Kael quietly joins a temporary raid squad for a standard gate suppression. The team's casual, under-prepared, and underestimating the threat — but it's enough for Kael to test his growing instinct. One member mocks him for being a mid without flair. Kael says nothing. He's not here to impress. He's here to prevent the future from repeating.
The raid lobby buzzed with the usual half-nervous, half-bored energy of low-tier suppression runs.
No banners.
No guild colors.
Just freelancers and rejects, gathered by timing and desperation.
Kael stood near the back, adjusting the fit of his gloves. He kept his glyph-hand low, hidden beneath the hem of his sleeve. The crack hadn't spread yet. Not visibly. But he could feel it — humming just beneath the skin, like a system thread warming up.
One pull. That's all I need.
Just one situation to test how much control he really had.
The rollback gave him time — yes.
But time was nothing without skill.
The squad leader was a stocky brawler with short orange hair and half his chestplate unstrapped.
"Alright," the guy barked, voice already hoarse. "Simple sweep. Class C nest, no boss. We do this fast and we go home rich-ish."
Kael didn't speak.
Someone chuckled. "You always say that, Jek. Last time you lost your right arm for five minutes."
"That was a friendly fire bug," Jek snapped.
"Because you face-tanked a flame aura mob with a grin," another chimed in.
Jek pointed at them both. "Listen, if the system can't handle my sex appeal, that's its problem."
Kael stepped forward, quiet.
"Target zone?"
Jek raised a brow. "New guy talks."
Kael said nothing.
A healer in pale gold armor rolled her eyes. "Let him speak, Jek. You're not funny enough to carry silence."
Jek shrugged. "Alright. Nest's in Sector South-9, below the glassway. Five spawn nodes. One anchor crystal. We break the anchor, mop the rest."
"Any known bugs?" Kael asked, flatly.
That earned him a few glances.
"Mid-tier's asking about bugs," someone muttered. "Man thinks he's QA."
Jek scratched his cheek. "Nothing flagged. Might be a desync on cooldowns — mobs have been double-casting, but only at extreme aggro range."
Kael's eyes narrowed slightly.
Exactly like last time.
That's the trigger.
The raid countdown began:
[PARTY SYNC: 6/6]
[INSTANCING COMPLETE]
[SOUTH-9 NEST INITIALIZING…]
The alley around them flickered — geometry unfolding like the pages of a transparent book. Walls stretched. Light bent. The air warped and collapsed.
In one heartbeat, the alley became a cavern.
Green light bled from the walls.
Wet stone. Skittering echoes.
Kael stepped forward, boots crunching over broken crystal.
He stayed silent as the others bantered behind him.
This was it.
The first real fight.
And if the same glitch triggered — like before —
he would patch it.
On purpose.
The echo chamber of the gate trembled with low hissing.
Five mobs.
Classless runners.
Heavily bugged models with bone ridges too long for their hitboxes. Tails with no collision values. Glitchy audio cues that always came too late.
Kael watched the tank — a heavy-built Awakener with a flanged mace and attitude to match — wade in like it was routine.
"Pulling center!" the tank shouted. "Don't be shy, get your bursts lined up!"
Kael held back.
Just behind the DPS line. Hands low. Breathing measured.
He wasn't watching the mobs.
He was watching the code.
The first swing came late — the tank's blow struck true, but the damage lagged. One mob flickered as its animation snapped between hurt-state and idle.
Then it cast.
Kael's eyes widened.
Too soon.
He saw it happen again: the exact same glitch from the previous timeline.
Mob cooldown: 8.5 seconds.
Bug trigger: double-cast at aggro reset if tank outpaces healers.
The mob screamed.
A sickening, warping sound.
Then its tail swept in an arc and slammed into the tank's flank — a second ability that shouldn't be ready yet.
The bug's real. Still here.
The tank crumpled.
[STATUS: DOWNED]
The healer gasped. "What the hell?! That wasn't even on cooldown!"
DPS scattered.
Another mob glitched mid-jump, skipping an animation.
It's happening again.
Kael remembered this.
The wipe.
The panic.
The screams.
