The wind on the rooftop was cold. It smelled of ozone and burning plastic.
I sat on the edge of the parapet with my legs dangling over the side. Six stories down, the campus was quiet. The "Student Council" was hiding in their cafeteria fortress. The monsters were lurking in the shadows.
I looked at the glowing purple message floating in my vision.
[Meet me at the subway station at midnight.]
It was 11:00 PM.
I had one hour.
This wasn't a quest. The System gave quests in blue boxes with gold trim. This was a direct injection into my interface. It was a hack.
Someone had bypassed the System's firewall to talk to me.
I pulled the Vial of Blood Essence from my pocket. The ruby liquid swirled inside the glass. It looked heavy, like mercury.
If I was walking into a trap, I needed insurance.
I looked at my squad. Alpha stood guard by the door, his massive sword resting on his shoulder. The nine Abyssal Stalkers were crouched on the ventilation units, watching the darkness.
Stalkers were good for scouting. But against a high-level threat, they were fragile. I needed an assassin.
"Number Two," I said.
One of the Stalkers hopped down from the vent. It chattered its teeth.
"Come here."
The skeleton approached.
I uncorked the vial. The smell of copper and old magic filled the air.
"Drink," I ordered.
I poured the thick red liquid over the skeleton's skull.
It didn't drip to the ground. The bone absorbed it like a sponge.
The skeleton convulsed. It fell to the rooftop gravel, thrashing. Red steam hissed from its joints. The black bones began to turn a deep, translucent crimson.
[Abyssal Infusion Detected.]
[Catalyst: Blood Essence (Rank B).]
[Evolution in progress...]
The skeleton screamed. It was a silent, psychic shriek that vibrated in my teeth.
Its form shifted. The bones fused together. The sharp, jagged edges smoothed out. It didn't look like a skeleton anymore. It looked like a sculpture made of red glass.
It stood up. It was smaller than before. Sleek. Aerodynamic. Two curved blades grew directly out of its forearms.
[Unit Evolved: Crimson Shade]
[Rank: D]
[Specialty: Single Target Elimination]
[Skill: Blood Step (Teleport to a bleeding target within 20 meters)]
I smiled.
Teleportation. That was a game changer.
"Your name is Beta," I said.
The Crimson Shade bowed. It moved like water. Fluid. Silent.
"Let's go," I said. "Don't keep the mystery guest waiting."
The city was a graveyard.
I walked down the center of 4th Avenue. The streetlights were dead. The only illumination came from the moon and the occasional burning car.
My army moved with me. Alpha walked behind my right shoulder. Beta walked behind my left. The other eight Stalkers climbed along the building facades, leaping from balcony to balcony.
I kept my [Glitch Analysis] active.
Numbers flowed over the environment.
[Wrecked Taxi: No Loot]
[Trash Can: Rotting Food]
[Sewer Grate: Rat Nest (Low Threat)]
I avoided the patrols. I saw a pack of Gnolls looting a grocery store on 5th Street. I walked around them. I wasn't here to farm XP. I was here for answers.
The entrance to the subway station was a black mouth in the sidewalk. The stairs led down into total darkness.
The sign above the entrance flickered. Main St. Station.
I checked the time. 11:55 PM.
"Stalkers," I whispered. "Secure the perimeter. Stay hidden."
My eight scouts vanished into the shadows.
"Alpha, Beta. With me."
I descended the stairs.
The air underground was stagnant. It was ten degrees cooler than the surface. I stepped over the turnstiles. The ticket booth was empty, the glass shattered.
I walked onto the platform.
It was silent. No rats. No monsters. Just the dripping of water from a burst pipe.
Drip. Drip. Drip.
Standing in the middle of the platform, under the only working emergency light, was a figure.
It was a person.
They were sitting on a plastic bench, typing on a laptop.
A laptop.
Electronics didn't work after the System initialized. The electromagnetic pulse of the mana wave fried all complex circuits. My phone only worked as a clock because it was offline and simple. But a computer? That should be a brick.
The figure looked up.
It was a girl. She looked young, maybe eighteen. She wore an oversized hoodie and headphones around her neck. Her eyes were hidden behind thick, black goggles.
"You're late," she said. Her voice was flat.
"I'm on time," I said. "Traffic was bad."
I stopped ten feet away. Alpha and Beta flanked me.
