Vol 1 Chapter 2 – The Night of the Meteor, and the Day Reality Became a Game【Vol 1 – Expelled from the Clan, NTR’d, and Then Reality Became the Game 】

At first, I thought it was just a fireball — maybe an unusually bright shooting star. But it was clearly neither. I had no idea how far away it was, and yet the sound it made was earth-shaking. As the light and the roar grew closer and louder, people around me started to panic. Someone nearby muttered something about a missile strike from a foreign power.

Then the light tore across the night sky, trailing a burning tail — and split apart, branching into fragments that vanished beyond the horizon. Moments later, the atmosphere itself shuddered. And then, slightly delayed, came the successive shockwaves — a sound that felt like a fist closing around my heart.

Something enormous had hit somewhere. Was it a meteor? Something terrible had just happened. That was all I could be sure of.

By the next morning, every news channel and every corner of the internet was consumed by it.

“Meteors have been confirmed falling at multiple locations worldwide. As seen in the footage, the incoming object broke apart mid-descent and struck in several locations. Damage across affected areas is reported as minimal — however, the energy release is believed to be the largest ever recorded in human history. No tsunami activity has been detected at this time, but as a precaution, residents in coastal areas are urged to evacuate to higher ground.”

Scientists were at a loss.

Roughly sixty-six million years ago, an asteroid ten kilometers wide struck the Earth — and wiped out the dinosaurs. The energy released this time was visibly, undeniably greater than that. By every known model, the planet should be hurtling toward catastrophe: earthquakes on an unprecedented scale, massive tsunamis, climate collapse.

None of that was happening.

Some experts went on record saying it plainly — what was occurring could not be explained by any existing science.

Something about this impact was wrong. The damage was impossibly small. And one phrase kept surfacing, from every person who’d witnessed it:

“Something feels different. Ever since that night.”

The change wasn’t visible at first. The experts had no framework for it. But quietly, steadily, it began eating into our everyday lives.

It started with holes.

Openings appeared in the ground at scattered locations around the world. The entrances were small — large enough for a handful of people to pass through — but the interiors were vast, their internal structures completely unreadable by any instrument. Ultrasonic mapping came back useless. How far they extended, how deep they went — nobody could say.

Experts attributed it to the meteor impact. And they gave these strange pockets of distorted space a name.

Dungeons.

It felt like something out of a game.

What made the comparison feel even less like a coincidence — the survey teams that ventured inside reported encountering monsters.

After that, militaries, law enforcement agencies, and dedicated research organizations mobilized worldwide. By then, it had already been confirmed: similar Dungeons had appeared across the globe, in staggering numbers.

Nobody knew what would come next. People feared that monsters would pour out into the open world.

But then — the world seemed to pause. To hold its breath.

The monsters didn’t leave the Dungeons. As far as anyone could tell, the Dungeons themselves were their natural habitat. People breathed easier.

Then the next wave of news hit.

Several members of a survey team had been killed, slaughtered by the monsters inside.

Reports indicated that conventional physics behaved strangely within Dungeons — firearms were completely nonfunctional. Most electronics were dead too, with only smartphones and basic communications gear managing to operate at all. Anything that could serve as a weapon was useless.

That left only knives, blunt instruments, and primitive tools. Combat became hand-to-hand.

Against monsters with raw physical power, humans had no answer. People died.

At the same time, something else was discovered: monsters occasionally dropped a mysterious object upon being defeated. They were calling them treasure chests.

Most were empty. But a small percentage yielded one of three things — weapons and armor, monsters, or treasure capsules.

For certain people, all of this had a very familiar ring to it.

It resembled the systems of games like Dark Fantasm Online — the world I’d once been obsessed with.

The only real difference was the “treasure capsule” — a physical capsule containing valuables, which had no equivalent in the game. Everything else was nearly identical.

“No way…”

The words slipped out of me before I could stop them.

A world that worked like a game — actually happening. In reality.

News programs were now airing segments breaking down treasure chest rarity tiers and drop rates.

Politicians had already started calling for regulations on “treasure chest acquisition systems.” Apparently, wealthy individuals had begun buying up chest stockpiles and leveraging them to consolidate political power. Someone in the office was worried enough to say it out loud.

The mechanic that awarded EXP to whoever landed the killing blow started as an urban legend. But the weight of testimony eventually tipped it into something most people accepted as fact.

Whether EXP itself was measurable remained debated — but leveling up could be felt. Firsthand accounts piled up: after killing a certain number of monsters, a sudden surge of strength would hit, seemingly from nowhere.

And it wasn’t just subjective. The physical capabilities of people who had leveled up were being documented and verified — objectively, measurably elevated.

On top of that, it was confirmed that anyone inside a Dungeon could view their own status screen. EXP appeared as a readable number. The system was real.

Those who defeated powerful monsters, leveled up, and pushed deeper — they started being called Hunters. And then they started being called heroes.

Hunters became the only thing standing between humanity and the monsters. The sole line of defense the world had.