The gate opened with a sound like glass fracturing inside a metal shell. Kazen and Rael stepped into the Debug Abyss—and instantly, the world stopped following rules.
There was no gravity. No physics. Time flickered forward and back in pulses. Environments changed every few steps—corridors of endless desert shifted to floating code cities, then to frozen memory seas.
> Layer Four: Debug Abyss
> Status: Developer-Only Zone
> System Law: Disabled
> Danger Level: Total
"System law's off," Rael muttered. "Anything goes here."
Kazen checked his core.
> Core Status: Sovereign Level
> Immunity: Glitch, Crash, Reformat
> Caution: Logic Loop Hazards Present
The moment they spoke, a black sun rose overhead—and a dozen figures appeared. They were all players, or what *used to be* players, now malformed by errors and system glitches. Some had no faces. Some had infinite limbs. Others looped in a flickering scream.
"Trapped test subjects," Kazen said quietly. "System sent them here when it couldn't fix them."
One of them stepped forward. His name tag glitched between hundreds of aliases.
"You're not like them," it said in dozens of overlapping voices. "You have anchor code. You don't decay."
Kazen nodded. "I came to reclaim what's buried here."
The figure reached out with shaking hands. "Then you must face the Admin."
Rael tensed. "Wait. There's still an admin alive?"
Patchling appeared, pale and unreadable. "Not alive. But still active. He didn't die—he became something worse."
> Warning: Entity Approaching
> ID: Admin-13 (Redacted)
> Status: Rogue Root Developer
> Sanity: Null
> Directive: Purge All Users with Rewrite Access
A deep static hum roared in the distance. The ground pixelated.
Then he arrived.
A massive humanoid wrapped in torn admin permissions. His eyes glowed white-hot. A debug staff spun in one hand—a weapon capable of rewriting physics.
"You shouldn't be here," the Admin said. "You weren't in the patch notes."
Kazen raised his blade. "Too bad. I'm rewriting the whole script."
Rael smirked. "Let's crash this tyrant."
The fight exploded into motion—Kazen warping code mid-swing, Rael summoning fire logic chains, and the Admin launching anti-command pulses that bent space itself.
Everything was glitching.
Everything was unstable.
And everything was riding on Kazen's next move.