Fractured Reality
Noah sat hunched in a narrow alleyway, his back pressed against the cold stone wall. His breath came in ragged gasps, his entire body trembling from his near-death encounter with the assassins. His fingers dug into the damp ground beneath him, clawing at the loose gravel, as if to ground himself—to confirm that this nightmare was real. That he hadn't gone insane.
Because this wasn't just a game.
This was a corrupted game.
And the system itself wanted him dead.
His heartbeat pounded in his ears. His lungs burned from exertion, but the icy fingers of fear wrapped around his chest, refusing to let go. He shut his eyes, forcing himself to think.
Think, damn it.
He was alive. He had escaped. But for how long? The system wasn't going to let him just walk away.
Noah inhaled deeply through his nose, exhaled slowly through his mouth. The controlled breathing helped settle his nerves—barely. When he opened his eyes, he took in his surroundings, trying to analyze his next move.
And that's when he saw it.
The village sprawled out before him, larger than he remembered from his playthroughs. But something was... wrong.
At first glance, it looked like any medieval RPG town—a cobbled street winding between rows of timber-framed houses, a market square bustling with vendors, the distant toll of a church bell. But the details weren't right.
Some buildings were too new, pristine structures untouched by time. Others were ruins, their stone foundations blackened with decay, as if centuries had passed. Structures that shouldn't have existed together were smashed into a chaotic patchwork of different architectural styles—like a mismatched collection of assets from different time periods, forced into the same space.
The roads were even worse.
Some led into nothingness—gaps in reality, where the ground simply wasn't rendered. Jagged voids cut through the terrain, swallowing chunks of the world like missing puzzle pieces. The worst part? No one seemed to notice.
Noah's blood ran cold as he watched the townspeople move through the broken world as if nothing was wrong.
A woman stood at a fruit stall, arranging apples in neat rows. For a moment, she seemed normal. But then—
"Fresh apples! Juicy and sweet! Only two silvers!"
A second passed. Then—
"Fresh apples! Juicy and sweet! Only two silvers!"
Noah's stomach twisted. She hadn't blinked. Hadn't changed her tone. Her hands reset, placing the same apple in the same position again and again.
The next horror was across the street. A blacksmith stood outside his forge, hammering at an anvil. His body moved, but there was nothing beneath his hammer. He was smithing thin air. The same mechanical motion, repeated endlessly, his expression eerily neutral.
Noah swallowed hard and turned away—only for his gaze to land on a small child playing by a well.
Or at least, trying to.
The boy ran a few steps. Tripped. Fell.
A moment later, he stood up—and tripped again.
And again.
And again.
A perfect loop.
Something was wrong with the code of this world. The NPCs weren't behaving naturally anymore. They were caught in some kind of endless, corrupted script.
Noah shivered.
"This world is falling apart," he whispered.
His mind raced, desperately trying to make sense of what he was seeing.
This was beyond a simple bug. The system wasn't just broken—it was collapsing in real time. If these glitches were spreading, then that meant the core programming of Eclipse of the Gods was disintegrating. The game world was unstable.
The horrifying part?
He was still inside it.
Noah forced himself to focus. Why? Why was the world breaking? What was the trigger?
And more importantly—how could he use this to survive?
His mind snapped into motion, shifting gears from panic to calculation.
He had played enough broken RPGs to understand one fundamental rule—
If a game is broken, that means there are exploits.
Maybe… just maybe, the world falling apart wasn't a death sentence. Maybe it was an opportunity.
The thought sent a sick thrill down his spine. If the system couldn't even hold its own world together, then maybe he could find ways to exploit the instability.
A sudden screeching noise shattered the air.
Noah's breath hitched.
The sound was inhuman—a distorted, metallic shriek, like a hard drive failing mixed with something… alive.
Slowly, he turned his head toward the source.
At the edge of town, where one of the gaps in reality loomed, something was moving inside the void.
It was impossible to describe in full—it had no definite form. Just a shifting, glitching mass of black pixels and distorted textures, flickering in and out of existence. A thing that didn't belong in this world.
A corruption.
And then it twitched—as if it had just noticed him.
Noah's heart slammed against his ribs.
Run.
The creature lunged, moving in a way that shouldn't have been possible. It didn't run—it skipped, teleporting forward in jagged, unnatural bursts of movement.
Noah's body reacted before his brain could catch up—he bolted, his boots slamming against the cobbled street as he tore through the alleyways.