The way the healer died first — trampled. Then the DPS, cornered against bugged geometry. And Kael last, alone, trying to outpace enemies that were rewriting the rules on the fly.
Not this time.
Kael stepped forward.
His glyph burned.
Right palm. Writhing lines. That humming sensation surged into pain — but he welcomed it.
He focused on the mob.
His HUD blurred — then sharpened.
The code appeared:
[COOLDOWN: SPIKETAIL – 00.00.07.91]
[ERROR: NULL – INVALID CAST RESOLUTION]
[FLAG: AUTO LOOP DETECTED]
There.
He grabbed it.
Not physically. Not with power. With intent. With instinct.
Edit.
Force rewrite.
Now.
[FIELD OVERRIDE → COOLDOWN: SPIKETAIL]
[MANUAL PATCHING…]
He held his breath.
Changed one digit.
Set the cooldown to 12.0 seconds.
Then released.
[PATCH ACCEPTED]
[SYSTEM GLITCH → MASKED]
[SYNC: +0.0082]
The mob froze. Just for a moment.
A flicker passed through it, like a hologram stuttering.
Then it reset its cast animation.
No double-strike.
No wipe.
The healer recovered the tank.
The DPS finished the rest.
The fight continued.
Kael stood still.
His palm still burning.
No one saw what he did.
But the system had.
He knew it.
And so had something else.
Something that always watched when rules were broken.
"Good call, healer!" Jek shouted, breathing hard. "Saved my ass!"
"I didn't cast anything!" she barked back. "The mob just… reset?"
"Glitch then. Whatever. Thanks, gods of lag."
The others laughed, loosening up. The tension passed fast — as it always did in low-tier raids that didn't wipe.
Kael didn't join them.
He moved to the edge of the cave. Sat against the wall. Fingers curled into the stone. Palm still burning.
I patched it.
Live. During combat. With intention.
He opened his HUD.
The log blinked faintly:
[PATCH: MINOR]
[TARGET: SPIKETAIL COOLDOWN]
[DEBT SYNC: +0.0082]
[TRACE: PASSIVE]
The digits pulsed like heat signatures.
No one in the party noticed the flicker in Kael's eyes.
Or the way he stopped blinking for nearly ten seconds.
Or the sweat on his temples, even though the gate temperature was fixed at 22°C.
Inside, he was cataloguing every nanosecond of the patch process.
The way the glyph revealed itself.
The thread he pulled.
The delay between system hesitation and system acceptance.
Twelve-point-zero.
Next time, try eleven?
Or thirteen?
His hands twitched.
A part of him wanted to go back. Undo the patch. Try it again. See if he could edit the animation speed instead.
But something deeper warned him.
You're still inside a live raid. One patch per pulse. No more.
He closed the HUD.
Flexed his fingers.
The glow on his palm had dimmed… but it hadn't faded completely.
It was still syncing. Still pulsing.
Still waiting.
"Hey," Jek called from across the chamber. "Mid-guy. You good?"
Kael nodded once.
"That was a slick pull. Didn't even see you cast."
Kael said nothing.
He could lie. Say it was a burst. A lucky placement. A delayed hitbox.
But why?
They wouldn't believe the truth anyway.
"Name's Jek, by the way," the brawler said, thumbing toward himself. "Jek the Brick. Look me up next time you need a wall."
Kael stood.
"Appreciate it."
And he meant it — not the invite.
Just the moment.
The proof that his memory of the past wasn't just trauma.
It was data.
And now…
he could do something with it.
"Anchor's shattered," Jek said, stomping on the glowing crystal core one last time. "Mob density's dropping."
The healer wiped her brow. "That was weird as hell, but fine. I've seen worse glitches."
"Lucky bug," one of the DPS muttered.
"No," the archer added, shaking his head. "That wasn't a glitch. That mob reset its cast clean. Like something rewrote it."
Kael paused mid-step.
Didn't turn.
Didn't breathe.
Just listened.
Jek snorted. "You saying someone hacked it?"
"No. I'm saying something happened. You don't feel it?"
The others scoffed.
Moved on.
Left the words to rot in the air.
But Kael heard them like a chime.
You don't feel it?
They made their way to the gate exit — a semi-transparent barrier of layered glyph-glass, programmed to shimmer gently between transitions.
