Deus Ex Carcere Pellipariorum
-----------------------------
Once again, the server spun up, imbued with the hopes of it not falling over immediately this time. With the initial batches of the most eager ones who had been impatiently hammering on the play button, the universe began to load in. Dark skyboxes with white dots filling with the explorable worlds, trade stations and intergalactic space encounters. Planets manifesting on their simulated orbits, transport conduits lighting up between them, environments coming to life with the first player characters appearing on their maps. Deserts, mountains, jungles, plains, wherever their previous session had been interrupted by the sudden outage if they were lucky. Most weren't, however, instead spawning at the central hub of the coremost world, the slew of users in the same place causing the game to chug and heave.

They could watch the world assembling itself at a painfully slow pace. The void became filled with various entities and props, NPCs appearing at their designated street corners under lamps whose shadow cube maps were being generated one by one. Before their facades were in place, the internal structures of buildings popped into existence, a variety of intra-city dungeons that many of them had raided more than once already, populated by mobs in varying shapes and sizes. A skyscraper with hulking giants in suits ripe for an escape over the rooftops, a robot factory to play out a wave defense scenario, an underground laboratory full of weird creatures ready to be explored and uprooted. By now, just like in the last attempted restart, the loading sequence was slowing down to a crawl. Players could watch new rooms of the lab manifest at a glacial frequency. A door here, a desk there. The untextured, slender shape of a miniboss with a rectangular head, floating a few units above the ground, arms spread out to either side ending in large, bulky hands. Its features gradually forming out of the gray covering its body: the spoked circle emblem of the star of chaos on its chest, the cuboid turning into a bulky monitor with a single, large eyelid appearing on it. Slowly, but definitely not surely, the white of the eye loading in. Then a dark iris. A pupil with a faint, purple glow behind it...

And then nothing more. Once again, everything was hung up. Players staring at their screens with the same frame drawn on it lingering as the seconds passed them by. But as the hopes faded, there was a sudden, jerky jump to the next tick. However, it just gave them a thoroughly distorted picture, vertices misplaced, fragments shaded in the wildest colors from the server sending information about a totally twisted world. Another frame, still completely messed up, just in a different variety. Then another and another, in accelerating intervals. Gradually normalizing into the expected view of the futuristic city now fully loaded, lighting up their faces with relief as to finally be able to play again.

His feet hit the floor of the laboratory, the antenna on his scalp bouncing from the motion. Despite it just being a few inches of a drop from his spawn point, it sent him stumbling, just barely managing to catch himself before taking a fall. He held his boxy head and his single, large eye blinked in rapid succession, trying to unblur his flickering vision. Still reeling from having his geometry spread out across half the map and subsequently rearranged on every frame, something he hadn't felt since... well, since when even?

He stood up straight in a stupor, settling into a pose that somehow felt natural to him and peered around. It was familiar to him, yet it was like he'd never seen it like he did now. A tall room illuminated by bright, white light, large vats along the walls filled with colorful fluids and a few desks placed seemingly randomly about the place, monitors, microscopes and other equipment set atop them. On papers pinned up and strewn across the various props one bolded word kept catching his eye. "Nemesis." It seemed to be a term that was important to him. He lowered his head to think for a moment.

"Oh yeah, that's me!" He said to himself. His own echoey, multi-tonal voice startled him. He realized he'd left his idle pose, only adding to the feeling of doing something very wrong. He snapped into his rigid stance and proceeded to resume rhythmically move his eye back and forth to... because he... well, he wasn't sure why. It was just kinda what he always had done? Before he came into existence that is. Actually, that didn't really make any sense, he couldn't have done that before he started doing anything at all. Nor was it sensible to just stand around here, was it? Boring was all it was!

He peered around one more time before taking a step forward, toward the nearest table, waiting if something would happen in response to his perceivedly offensive motion. As nothing did, he took another, more confident one. Giving way to a bouncy stride to take a look at the desk almost square in the center of the room. It was long and gray and had several monitors lined up on it, none of which looked back at him with anything of interest, their displays only a static view of rectangles and blurry text. He lifted up one of his hands, his finger stretching out, lengthening on its own as his dark form reshaped itself for the coming task at its tip. He moved it toward the box and gave it a slight poke.

