Dom Hart

Dom Hart

First appearance: Happy, chapter 0
Last appearance: Crucible, chapter 66
Appears in: Happy, Armageddon, Timeless, Crucible

Latest status

Publicly exposed as Dominic Hart, a terminally ill ally of Jason’s who sacrifices himself as a repeatedly-dying distraction during the siege.

Dom Hart is a college athlete whose terminal cancer diagnosis drives him into Awaken Online in search of an escape, where he reinvents himself through relentless, punishing training into an unkillable warrior. He builds Death and Taxes, a feared mercenary guild he leads under the alias Smiles, using its reputation and earnings to fund his real-world treatment. Equal parts ruthless operator and quietly desperate patient, Dom moves between rivalry and uneasy alliance with Jason’s group, his story a study in what a person facing death will risk, sacrifice, and become.

Abilities

• Chaotic Blessing (inverted, risk-scaling luck; replaces mana pool) — Book 5.5
• Deathwish (accelerated respawn) — Book 5.5
• Sprint and Dodge — Book 5.5
• Iron Skin and multiple damage/status resistances (poison, bleed, pierce) — Book 5.5
• Bull Rush and Challenging Shout — Book 5.5
• Unarmed Fighting and Improvisation — Book 5.5
• Roll the Dice (stacking luck buff from kills) — Book 5.5
• Thunderclap — Book 5.5
• Undying — Book 5.5
• Racial/class transformation into an Ogrin Juggernaut — Book 5.5
• Shapeshifting into a giant shark form using Queen’s illusion ring — Book 6
• Light Resistance — Book 6
• Increased damage resistance and faster regeneration developed through repeated combat against the avatars — Book 6
• Enrage (rarely used, deployed in his fight against Jason) — Book 6

Book 5.5: Happy

Dom Hart is a scholarship linebacker who receives a terminal soft-tissue sarcoma diagnosis he cannot afford to treat. He hides the news from his father, his roommates Steve and Justin, and his coach, using humor to mask despair and quietly considering suicide before a nurse, Vivian, secretly enrolls him in Cerillion Entertainment’s experimental Awaken Online therapy program. Inside the game he wakes not in the standard tutorial but in the Luckless Mark casino, where the Gambler tricks him through a rigged card game into accepting a quest to skip the tutorial and kill the first hostile creature he meets. The quest brands him with Chaotic Blessing, a skill that inverts and multiplies his luck but strips him of a mana pool. In the city of Aislen he refuses The Jackals guild’s exploitative protection contract, recognizing it as the same kind of racket his father warned him about, and walks alone into the jungle that has killed nearly every other solo player.

A dire python kills him almost immediately, but his death triggers an unexpected respawn back in the casino rather than the standard system, and the rush of the death-and-rebirth cycle proves to relieve his psychological burden better than anything else available to him. He turns this into a deliberate methodology: dying to the same python and to other jungle threats hundreds and then over a thousand times to grind out stats, resistances, and skills such as Deathwish, Sprint, Dodge, Iron Skin, Bull Rush, and Challenging Shout, transforming his body into a scarred, superhumanly strong frame. The training becomes compulsive, a way of burying his real-world diagnosis rather than facing it, costing him classes, practices, and contact with everyone who cares about him. He meets Adrian Pearson, a bard rejected by The Jackals for his unconventional class, and begins training him the same way, pushing him off a cliff as his first lesson in dying; the two become partners, and during an S-difficulty Egg Hunt event they rescue a hatching Battle Chicken that imprints on Dom as a pet, later named Wingman.

The Gambler reveals himself as the imprisoned God of Happiness, and Dom uses the partnership with Adrian to start disrupting The Jackals’ economic monopoly over Aislen’s crafters. This draws the attention of Sean, one of Booker’s lieutenants, who lures Dom and Adrian into a dungeon raid, then tortures and kills them both on Booker’s orders to eliminate Dom as a threat. The betrayal breaks Dom’s silence: he finally tells Adrian about his cancer, and the two turn their training into a business, using the game’s real-money economy to fund his treatment. Dom fights his way into the goblin fort, earns the goblins’ respect, and negotiates a collective-bargaining agreement binding their tragic, divinely abandoned civilization to the casino in exchange for labor and protection, founding what becomes Boomtown. He and Adrian retaliate against The Jackals directly, trapping and wiping out a raiding party and then pulling off a heist on the guild’s headquarters that burns down their warehouse. The money funds Dom’s first cancer treatment and lets him finally tell Steve, Justin, and his father the truth; it also seeds the founding of Death and Taxes, an assassination guild with Dom as Guild Master and Adrian handling recruitment and business.

