The login screen pulsed with promise, a hypnotic swirl of azure blues and electric violets that promised escape from the drudgery of D.J. Cross's cramped apartment in Greenwood, South Carolina. Fragments of Eternum's latest update danced across the interface: "Revolutionary full-dive immersion. Neural sync at 99.9% fidelity. Become the hero you were meant to be." D.J. adjusted his headset, the cool gel pads pressing against his temples, took a deep breath scented with the faint metallic tang of overworked circuits, and hit ENTER.Light exploded in a cascade of fractal geometries. Sound roared like a thousand waterfalls crashing into code. Reality dissolved into nothingness, his body dissolving into data streams that wove him into the fabric of the virtual world. For a split second, euphoria surged—wind on digital skin, the weight of imagined armor, the thrill of infinite possibility.Then everything glitched.Menus desynchronized with a sickening snap, icons stretching into infinity like taffy pulled by invisible hands. The logout button flickered crimson, pulsed once, twice, then vanished entirely. D.J.'s heart slammed against his ribs, a thunderous rhythm echoing in his chest even as his avatar stood frozen in the spawn point. "System? Logout. Logout!" His voice cracked, raw panic threading through the command. No response. No admin panel. No emergency eject.The world stabilized with a reluctant pop, but his HUD screamed error codes in scrolling red marquee: [SYNC_FAILURE_0x4F2] [NEURAL_OVERLOAD_WARNING] [CLASS_ASSIGNMENT_CORRUPT]. He opened his character sheet with trembling fingers, the interface lagging like a bad dream:CLASS: ERROR NOVICE / UNASSIGNEDLEVEL: 1STATS: [CORRUPTED]SKILLS: [NULL]INVENTORY: [REDACTED]The font flickered like dying neon in a rain-slicked alley. D.J. stumbled forward into the starter town hub of Aetherport, cobblestone streets rendered in hyper-real detail under a perpetual sunset sky. Players milled around everywhere—optimized warriors in gleaming plate armor that caught the light like molten silver, mages with perfect rotations chaining fireballs in casual practice, guilds shouting for recruits in booming voice chat overlays: "LF1M dungeon clear! DPS only!"He approached the first party, a trio of high-level tanks laughing over shared loot. "Hey, need a fourth?" D.J. forced casualness into his tone, his avatar's face twitching unnaturally.The leader, a burly orc berserker named Grimcleaver, glanced at his tag hovering above his head like a scarlet letter. "Error Novice? Pass." No explanation, just a dismissive wave as they queued up without him.Next group: a stealth rogue squad vanishing in and out of shadows. "Unassigned? Glitch. No thanks." The rogue's leader smirked, her voice dripping synthetic disdain.The third group—a full raid party of casuals—laughed outright, pointing at his flickering HUD. "Dude, you're literally broken. Fix your game or log out, man. You're gonna crash the instance."Heat flushed D.J.'s cheeks, phantom shame burning through the neural link. He retreated to a shadowed alley between vendor stalls hawking glowing potions and enchanted blades, the interface still spitting errors like digital vomit. Why me? he thought, slamming his fist against a virtual brick wall that yielded unnaturally under the blow. Just wanted a break from real life—bills, dead-end job at the mill, no friends worth mentioning.A blinking quest marker appeared in his peripheral vision—gold-edged, insistent. Shouldn't exist for his level. No tutorial prompt, no fanfare. Curiosity overrode caution. He followed it through twisting backstreets, past players ignoring him like a ghost, to a half-abandoned building sagging against the town wall. A flickering sign hovered above the warped doorframe, letters glitching in and out:GUILD OF REJECTS - ALL CLASSES WELCOMEInside smelled of ozone and desperation, a cocktail of burnt wiring and stale energy drinks bleeding through the dive rig. Flickering lanterns cast erratic shadows on mismatched furniture scavenged from deleted zones. Three figures turned as the door creaked open.Madison Vale (Junk Alchemist) was a frazzled redhead clutching a smoking vial, her freckled face smudged with iridescent residue. "Sorry! Test brew!" She waved it frantically, purple fumes curling like mischievous spirits.D.J. coughed, waving away the acrid haze that smelled suspiciously like burnt marshmallows mixed with battery acid. "Test brew? In a guild hall?"Madison