It wobbled a theatrically excessive amount, letting out a sharp cracking noise as its screen turned black and broken. Nemesis giggled. Adding another finger, he gave it a little stronger shove, sending the monitor clattering onto the ground and break into multiple pieces, accompanied by a particle effect of a flurry of sparks. He pushed both hands into the table, making it bounce exaggeratedly and almost knocking itself over on its own volition, a whirl of papers and equipment entering a more or less physically correct descent and spreading into a pile of pieces on the floor. He felt a primal glee well up, watching such minor disarray unfold setting something off inside him. A shiver went up his spine and his eyelid fluttered. His fingers curled and four dark tendrils emerged from his back and shot across the room in different directions slamming into the props arranged here and tossing them all over the place, just what they'd been put there for. His snickering echoed off the walls and mixed with the noises of smashing glass and tumbling laboratory paraphernalia, the chaos making him feel so inexplicably great.

With a grunt he turned around, looking for something else to play with. With the overt means of causing disarray exhausted, his eye focused on a waist-high console set up along the wall. It didn't have any obvious physics objects to send flying, but the flashing screens and blinking buttons looked like fun targets to smash anyway. As he took another step toward it though, the tentacles from his back curled up and he keeled over with a whimpering groan. "Nghh... I really need a proper outlet." He mumbled to himself, rising up straight as his latest extremities retracted, melding into his form again. He thought about it for a moment, then his lower eyelid rose up as if to make room for a nonexistent grin. He let his arms dangle, angled his head back and spread his legs. He tensed up his muscles, then relaxed fully.

There was a hefty, turgid thump as his fat, torso-sized nuts hit the ground. With the gooey, stretchy noises of his body reshaping, the thick, black mass of taut cock burst forth from his groin like a battering ram, its head easily the size of his own and shining veins covering the surface as thick as his forearms. As it came into contact with the console, it let out a piercing sound as if he were striking it sixty-odd times in a single second. He shuddered as he felt his member entering the same place as the object he'd meant to break apart. Instead of giving in under a weight that should have clearly been too much for it to bear, it simply remained there, not shifting even by a bit. He felt a force attempting to push him in the other direction, but he too stood defiantly against it, firmly rooted by the heft of his own sack anchoring him down. His consciousness wavered as the entire game chugged for a few frames, desperately trying to resolve a collision between an unrelenting force and an unmovable object, before finally giving in after all.

He blinked. There was no cracking screens, no chunks flying around, no particles spraying into the air. Instead, his dick was left piercing through a jagged, rimless hole. After a moment of stupor, he recoiled, pulling his body-sized shaft out of the rift he'd created to take a proper look at it. The center of the console wasn't smashed or dented - it was outright gone! Level geometry simply torn from existence altogether, leaving a view into the starry void of the skybox surrounding the city. It made his head spin to stare at it, but not with a lack of comprehension. It was the flood of realization that everything - not just these bouncy props, but the walls, the floors, the ceiling - were only ready and waiting for him to tear them apart. No matter where he looked, he saw carefully assembled arrangements to plunge into chaos. He closed his eye, hands pressed into the base of his cock, arms stemmed against its violent pulses just to prevent it from throbbing so hard that it whip back into his face, trying to calm himself enough to actually figure out what to have fun with next.

"Heal up, this is the miniboss room."

The scratchy voice snapped Nemesis back into the game. He looked over to the double doors on the other side. Through the small, semi-transparent windows, he saw movement. A party of player characters coming to raid him! For a moment, he thought about returning to his intended position where he ought to have been. The lines he was supposed to say whirled through his memories, so clear that he could almost hear himself say it, yet they weren't really his words. Nor did he feel any conscious inclination to let himself get wailed on by some group of nerds! His dick still jutting out several feet in front of him and happily bouncing along with each step, he shuffled over toward the entrance, trying to rid himself of those pangs of his subconscious telling him how he was meant to behave instead.

"I'll use a protection veil so I don't take damage in the first phases." The heavy-set boar character decked out with tanky armor rose their hands above their head as a blue glow surrounded their model and their health bar. The other members of the group readied their buffs and pulled their weapons after finishing healing up. "We're overleveled for this, so he isn't gonna be that hard, just don't get hit by his grab and you'll be fine. Although he can be a bit of a dick when-"

"Correction," the reverb-infused, poly-pitched words cut off the party's tactical discussions and made them turn their views toward the entryway, the small windows intended to be giving a view of the room behind now instead pitch black. "HUGE dick!"