She looked at the skeletons. She didn't flinch. She tapped a key on her laptop.
"Abyssal Sovereign," she read. "Real name: Kael Vance. University student. Dead parents. No siblings. Statistically insignificant until yesterday at noon."
She looked at me. The lenses of her goggles whirred and zoomed in.
"Now you are the number one anomaly in the sector."
"Who are you?" I asked.
"Call me Cipher," she said. "And put away the bone dolls. If I wanted to kill you, I would have detonated the C4 under the platform three minutes ago."
I looked down.
[Glitch Analysis]
The concrete floor became transparent in my mind's eye.
Below the tiles, strapped to the support pillars, were bricks of plastic explosive.
[C4 Charge x10]
[Status: Armed]
[Trigger: Remote]
She wasn't bluffing.
"You have a working computer," I said. "And military-grade explosives. That's a rare class."
"Technomancer," Cipher said. "Rare Class. I can speak to the machine spirits. Or in this case, the System's backend code."
She closed the laptop and stood up.
"I called you here because you are a problem, Kael. You are generating error logs. Massive ones."
"I'm just playing the game," I said.
"No," Cipher shook her head. "You are breaking it. You have skills that shouldn't exist. Cooldowns that don't trigger. You are a bug."
She walked toward me.
"The System has an immune response. It's called the Deletion Protocol. It scans for errors and purges them. Usually, it deletes bugged items or glitches terrain."
She paused.
"But when the error is a Player, it sends a Hunter."
I gripped the handle of my knife. "Is that what you are?"
"Me?" Cipher laughed. "No. I hate the System. I exploit it. Just like you. But I do it quietly. You are making too much noise."
She pointed a finger at the ceiling.
"You triggered a Code Red five hours ago when you killed that Blood Knight. The System couldn't calculate how a Level 10 player did that damage. So it flagged you."
"Flagged me for what?"
"Deletion," she said.
Suddenly, the air pressure in the station dropped.
My ears popped.
The emergency light above us flickered and died. We were plunged into darkness.
[SYSTEM ALERT]
[Anomaly Detected.]
[Initiating Purge Sequence.]
The blue text was gone.
The letters were jagged. Red. Bleeding down my retina.
A sound came from the tunnel.
It wasn't a roar. It was the sound of static. White noise amplified to a deafening volume.
KZZZZZZZHT.
Two red lights appeared in the darkness of the subway tunnel. They looked like eyes, but they were perfectly square. Pixels.
"It's here," Cipher said. She sounded calm. Terrified, but calm. "I told you."
"What is it?" I asked.
"A Debugger," she said.
The thing stepped into the light of the platform.
It was humanoid, but it had no features. Its body was made of wireframe polygons. It looked like an unfinished 3D model. It flickered in and out of existence.
It had no face. Just a smooth, grey surface with the word [DELETE] floating in front of it.
[Entity: System Debugger (v.1.0)]
[Level: ???]
[HP: ???]
[Damage Immunity: Physical, Magical]
"Immune to everything?" I asked.
"It's not a monster," Cipher shouted, backing away. "It's a script! You can't kill it with a sword!"
The Debugger raised a hand.
A beam of grey light shot toward me.
"Move!"
I tackled Cipher. We hit the dirty floor just as the beam passed over where I had been standing.
The beam hit Alpha.
My tank. My strongest unit.
The grey light touched Alpha's bone armor.
There was no explosion. No sound.
Alpha just... vanished.
[Unit Deleted.]
No death notification. No dust. He was just erased from the file.
I scrambled to my feet, dragging Cipher with me.
"It deleted him," I said. My voice was hollow. "It just deleted him."
"It edits reality!" Cipher yelled. "Run!"
The Debugger turned its head. The square eyes locked onto me.
It took a step. It didn't walk. It glitched forward. One frame it was at the tunnel entrance. The next frame it was ten feet closer.
I looked at Beta.
The Crimson Shade was vibrating. It sensed the threat.
"Beta," I said. "Attack."
"No!" Cipher screamed. "Don't waste it!"
Beta didn't hesitate. It used [Blood Step].
It teleported directly behind the Debugger. It slashed with its arm-blades.
The blades passed harmlessly through the wireframe body.
[Damage: Null]
The Debugger spun around. It reached out and touched Beta's chest.
Pop.
Beta vanished.