Dom recruits and trains a core team — Vanessa, Walt, Lauren, and Willow — through the same death-based methodology, preparing them for open war with The Jackals over Boomtown. Booker’s forces attack with chemical-warfare tactics, and Walt is killed sacrificing himself to stop a flood meant to destroy the settlement. Dom kills Booker in single combat, then leads a solo assault on Aislen itself, tanking a friendly meteor strike and gaining the Undying ability as Death and Taxes springs its real plan: they had bound their own spawn point to the city, letting them camp and repeatedly kill The Jackals for over forty hours until the guild formally disbands. In the aftermath Dom recruits the defeated Booker into Death and Taxes as Smokes, recognizing in him the same desperation that drove his own transformation, and discovers he has undergone a racial and class change into an Ogrin Juggernaut. By the book’s end Death and Taxes is running professional heists, including a coordinated robbery of the Barrow auction house, and an epilogue reveals that a mysterious hacker has flagged Dom — now going by the guild alias Smiles — to Gloria Bastion as potentially useful to an undisclosed plan, tying his survival story into the series’ larger VR-safety conspiracy thread.

Status: Alive — newly diagnosed with terminal cancer, in shock and concealing it from everyone around him → Alive — Guild Master of Death and Taxes, transformed into an Ogrin Juggernaut, undergoing funded cancer treatment while running professional guild operations

Adrian: grows from a training subject Dom pushes off a cliff into his closest partner and co-founder of Death and Taxes, the first person he tells about his cancer.

Wingman: an imprinted Battle Chicken pet becomes a trusted combat partner and a religious figure to the goblins of Boomtown.

The Gambler: shifts from a manipulative mark who tricks Dom into a dangerous quest to a wary business patron sponsoring Death and Taxes’ casino operations.

Booker: goes from the guild antagonist ordering Dom’s elimination to a defeated rival Dom recruits into Death and Taxes as ‘Smokes’ after recognizing shared desperation.

His Father: moves from being deliberately shut out to being told the diagnosis directly once treatment money is secured.

Steve And Justin: his roommates go from being kept in the dark and worried about his withdrawal to learning the truth and offering support.

Key quote: “I’m tired of just lying down and letting the universe shit on me. It’s time to take my fate into my own hands.”

Book 6: Armageddon

Dom Hart leads Death and Taxes, a mercenary guild whose reputation is so feared that his mere presence ends conflicts before they start, though the ease of it has left him bored. Behind the mask he is dying of a terminal illness in the real world and is quietly desperate for money for treatment, a fact he hides from most of his guild; he uses increasingly dangerous in-game risks to chase the adrenaline that distracts him from his medical reality. Death and Taxes takes a contract from Gloria Bastion to guard her excavation, and Dom leads a heist at Sandscrit, transforming into a giant shark using Queen’s illusion ring to steal a gate piece and kill Khamsin guards, deliberately leaving a witness alive so the crew’s reputation goes viral. When SAFE’s excavation triggers the Armageddon event, Dom is honest that his guild has no ideology at stake and is simply completing a paid contract, even while enduring torture calmly as part of a teleportation trap he has set using gate fragments.

Death and Taxes then abducts Jason, Alexion, Finn, and Eliza into the Mile-High Club, a hidden death-game arena, where Dom has spent weeks preparing a mana-barrier trap specifically to fight the four of them himself. He crushes his ally Evelyn without hesitation once she is no longer useful, then fights the group one by one, drawing on extreme damage resistance and rapid regeneration that improve as the fights escalate. He grows genuinely appreciative of his opponents, praising Eliza’s Ice Witch form as “incredible,” and provokes Jason into revealing his full transformed power, using his own Enrage ability and enduring a fractured mask that exposes part of his real face. When Jason overpowers him, Dom is revealed to be a 22-year-old college football player who admits his need for a real fight comes from the same thrill-seeking addiction he sees in Jason, and he tries to draw Jason into recognizing the same pattern in himself.

After Enrage wears off, Dom accepts defeat without resentment and has Death and Taxes sign a new contract to work for Jason instead of Gloria, framing the switch in purely professional terms while privately expecting a rematch. He settles into an uneasy but functional alliance with Jason’s group, showing open affection for his companion creature Wingman, and fights beside Jason directly against Gloria’s stone constructs as an equal combat partner. He then volunteers to hold off an army of hundreds of thousands of travelers alone as a distraction so Jason can pursue Gloria underground, accepting the near-certain risk and addressing Jason as “boss.” After the world’s transformation, Dom survives as one of Jason’s allies but continues to encourage Jason’s embrace of darker, more ruthless methods, taking visible pleasure in the chaos and in Jason’s hardening resolve.

Jason: Goes from orchestrating a death-game trap meant to kill Jason to accepting defeat, signing a new guild contract to work for him, and fighting at his side as a trusted combat partner.

Gloria: Ends the guild’s paid contract with her and becomes hostile to her mission after switching sides to work for Jason.

Evelyn: Uses her as a temporary strategic ally in his trap for Jason’s group, then crushes her without hesitation once she is no longer useful.

Wingman: Shows consistent open affection for his companion creature across the book, a rare crack in his otherwise controlled demeanor.