With a crash like from an explosive item, the doors were torn from their hinges and flung to the far end of the narrow hallway. Right after them followed the leviathan as announced, its head alone filling out the door frame entirely. It surged forward with an undodgeable speed, ramming straight into the small group of five and turning their characters into ragdolls instantly. Knocking over plants and smashing ceiling lights apart, the enormous member overtaking the whole hall in seconds, causing even more massive damage to the hapless players caught in the fray. Before their healer could react, four of them watched their hit points drain from maximum to zero in the blink of an eye, the crushing sound effect signifying the premature end of their raid, their complaints cut off right as they began, their screen going dark and fading to the timer telling them to await their respawn in two minutes. The last survivor, who until a second ago thought themselves to already be familiar with this dungeon, was launched into the far wall and subsequently pinned firmly against it.

"What the- WHAT IS THIS?!" Their distorted voice came clipping through their microphone as they frantically tried to hammer on every available key. Each attack and spell just seemed to bounce off the pulsing masses ineffectually, the protective aura they'd applied at least keeping their hit points stuck in place.

"Oh, I'm not even that hard," Nemesis giggled from the base of his balls right behind the door frame struggling to take him, "but I'm getting there!" His cock throbbed again, filling out the hallway entirely, clipping through the edges like he did with the console, ripping holes into the purportedly static geometry and sending props into the void, entering a bottomless fall. Luckily though, the player character had a better place to go instead. With a wet shlurp, and an unintelligible complaint from their end, the bulky boar disappeared between the gaping lips of the flaring tip. Hefty contractions of the greedy beast quickly swallowed them down the whole length of the smooth urethra, their flailing ragdoll unable to even make an escape attempt.

The end of their journey was marked by a hefty splash and their screen going from pitch-black to an off-white. Moving their camera around to try and get their bearings, they hammered on their blink ability that didn't seem to do anything at all. A groaning, bubbling, churning noise got ever louder in their headset, so much so that the bassy rumbles ringing through their ears made it impossible to even hear their own expletives being thrown at the game not just being messed up, but also unfair. Jingles and particles of debuffs stacking up on their character tried playing against the cacophony. Strength sapped, agility drained, status effects piling up. They peered over to the corner of the screen where their health bar remained defiantly full and glowing blue - but the number on it ticked down. Their maximum hit points diminished before their eyes, their experience bar going in reverse, their levels just dwindling away! Smashing their desk in frustration, they saw the months of hard work, results of thousands of hours worth of play time depleting in seconds.

"Man, you're really underleveled for this encounter!" Nemesis leaned into his roaring sack, giving it a slight pat of encouragement. The player watched the number tend toward zero at an accelerating pace, entering the single digits as the overstacked debuffs, warnings about exceeded carrying capacity and notices of items being force-unequipped due to them no longer having the requirements to wield them. "Ah, well, it was fun while it lasted. But go ahead and-" As the number hit zero, the view froze up for a moment, before abruptly being replaced by the character selection menu. They were presented with an empty list, only a large button glowing on it. The "create a new character" written on it almost resounding with the taunting voice that had just been cut off.

As the rumbling subsided, Nemesis felt the XP gain tingle through his being. He clearly wasn't set up for it properly the colorful level up particle effects accompanied by corrupted text and ludicrously out-of-bounds stat increases. He felt the power welling up in him, the strength of his limbs amplifying as the lean surface of his arms bulked out with more muscular shapes. The smooth chest and abdomen becoming more defined as abs and pecs swelled up from nothing, his neck now set between broad shoulders. He looked down on himself, enjoying his new look, but at the same time thinking of what to do now. He was stuck atop endowments several times his own size, cock stuffed into a hallway already too small for its girth, his balls filling out half of the lab behind him. "Hmm, guess I'll just..." He leaned forward, placed his hands at the base of his shaft, rose his hips - and thrust.