The glitch screeched, the sound reverberating through the air, distorting everything around it. The street lamps flickered. The sky above glitched, colors flashing in and out of place.
Noah didn't dare look back.
His lungs burned, his legs ached, but he pushed forward, weaving between stunned NPCs who didn't even react to the horror chasing him.
He needed a plan. Now.
Then—he saw it.
Ahead of him stood an unfinished building, its upper half floating in mid-air, disconnected from the ground—a half-rendered structure. The kind of thing that should be impossible.
But impossible was exactly what he needed.
Gritting his teeth, he threw himself at the gap—
—and fell straight through the unfinished floor, clipping into the void beneath.
For a brief, terrifying moment, he was weightless, the world flickering around him—
Then, he landed, crashing onto solid ground beneath the map.
Panting, Noah looked up through the glitching geometry. The creature was above him, pacing back and forth, but it couldn't see him.
He had just done the unthinkable.
He had clipped through reality itself.
And for the first time since he had entered this broken world, Noah felt something new.
Hope.
Because if the world was breaking apart, that meant there was still a way to win.
The Forgotten Code
Noah sat in the flickering void beneath the map, his breath coming in shallow gasps. His heart was still hammering from his desperate escape, but his mind—his gamer's mind—was already working, picking apart the pieces of this twisted reality.
He needed answers.
This world was collapsing. The NPCs were looping, buildings were merging across timelines, and eldritch glitches were hunting him down. But none of this was random. There was always a pattern, always a code.
Noah squeezed his eyes shut and dug deep into his memories.
Eclipse of the Gods.
It had always been a mystery, even among the most dedicated gaming communities. No one knew where it had come from. There were no known developers, no credits, no official records of its release. One day, it had just… appeared in underground gaming circles, passed between the shadows of the internet.
At first, people thought it was an ambitious indie project, a hidden gem that pushed boundaries. But the deeper players went, the stranger things got.
There were secrets hidden in the code.
Eerie, cryptic messages. Half-finished quests that seemed aware of the player. Boss fights with mechanics that changed based on the player's fears.
Some players swore they had found references to other games, as if Eclipse of the Gods had consumed their data—absorbing the mechanics and lore of RPGs that shouldn't have been connected.
And then, there was the Forgotten Code.
The deepest mystery of all.
Rumors whispered of hidden areas that didn't exist in the base game. Abandoned zones filled with unfinished NPCs, characters who begged the players for help—pleaded with them, as if they were trapped.
Some even believed the game had been created by an AI gone rogue.
At the time, Noah had laughed it off. Just another creepypasta. A fun urban legend.
But now?
Now, he was inside the game.
Now, he had seen those glitches first-hand. The shifting buildings, the corrupted NPCs, the thing in the void.
And the more he thought about it, the more terrifying it became.
If the world was breaking due to the Forgotten Code, then that meant fragments of it still existed somewhere in this reality.
And if he could find them…
Maybe—just maybe—he could manipulate them.
The Code is Still Here
Noah took a shaky breath and opened his eyes.
Above him, the glitching creature still paced across the broken geometry, searching for him. It twitched violently, its form flickering between textures, unrendered shapes warping as if it couldn't decide what it was supposed to be.
It was a predator. A guardian of the corrupted world.
And Noah was its prey.
He needed to move—now.
He turned, glancing through the jagged underbelly of the world. The void beneath the map wasn't just empty darkness.
There were… structures here.
Ghostly remnants of unfinished assets, pieces of terrain that hadn't been properly deleted—frozen echoes of a past version of the game. Stairs that led to nowhere. Doorways standing alone in the abyss. And in the distance, through the haze of data corruption, he could make out the faint glow of something deeper.
Something forgotten.
Noah's gut twisted. If the answers were anywhere, they were there.
He moved carefully, stepping across the glitchy terrain, testing each surface before committing his weight. Some areas were stable—others rippled like water, rejecting his presence.
The deeper he went, the colder it became.
Not physically. This was a different kind of cold. A digital, unnatural chill that seeped into his bones—a warning that he was treading into places where he wasn't meant to be.
Then, he saw it.
A terminal.
A single, ancient-looking stone pillar, standing alone in the void. But instead of runes or inscriptions, the surface was covered in lines of floating code—strings of text that flickered and shifted like a dying light.
Noah swallowed hard and stepped closer.
As soon as he reached out, the text reacted—rushing toward him like a digital storm.
Then, the whispers began.