Key quote: “I wanted a fight. A real one… I wanted to experience that same sensation I did when I first started playing – that cocktail of fear and adrenaline”

Book 7: Timeless

Smiles leads Death and Taxes during the forced-logout crisis in Gloria’s valley, where his group is boxed in and exposed to thousands of hostile travelers. He assesses the position as untenable and directs a tactical response, using his oversized chicken companion Wingman for intimidation to buy time while coordinating with Jason’s allied group. When the travelers attack in force, he fights from the front, relying on immense physical strength and coin-based ranged attacks that let him respawn immediately after death, and endures repeated killing blows despite carrying a large bounty on his head. He trusts an ally to target him directly with a meteor as part of the coordinated defense and directs Wingman’s size changes with precise timing, working alongside Jason’s group despite their prior history as enemies.

Later, Jason calls in a favor and Death and Taxes provides security for Eliza at an event; Smiles personally oversees her protection, his bloodied smiley mask giving him an intimidating presence that he offsets with a calm, reassuring manner toward her. That protective arrangement carries into a real-world extraction, where he leads the same crew to secure Eliza’s safety, projects calm authority over his team, and deflects questions about the operation’s ties to a broader resistance network working for an unnamed friend, implied to be Jason. By the time he closes out the arrangement, Smiles treats the relationship with Jason as a straightforward business one: he delivers the contracted work, collects payment, and declines to ask what it is for, reflecting in passing on how thoroughly the game has reshaped people into pragmatic, transactional operators like himself.

Status: Guild leader of Death and Taxes, cornered with a large bounty on his head during the forced-logout crisis → Independent mercenary contractor working paid jobs for Jason, including personally protecting Eliza and running resistance-linked security operations

Jason: moves from wary, temporary battlefield allies with a hostile history to an ongoing paid contractor relationship built on mutual professional trust.

Eliza: takes on a personal protective role toward her at Jason’s request, from event security through a real-world extraction.

Key quote: “I’m a mercenary. I don’t need to ask questions as long as the money arrives on time.”

Book 8: Crucible

Dom Hart, known in-game as Smiles, leads the Death and Taxes guild and runs the Mile-High Club, a death-game arena that forces visitors to fight their way to him. Early in the book he operates under an alias for the Gambler, keeping a low profile to avoid being linked to the Cerillion break-in; he impersonated Eliza’s parents to cover for her after she was caught there, and stole Cerillion’s data at Jason’s request. As Eliza and Finn investigate who helped her escape, they trace his growing real-world footprint: a former college football star who dropped off the map after Awaken Online’s release, he is dying of cancer, has registered Chaos Holdings LLC, and has used an eight-figure cash purchase from an offshore account to fund construction of a fortified facility next to Finn’s house, connected through Nexus Dynamics to St. Clair Holdings. Cady, Julia, Finn, and Eliza treat him as a target of investigation, with Cady speculating he may be an “angel investor” rather than a mastermind behind the construction.

Within the Mile-High Club he enforces a meritocratic system, telling Eliza she must “earn” a meeting with him through victory rather than demand it. After she and Finn defeat his Death Ball champions and later a modified exhibition opponent, he praises their performance while continuing to train his own guild to superhuman levels. When Eliza and Finn finally reach him, he removes his mask and reveals himself as Dominic Hart, disclosing that his cancer has stopped responding to treatment. He explains he has been secretly working with Jason throughout the book, manufacturing Mile-High Club events with Gloria and stalling and motivating Eliza and Finn, in exchange for Jason’s promise to save his life; he admits he lied to Jason about his treatment progress and that Jason caught the lie, and asks Eliza and Finn to judge his manipulation by its consequences rather than its means. During the siege that follows, his identity becomes public when Julia exposes him mid-battle, compromising the trust he built with Finn and Eliza. He nonetheless holds an entire battle line alone, dying and resurrecting repeatedly in a burst of amber energy to keep two armies of Originals occupied while Sebastian and the Empress reach the cathedral boss fight, and by the book’s end appears in the crowd sharing a confirming nod with Jason.

Status: Masked guild leader Smiles, secretly stealing Cerillion data and covering for Eliza while keeping his identity hidden. → Publicly exposed as Dominic Hart, a terminally ill ally of Jason’s who sacrifices himself as a repeatedly-dying distraction during the siege.

Jason: moves from a covert operative secretly stealing data for him to an openly trusted ally who accepts Jason’s promise to save his life from cancer.

Eliza: goes from a masked figure she must fight her way to and confront for answers to someone who reveals the truth of his manipulation to her directly, asking her to judge him by outcomes rather than means.

Finn: the two reach an understanding once Dom reveals his role and terminal diagnosis, though the alliance is then strained when his real identity is exposed publicly.

Key quote: “Ahh, well… hope, I guess. He offered to save my life.”

Appears in

• Happy — 49 chapters
• Armageddon — 19 chapters
• Timeless — 5 chapters
• Crucible — 13 chapters