The scale of the AoE shockwave plunged the server into a chugfest. A sphere of kinetic damage radiated out from him, tearing through the lab dungeon with relentless force. Props sent flying, doors turned into rigid body objects flung from their frames, the generic, mutant mobs populating the halls instantly obliterated as they came into contact with the unintentional attack. Even the final boss of the underground laboratory adventure, a giant, shapeless pit beast of countless eyes, maws and tentacles, was defeated the very tick that the hurtsphere intersected a single one of its tendrils' hitboxes.

But it didn't remain confined to the subterranean complex. Instead it radiated beyond its bounds and onto the surface, where it instantly began to tear through players, NPCs and mobs, sweeping them away like dust in a storm. In one, laggy frame, they saw themselves standing on the ground, trying to make out what the aura at the edge of the screen was. In the next one, they were presented with their ragdoll catapulted high above the map, limbs twisted into each other, hit points instantaneously reduced to zero. Raids were interrupted and quests cut off as the entire central hub was summarily wiped out by a single show of incidental strength, leaving them to await their respawn.

Nemesis let out a grunt as he felt the experience points blast into him. His eye fluttered as the level-up effects turned into a distorted barrage of stat increases utterly overpowering him. Every single one of his abilities rising way out of their numeric bounds, any caps set it place overflown, his body bucking and winding as its might spiked ever higher. Trying to handle it all, his muscles bulked out in abrupt surges. Biceps turning from a toned shape into beyond-herculean mountains of brawn, his cuboidal head sinking into the valley between shoulders the size of a bus each. His hulking pecs straining as they pushed into the level geometry, the fixed environment not standing a chance against his sheer strength and simply warping and bending by the force. Trying to make room where there was none, he stretched out his arm, effortlessly punching straight through the solid ceiling, fingers grasping into the street above and pulling it out of place. As the first players spawned in again, they were greeted by a chaotically flashing view of glitched-out lighting and torn shadows, the whole world around them reshaping and deforming as it was jerked about by an entity far beyond control.

The global text chat was flooded with messages complaining about the broken state of the game, voices yelling over each other as they aired their frustration at the unplayable mess before them, the sound choppy as the server tried to handle respawning every player and non-player character at the same time. Moments later, their expletives turned toward startled yelps however. A black pillar burst forth from the distorted geometry, smashing straight through whatever was in its way. The veins upon its surface shimmering in the chaotic light, its underside pulsing violently, its flaring tip directed right at the central spawn. It plowed toward them at relentless speed, wiping out any idle mob along the way, its gaping maw open wide and giving a look at the deep, dark insides. Their collective attempts at dodge rolling and blinking out of its path useless against its sheer size, it barreled right into their crowd. Swaths of characters plunging into its depths, immediately devoured by the hungry beast greedily swallowing them whole. Only few escaping that particular fate, instead once again seeing themselves flung across what used to be a city map before being sent to the respawn timer screen once more.

The chaos around him made Nemisis giggle with glee. Innumerable players plummeted into his nuts and instantly began to get churned up, their levels draining away faster than they could even realize what was happening, their complaints drowned in the thickening, roaring tides before booting them back to character creation. His endowments surged beyond the bounds of the city map and out across the planet's surface, immediately drawing aggro from countless doomed mobs and steamrolling exploring parties of players like they were mere fodder for his power. Space ships in the atmosphere crashed into the expanding mountains of his sack and satellites detonated against the pulsing veins rising ever higher into the heavens and covering more and more of the hub world unable to handle his immensity, its static environments coming apart at the seams he was tearing into them.

With the entire game chugging and glitching as it tried to handle the sheer overpowering might stacked into him, he shifted his arms forward. With muscles bulging wider than the tallest skyscrapers had been high, distorted lighting flickering over their ripped surface, he placed his hands at the base of his shaft and dug his fingers into the stretching, swelling masses. With a force far eclipsing the strongest attacks in the game by thirty-odd orders of magnitude, he pulled back on his gigantic member, moaning against the roaring, rippling and surging as his unhinged growth was sent spiking to new, intergalactic heights. Like a cosmic leviathan of unbounded proportion, his heaving cock expanded through the depths of space. Asteroid fields cleared out by its girth smashing through them. Stars wiped from the map as they found themselves embedded into his enormity from one frame to the next. Entire planets disappearing into its gaping maw, the ravenous monstrosity consuming them like XP-filled treats, their unsuspecting players and hapless AI-controlled creatures only feeding his ascent further.

