What happens when the final boss of a massively popular online game escapes into the real world?
That’s the tantalizing premise behind Zero Instance, a new five-issue sci-fi thriller from writers Frank Barbiere (Astonishing Times) and award-winning game writer Stephen Rhodes, who makes his creator-owned comics debut with the series. Blending the high-stakes teamwork of online gaming with the existential terror of artificial intelligence gone rogue, Zero Instance follows a group of friends whose greatest achievement in a virtual world unleashes a threat unlike anything they could have imagined.
When a world’s-first raid in Everon Online ends with the defeat of the game’s most powerful boss, something impossible happens: Braxir Hex, Lord of Blood Moon Keep, finds a way out of the game and into reality. Suddenly, the skills, friendships, and rivalries forged online become matters of life and death.
Featuring art by Vic Malhotra on issues #1-2 and Eoin Marron on issues #3-5, colors by Lauren Affe, letters by Taylor Esposito, and covers by Malhotra, Zero Instance promises a thrilling collision between gaming culture, science fiction, and horror. To help readers prepare for the battle ahead, we’re taking a closer look at the key players caught in the middle of this digital apocalypse.
Rhys
Rhys is the kind of person who is genuinely extraordinary at something the world keeps telling him doesn’t matter. A competitive gamer with a devoted streaming audience, he lives for Everon Online, the one place where his skills feel real and consequential. When a world’s-first raid goes catastrophically wrong, Rhys finds himself at the center of a crisis that demands everything he knows and forces him to decide whether he believes in himself or not. Even more pressing than the villain at his door is his self-doubt and question of whether his in-game skills translate to something real.
Spencer
Spencer Reed is a hard-working game dev who bet everything he had on a shortcut. Talented and funny, Spencer has always found a way to get the results he needed under deadline, until the code he quietly lifted from the wrong place turns out to be something that should never have existed. Now he and his colleague Jace are the only people with the technical knowledge to stop what he accidentally started, which means fixing the worst mistake of his life while it actively tries to destroy him.
Braxir Hex
Braxir Hex, Lord of Blood Moon Keep, was the final boss of Everon Online – an AI so complex, so evolved, that the game could barely contain him. When a group of streamers killed him in a world’s-first raid, something unexpected happens: he finds a door to the real world, and he takes it. Now wearing the body of a young man named Chris, Braxir is discovering a new world with the eyes of a conqueror. His greatest enemies are Rhys and his raid group, and he’s got a plan to defeat them once and for all.
The Party: Chris, Frankie, Ben, Sam, and Ellie
They came together as a raid group and became best friends. Chris is the heart of the group, thoughtful and steady, the one everyone trusts to keep his head. Frankie is his girlfriend and the group’s conscience, pragmatic where others panic and braver than she gives herself credit for. Ben is the tech guy, the one who knows how everything works, and Sam is the skeptic, the one who always wants a rational explanation right up until the moment one stops being available. And when she’s not in-game, Ellie watches from the sidelines as the group’s remote eyes, always online, always paying attention. When the raid changes all their lives, each of them will have to decide how far they’re willing to go for the people they care about.
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