A prompt appeared at the bottom of the screen, mirroring the game's UI:

He realized too late that the second .rar wasn't an error. It was a container. And he had just let whatever was inside out.

The figure didn't move in frames; it moved in glitches. One second it was at the far end of the stage; the next, it was nose-to-nose with the camera, its face filling Elias’s monitor.

Elias gripped his controller, his knuckles white. He hadn't even launched the game, yet his inputs were registering. As he pressed 'A', the room around him dimmed, the only light coming from the pulsing purple glow of the "fix" he had invited into his system. The game wasn't just running on his PC anymore—it was running on the power grid of his apartment, and the stakes weren't just his rank on the leaderboard.