Chapter 6: Friction
The mace didn't look like a weapon anymore. In the dilated perception of Kaelen's adrenaline, it looked like a kinetic equation.
[Object: Sunburst Mace]
[Mass: 18.5 kg]
[Velocity: 12 m/s]
[Trajectory: Cranial Impact]
The Enforcer's roar was a distorted, slow-motion bass note that rattled Kaelen's teeth. The white-armored giant had committed everything to this strike. His back foot was planted deep, digging into the invisible texture of the marble to leverage the swing. His center of gravity was shifting forward, trusting the floor to push back, to hold him steady.
He was trusting the laws of physics.
Kaelen didn't move to dodge. His body was frozen, locked by a lifetime of cowardice, but his mind was racing at the speed of a processor overclocked to the breaking point.
The blue text of the Apocrypha System overlaid the world, stripping away the veneer of reality. The marble floor wasn't stone; it was a grid of grey polygons. The air wasn't empty; it was filled with particle effects.
And the friction coefficient of the floor tile beneath the Enforcer's left boot was a variable.
[µ = 0.60]
Kaelen's mind reached out. It wasn't a prayer. It wasn't a spell chanted in High Lumen. It was a cursor click. A keystroke.
He grabbed the number.
Zero.
[Command Executed: Edit Local Physics.]
[Target: Floor_Tile_A7.]
[Value Set: µ = 0.00]
The world snapped back to real-time.
The Enforcer's boot didn't slip. "Slip" implied resistance, a scrape of rubber against stone.
This was absolute negation.
As the Enforcer shifted his weight to drive the mace down, his planted foot simply ceased to interact with the floor. It shot backward with the speed of a fired piston.
There was no screech of metal on stone. Just a wet, sickening whoosh of displaced air.
The Enforcer's momentum, intended to crush Kaelen's skull, had nowhere to go but down. His legs splayed into a grotesque split that the human pelvis was never designed to accommodate. The heavy plate armor, designed to deflect blows, became a prison of inertia.
CRUNCH.
The sound was wet and sharp, like a tree branch snapping inside a metal drum.
The Enforcer fell. Not forward, but straight down, his torso slamming into the marble with enough force to crack the tile. The mace, caught in the arc of the swing, continued its trajectory. It missed Kaelen by an inch, the wind of its passage ruffling his hair, and smashed into the floor.
The impact of the weapon against the ground sent a shockwave through the Enforcer's arm. Because his body was in freefall, unanchored by friction, the recoil didn't dissipate. It traveled up the arm, into the shoulder, and whipped his head back.
SNAP.
The sound was smaller this time. Precision engineering failing under stress.
The Enforcer lay still.
His legs were twisted at impossible angles, the white greaves pointing in directions that made Kaelen's stomach churn. The T-visor of the helmet stared up at the ceiling, the blue Starlight glow flickering, then fading to black.
Silence rushed back into the corridor, heavy and suffocating.
Kaelen stood there, the iron knife still gripped in his white-knuckled hand. He hadn't moved. He hadn't swung. He had just... looked.
He looked at the floor where the Enforcer had fallen.
The marble tile was different. It didn't look polished; it looked unrendered. For a radius of three feet, the stone was a flat, textureless grey, lacking reflection or shadow. It looked like a hole in the world where the concept of "grip" had been surgically removed.
"I..." Kaelen's voice was a croak.
He took a step forward, and pain exploded in his hands.
It wasn't the ache of a bruise. It was a searing, electrical burn that started at his fingertips and raced up his forearms. He dropped the knife. It clattered to the floor—loud, real, physical.
Kaelen looked at his hands.
They were bleeding. But it wasn't red blood.
Thick, viscous liquid oozed from his pores and the beds of his fingernails. It was the color of a bruise—deep purple and electric blue. It didn't drip; it floated, dissolving into static in the air like ink in water.
[System Warning: Corruption Threshold Exceeded.]
[Current Corruption: 2.1%]
[Physical Integrity: 98%]
He fell to his knees, clutching his wrists. The pain was cold. It felt like his hands were being dunked in liquid nitrogen, then shattered.
This is the cost, a voice in the back of his mind whispered. It sounded like his own voice, but older. Colder. You edited the source code. The System is trying to debug you.
Kaelen gritted his teeth, forcing himself to breathe. He looked at the dead Enforcer.
He had killed a man.
He waited for the guilt. He waited for the horror that the priests said would consume any soul that took a life. Life is sacred. Life is the Engine's fuel.
But he felt nothing.
No, that wasn't true. He felt... relief.
The man in the white armor had called his family a smudge. He had called Lyra a formatting error. He had promised to break Kaelen's legs.
Now, he was dead. And Kaelen was alive.
It was a simple equation.
Kaelen crawled toward the body. He avoided the grey patch of the floor—if he touched it, he would slide forever until he hit a wall. He reached for the Enforcer's belt.
His hands, still leaking blue static, shook as he fumbled with the pouches. He didn't want the mace. He couldn't lift it. He didn't want the armor.
He found it in a leather pouch on the Enforcer's hip.
A Permission Wafer.
It was a small, hexagonal chip of gold, stamped with the Eye of the Synod. It hummed with faint warmth. This was the key. This was what allowed the Enforcers to bypass the quarantine barriers.
Kaelen clutched it. The warmth of the Starlight fought against the cold static in his blood, making his skin itch.
[Item Acquired: Level 1 Access Token]
[Note: Grants passage through Low-Security Starlight Barriers.]
He had a way out.
But as he tried to stand, the air in the corridor shifted. The heavy, oppressive silence of the Lockdown was replaced by a new sound.
A low, rhythmic thrumming. Like a massive heart beating deep underground.
THRUM.
The lights in the hallway flickered.
THRUM.
The dead Enforcer's armor rattled against the stone.
THRUM.
Kaelen looked up. The air above the corpse was distorting. Lines of code—gold and angry—were scrolling down the walls like rain. The Reality Engine had noticed the discrepancy. A man had died without a combat log. Friction had vanished from a localized coordinate.
The System was investigating the crash.
[Anomaly Detected: Physics Violation in Sector 5.]
[Generating Ticket...]
[Ticket Escalated to: Oakhaven Server Admin.]
Kaelen scrambled to his feet, ignoring the agony in his hands. He grabbed his satchel. He grabbed the knife.
He couldn't stay here. If the System was generating a ticket, that meant a debugger was coming. And he knew what the debuggers looked like.
The Silencers.
He turned to the golden barrier blocking the service exit. He held up the Permission Wafer.
The barrier didn't dissolve. It didn't fade. It shattered.
The golden honeycomb broke apart into shards of hard light that dissolved before they hit the floor. The smell of ozone rushed out, replaced by the damp, rot-scent of the service tunnel.
Kaelen ran.
He didn't look back at the body. He didn't look back at the grey patch of floor where physics had died. He sprinted into the darkness of the maintenance passage, the blue static dripping from his fingers leaving a trail of glowing breadcrumbs in the dark.
As he ran, a new window popped up in his vision. It wasn't a warning. It wasn't an error. It was a progress bar.
It was green.
[Combat Tutorial: PASSED.]
[First Kill Registered.]
[Experience Gained: 500 XP.]
[Leveled Up!]
[System Boot Sequence Initiated...]
[Loading Class: Apocrypha Architect (Tier 1)... 2%]
The text hovered in the darkness, illuminating the rusty pipes and dripping moss of the tunnel. Kaelen stared at it, his chest heaving.
He wasn't just a glitch anymore.
He was a player.