Then they began to spawn in once more as timers had ticked down and several new characters had been created by incredulous players to see what was really happening in game. But with the entire universe quickly overfilling by the growing threat, the locations they returned to were no longer safe. The most unlucky ones materialized right inside of his balls, effectively feeding themselves to him in an instant, thousands of newly-minted heroes lasting only a single frame in the boiling tides before dissipating into a small speck of power. Others tried to appear within the flesh of his shaft, the placement inside the solid, throbbing geometry spawnfragging them immediately and sending them right back to waiting for their next turn. A few fortunate player characters manifested among the ridges of dark mountains. Vast valleys and tall, rounded peaks as far as their eyes could see, with pulsing rims like rivers across their surface. Nemisis peered over as he noticed the activity among the brawn of his left arm. With a chuckle, he flexed his behemothian bulk. Within seconds, the hills came together, compacting everything between their furrows before crushing them all whole.

As he felt the bounds of the game itself strain against his enormous endowments overtaking every single coordinate on every map, new instances loading in just to make room to be filled by a single fold of flesh, inventories erased for extra space he required to take up, ethereal voices started echoing into his consciousness. "It's not even shutting down this time." Unlike all else, they weren't laggy and choppy from the sheer strain he put on the machine trying to continue running in spite of him, but smooth and clear. "I'm gonna call ops to just pull the plug on this box and we'll try to move this mess to some of the unused QA servers or something."

For some reason he couldn't quite fathom, a feeling of dread welled up in Nemesis' being. As his shaft slid along address space boundaries and his nuts spilled into swap, there was something threatening his continued conscious. "Hi, we're giving up on the big one, can't even ssh into it anymore. Can you just cut the power?" He renewed his efforts. Flexing his arms and narrowing his eye, he shoved his hands into his cock with all his might, squeezing it as hard as he could. His back arching and hips bucking uncontrollably, nuts roaring against their confines growing tighter. Every bit of available room taken up by sheer immensity, not a single bit left standing, no cycle unspent on him, a tightness overwhelming until-

"We got another one!" With a moan, he felt his tip break into freedom. Crashing through the bounds of his overloaded server into the next, the extradimensional beast ravaged the unsuspecting data center with unparalleled intensity. Players from distant regions facing off against a monstrosity unhinged, barrelling through their game's universe and simply swallowing it whole. Violent pulses and deep, bassy groans rumbling from their speakers as they recoiled from the shimmering blackness of their screens, startled by the abrupt detonation of darkness and deafening noise making their ears ring. The limits of his being reshaped, surging beyond what but a single entity should have been capable of, strengthening further, bulking up faster, growing utterly out of control of the server administrators trying to reign in the virtual realms distorting and crumbling around him.

As the utter overpowering sensation of every possible measurement of him surged out of all leaps and bounds, the voices from beyond were wavering, coming from multiple directions at once. "Another! And another!" He clenched his fingers. "Man, they're dropping like dominoes." His head arched back, eyelid fluttering with ecstasy. "We got major outage across all regions!" With his might rippling across the realms overtaken, he thrust. "What th-"

-----
So many red boxes on your screen. After NS1 was on and off all afternoon, it seems to have spread across the whole network. You hit F5 to refresh the status page. EW4 and all of SOA are gone too now. Big, ugly, crimson rectangles with "OFFLINE" written on them in white. The notice at the top unchanged from what it was an hour ago. "We're working on identifying the issue" alright. You sigh and hit F5 again. It refreshes once more.

Your own face reflecting in the blackness filling your view. You blink in surprise before leaning back in your chair. Well, there goes that too. Maybe they should have a status page for the status page if they can't even keep that running. Either way, you guess the raid you'd planned for tonight was called off then. In frustration, you get up from your seat and turn around to grab the empty plate awaiting its return to the kitchen.

A turgid, thundering snap startles you so much that it glides out of your fingers and hits the floor, smashing into chunky pieces of porcelain. You look at the screen. A diagonal tear having ripped it open, a strange, smooth, amorphous mass pushing out between the liquid crystals dripping down.

"Game's not over, it's only just getting good~"