grinned sheepishly, capping the vial with a cork that immediately began to hiss. Her tag floated beside her: Level 5 - Junk Alchemist. "Yeah, version… uh, fifty-two. It was supposed to be a healing tonic. Works great unless you're allergic to spontaneous combustion. Name's Madison. You look like fresh meat from the error pool."Another player leaned back in a creaky chair patched together from splintered starter-zone crates, a tall man with a too-perfect jawline sculpted by some vanity slider max-out, dark hair swept back, and a faint smirk playing on his lips. His tag read Ryan Mercer (Patch Knight) — Level 8. Patch classes weren't supposed to unlock until mid-game patches—odd, even for a glitch hub.Ryan crossed his muscled arms, his fractured plate armor humming faintly with embedded code fragments. "So the algorithm finally sends us another bug. Welcome to the landfill, buddy. Grab a seat before the next desync hits.""Landfill?" D.J. echoed, sliding onto a stool that wobbled threateningly. His eyes darted around the room: walls papered in half-rendered quest icons, a workbench littered with bubbling alembics and shattered data crystals, a corkboard sagging under printed error logs.Madison pointed to the bulletin board, her vial finally stabilizing to a benign green glow. "Rejected content. Stuff that got patched out of the main game during betas or hotfixes. We kinda… live off the leftovers. Makes for weird loot—exploding swords, potions that turn you into furniture—but decent XP if it doesn't crash you first. Most guilds shun us. Devs flag our zones for cleanup."D.J. frowned, staring at his HUD where his stats stubbornly refused to load. "This place shouldn't even exist. I'm stuck—can't log out, class won't assign. You guys… you're like me?"Ryan shrugged, polishing a jagged sword that shifted textures mid-swipe—from steel to obsidian to pure light. "Neither should we. Patch Knight? Devs axed the concept in 2.1. Madison's alchemy pulls from deleted item tables. And the third reject…" He nodded to a shadowed corner where a hulking figure tinkered with a mechanical arm, sparks flying. Toro Vance (Scrap Golemancer) — Level 6. Toro grunted without looking up, his golem minion—a patchwork of rusted armor plates and glowing runes—patting his shoulder sympathetically.Madison leaned in, eyes sparkling with manic energy. "We're the Guild of Rejects. No perfect builds, no meta rotations. Just survivors scraping by on the system's trash heap. What's your glitch, newbie?""Everything," D.J. muttered. "Login error, corrupted sheet. They laughed me out of every party."Ryan's smirk faded. "Welcome home."Before D.J. could process the grim camaraderie, the world stuttered. Frames froze mid-motion—Madison's hair suspended in unnatural strands, Toro's wrench halted inches from his golem. Text shattered like glass midair, raining shards of unread notifications. Madison grabbed D.J.'s arm, her grip vise-tight. "Oh no—not again. Server rollback incoming!"The floor ruptured with a digital crack, a molten error code erupting beneath them: [CORE THREAD BREAKPOINT DETECTED]. It spilled viscous digital light, searing the air. Every player visible through the windows vanished—blinked out to static, poofed into logout particles, or stretched into wireframe skeletons before deletion. Only the four in the guild hall remained, anchored by their glitch status.Ryan drew his fractured sword in a blur, blade humming with unstable energy. "Brace! It's a purge wave!"But instead of a full crash, the light condensed, coalescing into a shape—a creature forged entirely of red code strings, twisting like corrupted sinews around a void-black core. Its tag pulsed ominously:[CORRUPTED ENTITY: NULL BEAST_SPAWN/ERROR(001)]Its roar wasn't sound—it was system static burrowing into D.J.'s skull, a cacophony of modem screeches and buffer overflows that made his teeth ache. Claws of raw data slashed the air, carving gouges that bled pixel artifacts.D.J. staggered back, instinctively reaching for a weapon. His inventory pinged empty: [NO ITEMS ASSIGNED]. Panic clawed his throat. I'm dead. First five minutes, and I'm data dust.Madison hurled her vial—it exploded into pixelated smoke, a temporary shroud that made the beast flail blindly. "Run, idiots! Toro, wall!"Toro's golem lumbered forward, slamming plated fists to summon a barrier of scrap metal. Ryan charged, sword clashing against code-flesh in sparks of defiance. But the Null Beast shrugged