach the final round," he said. "The rest stay."
"And if we refuse?" the VP said.
Fin did not answer him.
He stopped in front of me.
He looked down at my face for a long moment, and something moved behind his eyes.
Then he crouched so we were level.
"Andrew," he said.
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