The streets of Coin Hunt were a carnival of broken identities. Avatars deliberately deformed, others faceless, and some who had simply given up, wearing the game's default models. Ishtar moved among them, a shadow among shadows. The revelation of the null value had left her in a vacuum, and she was back at square one—scraping for crumbs, hunting for another low-level contract that might somehow buy her the next rung on the ladder.
That was when a man stepped into her path.
Anywhere else in the universe, he would have been forgettable. Here, he was an anomaly. He was… normal. Simple clothes, a generic character-creator face, unstyled brown hair. In a place where everyone screamed for an identity, his complete lack of one was the most suspicious thing Ishtar had ever seen.
"I have a proposal for you, Black Ladybug," he said, his voice calm and free of electronic modulation.
"I'm not interested," Ishtar replied, her tone icy as she already moved to step around him.
"That's a shame," the man continued, not moving. "Maybe we could find the null together."
Ishtar's world stopped.
The noise of the station, the neon lights, the crowd—everything vanished. The word echoed in her mind, a secret shared between her and a god of code. Her gaze locked onto the man's generic face, and the pieces snapped into place with staggering speed.
"Khep—" she began, the word a whisper of shock.
Instantly, he raised a finger to his lips—a universal gesture of silence. His eyes, the only remarkable feature on his face, were sharp and intelligent. The simple motion was a command, not a request. Without another word, he turned and began to walk. After a fraction of a second's hesitation, Ishtar followed.
He led her away from the main streets, through alleys that grew darker and narrower, until they reached a dead-end brick wall where a texture failed—flickering between brick and the absolute black of a rendering error. Khepri touched the wall. It dissolved with a hiss of static, revealing a dark room. He stepped inside. Ishtar followed, and the wall reformed behind her.
The room was a den.
Exposed cables hung from the ceiling like vines. Cracked monitors stacked in the corners displayed cascading lines of code. And in the center, standing or sitting on crates, were them.
The Guild of the Excluded.
They were a character-creation nightmare—a collection of bugs and exploits made digital flesh.
The first to stand out was Payload, the giant she had met in the desert. He stood over three meters tall, a monstrosity that could only have been created by breaking the height slider in the creation menu. His armor was a patchwork quilt of pieces from rival factions. He was cleaning a hand cannon larger than Ishtar's head.
Beside him, a female figure flickered. Glitch. Her character texture seemed to be at war with itself, flashing between a pilot suit and gray skin, her limbs stretching and snapping back in small spasms. It was like watching a video stream suffering packet loss.
Sitting on a crate was Silas, a three-armed being. Two arms were muscular and symmetrical, but the third—sprouting from his sternum—was thin and twisted, a symmetry error he seemed ashamed of, always keeping it close to his body.
Leaning against the wall was Echo, whose face was a blank sheet of paper. Literally. Where eyes, nose, and mouth should have been, there was only a smooth, expressionless plane of skin. A bug that zeroed out all facial sliders. It was deeply unsettling.
And in a corner, two identical, gaunt avatars worked at a terminal. Parallax A and Parallax B. They moved in disturbing synchrony, as if bound together by an invisible thread. When one looked up, so did the other. A bug that linked their animation skeletons.
Khepri stopped in the center of the room. "This is my guild," he said, his voice still calm. "Or what's left of it."
He gestured to the group. "These aren't disposable avatars we use for missions. These are us. Our main accounts. Banned, sabotaged, unjustly demoted. Apex, among others, made sure we were flagged—our original player names burned. Our avatars corrupted by targeted attacks or frozen by bugs that were never fixed. We can't delete them. So we wear them. As a symbol."
Then he looked directly at Ishtar. At her face."Most people who are betrayed hide behind a new name, a new face. You, on the other hand… you scanned your own face to create this avatar, didn't you? Helen and Ishtar… identical."
Ishtar didn't answer, but her silence was confirmation. The revelation hit her like a punch. Khepri didn't just know her in-game history; he knew her deepest secret.
"Bold," Khepri continued, without judgment. "Or foolish. But that doesn't matter. You see, Ishtar—every one of us here is a null. Reduced to a system error. We know what it's like to have everything taken by a ghost in the machine."
He took a step forward."We help you find the hand behind your null. You have the strategic skill we lost when our leaders were broken. In return, you help us break the chains that keep us here."
"I don't join guilds," Ishtar said, her voice hard.
"I'm not asking you to join," Khepri replied patiently. "I know who you are. You don't lead with friendship. You lead with results. We're not asking you to lead us. We're asking you to orchestrate us."
Ishtar looked at the group—the giant, the glitch, the three-armed man, the blank face, the bound twins. She expected to feel disgust or pity for those broken avatars. Instead, she felt a cold echo of recognition.
They were all mirrors. Distorted reflections of her own fall, her own losses. The only difference was that their scars were visible—grotesque and permanent.
Hers, for now, were still hidden behind a face that looked perfectly normal.