Chapter 0 (Prologue): Neo Front Cyber City

[Welcome to the Neo Front Cyber City Forum.]

Author: ㅇㅇ (123.456)

Title: Did the new update drop???

It dropped, so I’m posting this!

Alright, let’s gooooo DLC!!!!!!!

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Neo Front Cyber City.

A cyberpunk action RPG set in the near-future late 21st century.

With its relatively high level of polish and strong genre traits, it gained a cult following among gamers.

And today marked the release of the game’s first DLC—two years after its original launch.

Jian, currently seated in front of his computer, was one of the many Cyber City players who had been eagerly waiting for this day.

It was a Friday evening.

He was perfectly prepared to pull an all-nighter the moment the patch dropped.

But when the clock finally struck the release time—

What greeted him was a massive wall of download data.

“How is it this big…? Is my hard drive going to explode?”

The data volume was enough to install two or three entire games from scratch.

As a result, the estimated time to completion had already shot up to several hours.

For someone who had been waiting in anticipation to jump into the new content the moment it opened, this was a serious buzzkill.

Even on the usual gaming forums, other lost souls like himself were wandering around, screaming into the void.

While thinking about what to do during the wait, his hand instinctively moved to another game icon.

An open-world RPG set in a medieval fantasy world—[Cinder Knights].

He had already seen multiple endings, but it wasn’t a bad way to kill time while waiting.

So he launched the game. Skipping over all the save data from completed playthroughs, he selected a new save slot.

“It’s been a while. Let’s do a new run.”

When the customization page came up, he paused for a moment in thought.

The screen let him choose appearance, class, and traits.

Normally, Knight or Hunter were standard and safe choices.

But this time, just for fun, he picked something a little different—something he had never chosen before: “Saintess.”

No matter how you developed her, the damage output was so low that the class was usually treated as a joke build or used in hardcore challenge runs by veteran players.

But what did it matter?

He wasn’t planning to play seriously to the end anyway.

This was just a light diversion while waiting for the download.

He quickly chose the remaining traits and started the game.

But then—

[Critical Crash Detected: The game has encountered an unrecoverable error and must shut down immediately]

“What the…?”

After a brief loading icon, a strange error code appeared.

Then the monitor screen began to fade to black.

Wait—was it the monitor going dark?

Or was it… his vision?

That was the last thing Jian could remember.