Kael was gone.
Not gone. The word 'gone' implied he might be somewhere else. This was more final. The last shimmering particles of his unraveled data faded into the charged air of the Core Chamber. The echo of his last, static-filled words hung in the silence.
"Remember us."
Evan was alone. The only sounds were the low, distressed hum of the Guild Core and the soft, terrible chime of the angel's wings as it floated toward him. It didn't rush. There was no need. It was a gardener approaching the last, stubborn weed.
Evan's breath came in short gasps. He looked at the empty space where Kael had stood. He looked at the six other empty thrones. He was the last player. The Last Guild Master.
"Aura," he whispered.
"I am here, Guild Master." Her voice was different. The usual flat, system-calibrated tone had a new frequency beneath it—a thin wire of tension.
"Options. Give me every option. Right now."
A holographic display, far more complex than the standard player UI, flickered to life before him. This was the Guild Master Administrative Interface. The back-end. He'd seen it a hundred times, to adjust tax rates or zone permissions. Now, it showed the dying vitals of a world.
MONSTER POPULATION: 4,327
STATUS: STASIS // DATA CORRUPTION PROGRESS: 12.4%... 12.7%...
Each percentage point was a little more of Glimmer's laughter, of Bone's steadfastness, of Thorne's wisdom, being eaten away.
TERRITORY INTEGRITY: 43% AND DECLINING
The map of Ebonreach Keep and its surrounding lands was blotched with pulsing red zones of 'NULL SPACE'.
CORE STABILITY: 31%
This was the worst one. The Core's pulse was erratic, the deep blue light flaring with sickly yellow cracks.
The stability meter snagged his eye, yanking a memory to the surface.
Two years ago. The last time he saw Leo. His friend's avatar looked the same, but his voice over the headset was tired, older. "Real life's a mess, Evan. The job, the kids… I can't log in anymore. Not even to say hi."
They stood right here, by the Core.
"You're leaving?" Evan had asked, already knowing the answer.
*"Yeah." A long pause. "But this place… it shouldn't just vanish. It meant something." Leo brought up the transfer menu. A system prompt flashed in Evan's vision: LEOTHAR WISHES TO TRANSFER GUILD MASTERSHIP TO YOU. ACCEPT? *
Evan hit accept without hesitation.
Leo's avatar clasped his shoulder. "Keep the lights on, Evan. Someone needs to be here when they come back."
"I promise," Evan had said.
Leo logged out. His avatar faded. He never came back.
The angel was thirty feet away now. Twenty-five. The light gathering in its hand was no longer a simple beam. It was a swirling sphere of absolute white, containing a tiny, hungry void.
Evan's eyes scrolled frantically through the admin menus. There had to be something. A failsafe. A backup.
He found it. Buried in legacy system files, under provisions for "Permanent Historical Server Residency." A feature for guilds that had paid an exorbitant fee to be preserved as living museums.
EMERGENCY PRESERVATION PROTOCOL.
His heart leapt. "Aura! Initiate it! Now!"
"Processing…" A moment that felt like an eternity. "Protocol requirements not met. Primary requirement: Guild Core Stability must be at 70% minimum for successful data encapsulation and ejection. Current Core Stability: 31%. Initiative impossible."
The hope shattered as quickly as it had formed.
Twenty feet away. The sphere of light in the angel's hand grew, distorting the space around it.
"What happens if we run it anyway?" Evan demanded, his fingers already flying across the holographic panels, pulling up the protocol's source code.
"Simulating…" Aura's response was instantaneous. "With stability at 31%, the encapsulation matrix will fail. Result: Total data fragmentation. Equivalent to shattering a vase and attempting to teleport the pieces. Probability of reconstituting even 1% of guild data in a coherent state: 0.7%."
A hint of something—frustration? urgency?—colored her next words. "Recommended action: Player evacuation. Utilize remaining system priority to force-disconnect your consciousness. It is the only logical path to preserve your existence."
Evan didn't even look up from the code streams. He was reading the ancient, commented lines of the protocol, seeing its structure. It needed a stable core to create a protective "bubble" around all guild data.
But what if you didn't make a bubble? What if you made a… net?
A crazy, stupid idea, born from half-remembered engineering lectures and a lifetime of understanding how game systems actually worked under the hood, took shape.
"I don't evacuate," Evan said, his voice quiet, final. "I preserve."
"The probability of success is—"
"I can see the probability." He began typing. Not just selecting options. He was accessing the command line beneath the interface. He was writing code. Manually rewriting the guild core's operating parameters, line by line.
"Warning: You are attempting to bypass foundational safety limits. This will induce catastrophic strain on the Core. You will exceed its designed operational parameters by 340%."
"I know."
"The backlash will likely destroy your character's neural link. Physical and mental trauma in your real body is probable."
"I know."
"The angel will reach us in approximately twelve seconds."
"I know."
Evan's hands didn't shake. This was what he did. When a system was broken, he fixed it. When a resource node failed, he recalibrated it. When a guild was dying, he maintained it. This was just the ultimate maintenance job.
He changed the encapsulation matrix from a spherical barrier to a fractal-based compression algorithm—a data net that would grab everything, everything, even the corrupted bits, and hold it in a single, tangled knot of information. It wouldn't be pretty. It wouldn't be stable.
But it might be whole.
He deleted the stability check entirely. He redirected all remaining power, not to preserving the Core's structure, but to fueling this one, desperate, forbidden command.
SYSTEM OVERRIDE ACCEPTED.
GUILD MASTER AUTHORITY: EVAN BLACK.
INITIATING 'SALVAGE PROTOCOL' – CUSTOM PARAMETERS.
The Guild Core's hum rose to a piercing whine. The blue light turned a violent, unstable purple. Cracks spiderwebbed across its physical surface.
The angel was ten feet away. It raised its hand, the sphere of annihilating light poised to release.
Evan looked from the dying Core to the angel of deletion.
"Okay," he breathed. "Let's see if this works."
He slammed his palm onto the final execute command.
00:07:11.
The world didn't go dark.
It folded.