it off, its core pulsing brighter.Then something pulsed in D.J.'s hands—a glitching cube of raw data materializing from nowhere, flickering between cube, sphere, fractal shard. Warmth spread through his palms, syncing with his heartbeat like a second pulse.NEW CLASS DETECTED: GLITCHWALKERAbility Generated: Rewrite Instance [Lv. 0] — Rewrite target data structure. Cooldown: Unstable.No time for questions. D.J. swung the cube like a hammer, raw instinct guiding the blow. It struck the Null Beast's core—and the world inverted. Blue overtook red in a chromatic reversal. Code strings unraveled, the creature freezing mid-lunge, fragmenting into clean lines of executable data that dissolved into harmless motes.Silence crashed down, broken only by heavy breathing.Ryan lowered his sword slowly, eyes wide. "…You shouldn't have been able to do that. Null Beasts are purge enforcers—no drops, no XP, just deletion."Madison's expression flashed between awe and horror, her alchemist HUD scanning the motes. "You just rewrote a corrupted entity. That's admin-level code manipulation. That's—That's not possible for a level 1 scrub."D.J. looked down at his new class tag blinking faintly over his chest, solidifying:CLASS: GLITCHWALKERABILITY: Rewrite Instance [Lv. 1] — Success.His stats flickered into partial view: STR: ? AGI: ? INT: [OVERFLOW]. "What just happened?" he whispered, the cube dissolving into his inventory as [ANOMALY CORE x1].Toro finally spoke, voice like grinding gravel. "System likes you. Bad sign."The Rejects' PactLater, amid the flickering neon of the guild's defected base, Madison tinkered with a new potion on her workbench, vials clinking like mad scientist wind chimes. Ryan paced, studying D.J. like an unsolved puzzle, while Toro reinforced his golem with Null Beast scraps."Either you're a dev plant," Ryan said, halting mid-stride, "or the system's gone sentient. Glitchwalker? Never heard of it. Not in any datamined patch notes.""I barely got in," D.J. replied, flexing phantom fingers that still tingled from the rewrite. Real life intruded in flashes—his mom's worried texts about his "gaming addiction," the eviction notice pinned to his fridge. "Supposed to be a basic swordsman. Farm some mobs, join a guild, climb ranks."Madison chimed in, holding up a freshly brewed elixir that shimmered unstably. "Well, congratulations. You're now the world's first official bug magician. Drink this—it'll stabilize your sync. Probably."Ryan frowned, closing his menu with a decisive swipe. "That power—if the main servers detect it, they'll isolate or delete your data. You'll be erased. Poof. No respawn, no appeal."Madison snorted, tossing D.J. the potion. It tasted like battery acid and victory, warmth spreading through his veins as his HUD smoothed out. "Unless we figure out how it works first. Experiment with you, not on. Small difference. Fewer explosions."D.J. hesitated, the weight of their stares pressing down. Outcasts like him—real-world loner thrust into digital exile. "You want my help?""Need it," Toro grunted. "Sandbox collapsing. Half our quest hooks vanished with the beast."Ryan nodded, gaze hardening like forged steel. "Whatever's happening, we move. To the Glitchspire—the patch world's memory leak. Everything the devs try to delete funnels there. Cores, prototypes, forbidden code. If we find its heart, maybe you unlock answers. Or we all get wiped."The thought of venturing deeper into Eternum's broken edge sent a chill down D.J.'s spine, colder than any starter-zone draft. But beneath the fear burned curiosity, a hacker's thrill. Whatever this corruption was, it had chosen him—reached out through the glitch.He glanced toward the guild's cracked window, where the artificial dawn glitched in place, forever starting but never fully arriving. Pixel storms brewed on the horizon."Fine," D.J. said, standing tall for the first time. "Let's find out what the system's trying to hide."Madison beamed, slapping his back. "Welcome to the Rejects, D.J. Cross. First round's on me—if it doesn't explode."QUEST UPDATED: "First Contact – The Glitch Within"Objective: Reach the Glitchspire with the Guild of Rejects.Rewards: ? [CORRUPTED]Status: Active.Outside, the pixelated horizon flickered again—something vast watching from the code behind the sky.And deep within the system logs, unknown to them, a line of data executed silently:[Override_Protocol Initiated // User: D.CROSS // STATUS: UNAUTHORIZED // PRIORITY: ELIMINATE]
