The transition from the oppressive, damp gloom of the ancient forest to the sunlit clearing was jarring. The dirt path leading into the village was relatively quiet, but it was far from empty. It was a rustic, breathing settlement that felt painfully ordinary. A few locals, dressed in simple, woven garments dyed in muted earth tones, moved about their daily chores. An older woman was carrying a heavy woven basket overflowing with root vegetables, while a young boy poked at a small, crackling fire with a stick. The air smelled of woodsmoke, roasting meat, and the sweet fragrance of the surrounding pine trees.
It was a picture of peaceful, vibrant life. And Lutax was a walking, breathing glitch right in the middle of it.
He took a slow, cautious step forward. His boots crunched softly against the dry dirt, but the sound felt deafening to his own ears. He raised an empty hand, palm open, trying to project vulnerability and harmlessness. His throat felt like it was lined with sandpaper, parched from the wild pursuit of the flesh-monster in the woods.
"Hello?" he called out. His voice cracked, sounding entirely foreign to his own ears. "Please. I just... I need water."
The reaction was instantaneous, and it was devastating.
The woman carrying the vegetables stopped dead in her tracks. The heavy wooden basket slipped from her grasp, hitting the ground with a dull thud, sending potatoes and muddy roots rolling across the path. A few yards away, a broad-shouldered man violently yanked a young child behind his legs, shielding the boy with his own body. His eyes were blown wide, pupils constricted in pure, unadulterated terror.
They weren't looking at his hands. They weren't looking at the strange, glitching monochrome spear, which had already dissolved back into the void moments ago. They were staring directly, fixedly, at his head.
A heavy, suffocating silence fell over the edge of the village. Then, the whispers started. Some of the villagers pointed trembling fingers at him, shouting words in a harsh, guttural language full of sharp consonants that grated against Lutax's ears. He couldn't understand a single syllable, but the universal tone of fear and hostility was unmistakable.
What are they looking at? Lutax thought, his heart beginning to hammer against his ribs. Why are they looking at me like I'm a predator?
Confused and suddenly self-conscious, Lutax slowly brought his left hand to his face. His fingertips brushed against his jawline, feeling the grime and sweat. He moved his hand up his cheek, toward his temple. There, his fingers met something strange. The skin on the left side of his forehead was ruined—a patch of thick, jagged scar tissue. It felt old, tough, and uneven, as if something substantial had been violently broken off or torn out a long time ago.
But when his right hand moved to mirror the action on the other side of his head, his breath hitched in his throat. His entire body froze.
Protruding aggressively from his right temple, just above his hairline, was a solid, curved horn.
His fingers traced its length. It felt like cold, polished bone, ending in a jagged, dangerous point. It was undeniably real. It was a part of him. Looking down at the muddy puddle near the dropped basket, he caught a distorted reflection of himself. Void-black eyes. Stark white hair. And a demonic, bone-white horn jutting from his skull.
To these simple villagers, he didn't look like a lost, desperate traveler. He looked like a nightmare made flesh. He looked like a monster.
I have to get rid of it, the realization slammed into him with the force of a physical blow. I have to look normal. If I don't, they will never let me near them. They'll hunt me down just like I hunted that beast.
Gritting his teeth, Lutax tightly gripped the base of the horn with his right hand. The bone was warm, pulsing slightly with his own heartbeat. He closed his eyes and dug deep into that strange, empty reservoir within his mind, summoning the power that defied this world.
He visualized the concept of deletion. He searched for that familiar, digital vibration.
The shockwave hit him instantly, traveling up his arm and straight into his skull. Right before the wide, terrified eyes of the villagers, the bony horn protruding from Lutax's head began to change. The natural, ivory-white color was forcefully erased. It turned pitch-black and ash-gray, flickering and stuttering like corrupted data on a broken screen.
Lutax groaned, the effort demanding every ounce of his willpower. It was completely different from overriding a dead branch or a stream of water. He was trying to override a living node. He was trying to alter his own physical code.
With a sickening, digital crunch that only echoed inside his own mind, the monochrome horn shattered into thousands of tiny, square pixels. The glitching fragments hovered for a fraction of a second before crumbling into fine, gray dust that blew away in the gentle breeze, leaving his right temple completely flat and smooth.
The villagers gasped in unison. Some fell to their knees, frozen in absolute shock at the impossible, colorless magic they had just witnessed. They had seen spells of fire and water, but they had never seen reality itself glitch and delete.
But Lutax didn't have time to care about their awe or their terror. The toll of the System hit him like a swinging anvil.
A blinding, agonizing spike of pain drove straight through the center of his brain, so intense it whited out his vision. He let out a choked scream, his knees buckling beneath him. He crashed into the dirt, both hands flying to clutch his head as if trying to hold his skull together.