[Unit Deleted.]
My army. My blood essence. Gone in two seconds.
I backed up. My back hit the turnstiles.
"How do I kill it?" I yelled at Cipher.
"You have to crash it!" she yelled back. She was opening her laptop again, her fingers flying across the keys. "Overload its logic buffer!"
"English!" I shouted.
"Give it something it can't compute!" she screamed. "The System runs on math! Give it a paradox! Give it an impossible value!"
The Debugger was walking toward me. It raised its hand again. The grey light began to gather.
Impossible value.
I looked at my hand. I looked at the stats.
I had the [Glitch] trait.
Cooldowns do not apply.
Resources do not apply.
The Debugger was trying to fix an error.
"Cipher!" I yelled. "Can you see its mana pool?"
"It has infinite mana!" she replied. "It's connected to the Source!"
"No," I said. "Can you see its input channel?"
Cipher paused. She tapped a key.
"Yes. Port 8080. It's open."
"Connect me," I said.
"What?"
"Connect my mana pool to its input channel. Now!"
"That will kill you! It will drain you dry in a millisecond!"
"Do it!"
The Debugger fired.
The grey beam rushed toward me.
At the same instant, Cipher hit Enter.
A blue arc of lightning shot from her laptop, hit me, and then arced to the Debugger.
[Connection Established.]
I felt a hook sink into my soul. The Debugger was trying to read my data to delete me.
I opened the floodgates.
"You want data?" I snarled. "Take it."
I activated [Raise Undead].
But I didn't target a corpse. I targeted the Debugger itself.
"Rise."
[Error. Target is not dead.]
"Rise."
[Error. Target is not dead.]
"Rise."
I cast the spell. Again. And again. And again.
I didn't stop. Because of my Glitch, I had zero cooldown. I cast the spell a thousand times in a single second.
"Rise. Rise. Rise. Rise."
The blue boxes stacked up in my vision so fast they turned into a solid wall of light.
[Error.]
[Error.]
[Error.]
The Debugger froze. The grey beam stopped inches from my face.
Its wireframe body began to vibrate. It started to bloat.
"It's working!" Cipher screamed. "Its logic loop is stuck! It's trying to process a million invalid requests at once!"
I kept casting. My mind felt like it was melting. The psychic strain of casting a million spells was liquefying my brain.
"Rise!" I screamed, blood pouring from my nose.
The Debugger twitched.
[System Warning: Memory Overflow.]
[Process 'Debugger_v1' is not responding.]
The wireframe entity let out a sound like a dial-up modem screaming in pain.
Then it cracked.
The grey polygons shattered like glass.
[CRITICAL ERROR.]
[Forced Shutdown.]
The Debugger exploded.
It wasn't a fire explosion. It was a data explosion. A shockwave of binary code and white light blasted through the station.
It knocked me off my feet. I flew over the turnstiles and hit the far wall.
Silence.
I lay on the dirty floor. My ears were ringing.
I looked up.
The platform was empty. No Debugger. No Alpha. No Beta.
Just a crater in the concrete where the entity had stood.
And in the center of the crater, floating in the air, was a glowing, jagged object.
It looked like a shard of crystal, but it constantly shifted shape. A cube. A sphere. A pyramid.
Cipher crawled out from behind the ticket booth. She adjusted her goggles.
She looked at the floating object. Her mouth fell open.
"No way," she whispered.
I dragged myself up. I wiped the blood from my nose.
"What is it?" I rasped.
Cipher looked at me. She looked terrified.
"That's not loot," she said. "That's a piece of the Source Code. You didn't just kill the debugger, Kael. You broke off a piece of the System."
I walked toward the crater.
My Glitch trait flared red, brighter than ever before.
[Item Detected: Administrator Key (Fragment)]
[Rank: ???]
[Effect: Grants user limited editing rights to local reality.]
I reached out and grabbed it.
It felt cold.
[Integration Complete.]
I grinned.
"Editing rights," I whispered.
I looked at the empty space where Alpha used to be.
"Undo," I said.
The air shimmered.
Time reversed in a localized bubble. The grey light retracted. The bone armor reassembled.
Alpha stood there. He looked confused. He looked around, gripping his sword.
I looked at Cipher.
"You said I was a bug," I said.
I crushed the digital shard into my chest.
"I'm not a bug anymore. I'm a feature."