The world came back in broken, corrupted fragments. The smell of ozone. The high-pitched, electronic whine inside his skull. The rough, gritty texture of concrete against his cheek and a spreading, sticky warmth under his nose. Blood.
System_Resource_Leak. Severity: Minor. The thought, unbidden and clinical, flickered through his mind.
"—o! Leo, can you hear me?" Chloe's voice, tight with panic, filtered through the static.
He managed a groan. He tried to push himself up, but his arms refused to obey. 404_Error. Arms_Not_Found.
"Don't move." Maya. A hand, surprisingly gentle, pressed against his shoulder. "Just breathe."
He forced his eyes open. The world was a fractured, shimmering mess. The floodlight was a supernova, splintering into a thousand razor-sharp points of light. Overlaid on everything, a constant, flickering cascade of raw, unfiltered source code scrolled over every surface, every person. His brain was running a denial-of-service attack on itself.
"His eyes…" he heard Ben whisper, his voice a mixture of clinical awe and raw horror. "The code… it's in his eyes."
He could see them all, not as people, but as complex, layered processes. Chloe, a warm, steady glow of [Bio-Energy], her [Mental_State] a frantic script of anxiety protocols. Ben, a chaotic explosion of [Cognitive_Processes]. Maya, a tightly controlled, efficient process, her [Combat_Ready_State] humming at 98%.
And he saw himself, reflected in the dark screen of Ben's tablet. A corrupted file. [User:Leo_Maxwell] flickered in red, followed by a string of error messages. [Cognitive_Load:Critical]. [Neurological_Integrity:Compromised]. [Admin_Permissions:Unstable].
He had tried to issue a DELETE command on a core piece of the System's physics. He hadn't just broken a rule; he had tried to edit the source code of the universe with a blunt instrument. And the backlash had shattered him.
The pain started to filter back in, a deep, foundational agony. The world of code began to dissolve into a sea of pure, white static. He was losing his connection, not just to the System, but to himself. His consciousness was fragmenting. This is it, he thought, a strange, detached calm settling over him. This is how the process terminates.
Then, a new sensation. A warmth spreading through his chest. Gentle. Soft. A faint, golden light bloomed at the edge of his broken vision. He turned his head, a colossal effort, and saw Sarah. She was kneeling beside him, her hands outstretched, not touching him, her face a mask of intense concentration. A soft, golden aura pulsed from her, a steady wave of pure, uncorrupted data.
[Skill_Active: Encourage]
[Target: Leo_Maxwell]
[Effect: Stabilizing Emotional_State, Reinforcing Cognitive_Cohesion]
It wasn't a healing spell. It was a defrag program. A system restore. The golden light washed over the frantic, red error messages in his code, and they began to calm, to stabilize. The chaotic waterfall of source code slowed, resolving back into the familiar, solid shapes of the tunnel. The pain receded from an all-consuming supernova to a merely agonizing, localized star.
"It's working," Arthur breathed, his voice filled with a disbelief that cut through Leo's haze. "The probability of his neurological cascade failure was 98%. Now it's… dropping. 70%. 60%."
Leo took a breath, a real one. He looked at Sarah, this quiet, terrified young woman who thought her only skill was a minor morale boost. She was the only one in the world who could have pulled him back. She wasn't a support class. She was a system admin. Just like him.
He finally managed to push himself into a sitting position, his body trembling with a profound, bone-deep exhaustion. He looked back down the tunnel, where the mangled wreckage of the steel beam lay in a cloud of dust, completely blocking the path. The barking of the Hounds was gone. The silence was absolute.
"Did it… work?" he asked, his voice a raw, shredded thing.
Maya nodded. "It worked." She looked back at him, and for the first time, he saw a flicker of something that might have been concern. "You paid for it."
He had. He looked at his own status, the window hovering in his vision, no longer flickering red, but a stable, ominous yellow.
[User-Class: Administrator]
[Tier: 1 (Helpdesk Admin)]
[Status: Neurological Trauma (Severe)]
[Skill_Disabled: Minor Edit (24:00:00)]
[Skill_Disabled: Inspect Element (24:00:00)]
He wasn't an Admin anymore. He was just Leo. A guy with a killer headache, a 24-hour lockout on his only useful skills, and a group of sixteen people staring at him like he was their savior. The System had collected its tax. And it had taken everything.