It wasn't just physical pain; it was a psychological amputation. Another piece of his mind was being ripped away by the universe's invisible source code. He could feel a specific memory actively dissolving. He tried desperately to hold onto it, clawing at the mental image, but it was slipping through his fingers like dry sand.
The dark room. The glowing monitor. The text asking him a question... What was the question? What did the System ask him before he clicked the mouse? What was the condition of his arrival?
It was gone.
He remembered the cold plastic of the mouse under his palm. He remembered typing the letters L-U-T-A-X. But the reason he was here, the very purpose of his reincarnation, the question that started it all—it was completely deleted from his mind. It was a terrifying, hollow void where a core truth had existed just seconds ago.
Panting heavily, a cold sweat dripping down his face and stinging his eyes, Lutax slowly pushed himself up from the dirt. He felt dizzy, his sense of self eroding piece by piece. He looked up at the villagers through blurred vision. He raised a trembling hand, his palm dirty and scraped.
"Please," he rasped in English, his voice pathetic and broken, desperate for just a single drop of compassion. "Help me."
An elder man, wearing a heavy tunic adorned with animal teeth, stepped forward from the paralyzed crowd. His hands were shaking violently, but he gripped a sturdy wooden pitchfork defensively, aiming the rusted metal prongs directly at Lutax's chest.
The elder barked a question, his voice cracking with panic: "Kael'thas vora? Vora mori?!"
Lutax stared at him blankly, the sounds washing over him like meaningless static. The words meant absolutely nothing. The language barrier was an impenetrable wall. He was in a vibrant world he didn't understand, surrounded by people he couldn't speak to, and he was slowly, painfully forgetting why he even existed in the first place.
He opened his mouth, his lips parting to try and speak again, to try and beg in whatever tone they might understand.
But before a single sound could leave his throat, a sickening squelch shattered the tense silence.
The smooth, newly flat skin on his right temple violently tore open from the inside out. A spray of warm, arterial blood splattered onto the dirt path, a few crimson drops flying far enough to catch the tip of the elder's leather boots.
With a grotesque, heavy crunch of shifting skull and regrowing bone, the curved, jagged horn forcefully pushed its way back out of Lutax's head, tearing through muscle and skin to reclaim its place.
The System had rejected the deletion. The physical anomaly was hardcoded. It had repaired itself.
Lutax choked on a gasp, the sudden physical trauma bringing tears to his dark eyes.
The elder's eyes widened to the size of gold coins. All the color instantly drained from his weathered, wrinkled face, leaving him looking like a corpse. He dropped his wooden pitchfork, the tool clattering uselessly against the stones. He stumbled backward, his boots catching on each other, and fell hard onto his backside in the dirt.
Frantically kicking his legs to scramble away, the old man pointed a trembling, dirt-caked finger at the fresh blood dripping down Lutax's face, staining his white hair crimson.
"Kerz menaz naz!" the elder screamed, his voice tearing his vocal cords. "Kura iblis! IBLIS!"
Without looking back, the old man scrambled to his feet and sprinted toward the center of the village, yelling frantically for everyone to run, to hide, to lock their doors. The rest of the villagers didn't hesitate. Baskets were abandoned, fires were left burning, and within seconds, the entrance to the village was entirely empty, save for the echoes of slamming wooden doors.
Lutax stayed on his knees. He slowly brought his trembling fingers to his right temple. He felt the sticky, warm blood coating his skin. He felt the hard, unforgiving bone of the horn that had returned to mock him.
He had paid the price. He had sacrificed a piece of his own mind, a core memory that tied him to his past, for absolutely nothing.
He didn't understand the old man's exact words, but the sheer, visceral terror in his eyes and the way he screamed the word "iblis" needed no translation dictionary. They didn't see a traveler in need of water. They saw a demon.
A hot, uncontrollable surge of anger began to boil deep within Lutax's chest. It wasn't just anger at the villagers; it was a profound, suffocating rage directed at the invisible System that was torturing him. He was trapped in a rigged game.
The air around him began to hum. It wasn't a sound, but a dark, glitching vibration that made the very atmosphere feel heavy and oppressive. The vibrant, sunlit green grass beneath his boots started to violently lose its color, turning into a dead, monochrome gray. The Anti-Matter power, reacting to his raw emotional state, was preparing to lash out in pure frustration. The gray rot began to spread from his knees, creeping toward the wooden fences of the nearest cabins.
He was going to tear the dirt path apart. He was going to erase this entire village from the map just to make the world feel as empty as his own mind.
But just as he raised his hand, his fingers curling into a claw to command the void, a calm, impossibly clear voice cut through the heavy, vibrating tension.
"Hey."
It came from a narrow alleyway to his right.
Lutax snapped his head toward the sound. The glitching, grayscale aura expanding around him instantly paused, freezing the destruction in its tracks.
Standing there, half-hidden in the deep shadows between two wooden cabins, leaning casually against the rough timber, was the silhouette of a man quietly watching him.