Kael stayed at the rear.
Hands in pockets.
Head down.
The glow on his palm had faded again… mostly.
He kept one eye on the corner of his HUD, watching for instability.
They neared the glass.
It flickered.
Once.
Kael stopped.
The others didn't notice.
He stayed behind as they crossed through — laughing, cracking energy bars, already moving on with their lives.
He stared into the barrier.
At first, it was nothing.
Just a reflection of himself — tired, mid-tier, gloves loose at the wrist.
Then…
Just at the edge of vision…
The reflection twitched.
His body stayed still.
But the image shifted.
Like it had blinked.
Without him.
And behind it —
in the deepest layer of glass —
a tall, bent figure unfolded.
No face.
Just black glass skin — reflective, angular — like armor grown in void.
Its eyes weren't visible.
But Kael felt it watching.
No sound.
No message.
Just presence.
Then —
Ping.
[REAPER TRACE DETECTED]
[GLASS-BOUND: ECHO STATUS – OBSERVING]
[ENGAGEMENT LEVEL: 0]
[RESPONSE: NONE]
Kael backed away.
Just a step.
His breath fogged the surface.
The image wavered.
The figure folded back into the distortion. Gone. Like it had never been there.
But the trace remained.
And his HUD added a new line:
[GLYPH RESONANCE: MINOR FLUX DETECTED]
[STABILITY: 91.8%]
Kael closed his eyes.
For just a moment.
Not from fear.
From memory.
Because this —
this was exactly how it began last time.
A flicker.
A glance.
A mob that died wrong.
And then…
the deaths began.
He stepped through the barrier last.
The system registered the raid as successful.
[REWARD CREDIT: 200g]
[XP: +0.04%]
[SYNC INTEGRITY: 91.8%]
[TRACE: SILENT]
Kael didn't smile.
Didn't speak.
He walked past the others.
Past the vendor.
Past the loot screen.
Out into the city night —
the reflection still burned behind his eyes.
The checkpoint gates shimmered and opened.
City sounds rushed in — muffled static of hovering skiffs, footsteps across tile, rain beginning to spit against the glass canopy overhead.
Jek stretched his arms like he'd just finished a workout.
"That was clean," he said. "We should stick together."
The healer scoffed. "You mean next time you trigger a bug, someone else better be there to save your ass again."
"Exactly," Jek grinned.
Kael stood a little apart. He always did. His gloves were pulled back on, tighter than before. The glyph lines on his palm still itched — but not enough to show.
Not yet.
One of the DPS walked past him — the one who'd noticed the cast reset mid-fight.
He glanced at Kael, eyes narrowed.
"You're mid-tier, right?"
Kael nodded once. "C-Class."
"You don't fight like a C."
"Didn't do anything special."
The DPS's eyes didn't leave his.
Then he smirked. "Right. Just happened to step in right before the mob misfired."
Kael said nothing.
The man chuckled and walked off.
As he did, Kael heard the word under his breath — half-amused, half-suspicious:
"Cheater."
Kael stayed where he was for a long moment.
Rain now slid in sheets along the edge of the canopy. Glass above, flickering lights below.
He opened his HUD again.
System logs scrolled past his vision.
Clean.
Clean.
Clean—
Then:
[MANUAL OVERRIDE DETECTED]
[TIMESTAMP: 14:09:33 / S9-ANCHOR FIELD]
[EVENT: LIVE PATCH – ENEMY COOLDOWN / SPIKETAIL]
[CLASSIFICATION: UNAUTHORIZED CODE REWRITE]
[REVIEW STATUS: FLAGGED (INTERNAL)]
[TRACE: NON-HOSTILE]
Kael exhaled slowly.
Not an alert. Not a punishment.
Just a flag.
But flags added up.
You keep patching like that, he thought, and eventually the system will start asking questions. Or worse—
Something else will.
He closed the HUD.
Looked out over the city.
The raid hadn't changed anything on the surface.
A quick cleanup.
No fatalities.
He'd even earned coin.
But beneath the glass...
the cracks had begun.
I fixed one line of code.
And something watched me do it.
Next time… it won't stay behind the glass.