Thankfully it was only about a twenty-minute drive back to his house, still plenty of time to get in some studying before going to sleep… if he didn’t pull an all-nighter that is. An all-nighter… maybe that was the solution, Arthur thought to himself.

Putting some top ramen on the stove, he started up his phone again and launched Defenders of the Cosmos. It was a bullet hell game, which, for the uninitiated consisted of a small ship in one section of the screen and nearly infinite enemies. Bullets or lasers would fire non stop as the player is tasked with avoiding them as much as possible. Bullet hell games were also famous for having almost no if any hit points so that if you were hit just once in many cases, it would be game over.

Arthur had always considered himself a more hardcore gamer, growing up with a SNES and Playstation he had played most of the classics, from RPGs, fighting games, to first-person shooters. He had played the lot of them. Ordinarily mobile games were not on his radar as they were too “casual” for his tastes. There was something about Defenders that made him keep coming back, however. Maybe it was the clever pixel graphics, perhaps it was the funky soundtrack… or the crushingly hard difficulty. Whatever it was, he couldn’t seem to put it down.

The ramen started to boil over, and he paused the game to pour it into a bowl and ate while he played. Thankfully he could play one-handed. It had only been out for a month now, but it was already the most popular game on the app store, and he was already one of the top players in the world. If he could only pass the next 100 stages without dying once he would be number 1. Currently, that slot was taken by someone with the name Cr4zy8. He hated that name, all he could think of was wiping them off the leaderboard.

After a few near misses, he put his fork down and focused all his effort on the game. His ramen was getting cold, but he didn’t care. There were alien invaders to kill.