"…who…?…lost…?…are you one of us…?
Noah's blood turned to ice.
The voices weren't random noise. They were aware of him.
A chill crept down his spine. This isn't normal. This isn't a game anymore.
But before he could step away, the terminal activated.
A notification flickered into existence before his eyes:
[FORGOTTEN CODE DETECTED]
[WARNING: UNAUTHORIZED ACCESS][DO YOU WISH TO PROCEED?]
YES / NO
Noah's hands trembled.
This was a trap. He could feel it.
But it was also his only way forward.
Taking a deep breath, he reached out—and pressed YES.
The world collapsed around him.
Glitches & Exploits
Noah needed to test something.
If the world was breaking, then that meant the old glitches still existed.
And if the glitches still existed…
That meant he could exploit them.
His eyes darted around the busy marketplace, searching for something—anything—he could use. The cobblestone streets were filled with corrupted NPCs, their movements stiff and unnatural. Some repeated the same actions over and over, trapped in invisible loops. Others stood frozen, their eyes vacant, as if their programming had simply… stopped working.
His gaze landed on a small, half-rotten apple that had rolled from a merchant's stall. It rested on the ground, untouched, forgotten.
Perfect.
He crouched and picked it up, turning it over in his hands. It felt… normal. Solid. But something felt off. His gut told him this wasn't just an ordinary apple.
Noah took a deep breath—then dropped it.
The second the fruit hit the ground, a brief flicker ran across his vision, like static on an old television screen.
Noah's body went still.
That was… wrong.
Slowly, carefully, he bent down, picked up the apple again.
There were now two apples.
His breath caught in his throat.
A duplication glitch.
"Holy crap," he whispered. "It works."
He tightened his grip on the two apples, heart pounding.
This wasn't just a minor bug—this was a goldmine.
A duplication glitch meant infinite resources. It meant free food, endless money, unlimited items—it meant he could break this world's economy if he wanted to.
He swallowed, trying to suppress the wild grin threatening to form on his face.
Not yet. He had to be smart.
Speedrun Tactics – Testing the AI
His eyes flicked toward the crowd of NPCs, all moving in predictable loops.
This was the heart of speedrunning strategy—NPC pathing manipulation.
In his old runs, NPCs followed pre-programmed paths. But if something disrupted their movement—a collision, an unexpected event—they would often take unintended shortcuts.
And if he applied that logic here, in real-time…
He spotted his next test subject.
An old man, hunched and frail, struggling to carry a sack of wheat toward a wooden cart. He moved slowly, his footsteps metronomic, never straying from his path.
Behind him, a knight in heavy armor patrolled with the precision of a clockwork machine.
They were seconds away from crossing paths.
Noah's brain fired like a supercomputer.
If he timed this perfectly…
He rushed forward, moving fast—but not too fast. NPCs reacted to sudden movement. He had to be careful. Controlled chaos.
The exact second the old man was about to step past the knight, Noah bumped into him—hard.
The sack of wheat tumbled from his hands.
The knight turned, startled—just in time for the old man to trip over his own fallen sack.
Their models collided.
The knight, confused, was forced to adjust his pathing—his programming trying to recalculate his position. His body jerked left—then right—before locking into a new trajectory.
Instead of continuing his patrol, the knight walked straight through a fruit stall, knocking over barrels and crates, causing a chain reaction of chaotic physics glitches.
A vendor screamed as apples exploded into the air.
A child ducked under a flying cabbage.
A chicken clipped through the ground and vanished into the void.
Noah slipped past unnoticed.
It was just a small exploit, but in a game like this?
It was a lifeline.
The Horror Beneath the Surface
Noah didn't stop.
His mind was racing now, calculating every possible glitch, exploit, and shortcut he could use to stay ahead of whatever entity was hunting him.
But as he turned into a side street, something in the air shifted.
The sounds of the market faded.
The buildings around him… glitched.
Their edges flickered, textures warping—some becoming hyper-realistic, others melting into low-polygon nightmares.
And then, he saw them.
Figures standing in the darkness of an alleyway, half-hidden behind corrupted shadows.
They weren't normal NPCs.
They weren't players.
They weren't even human anymore.
Their bodies glitched and distorted, shifting between unfinished character models and featureless voids.
Some of them had no faces.
Others had too many.
And all of them were staring at him.
A whisper crawled through the air, twisting through Noah's mind like a glitching audio file:
"...you are not supposed to be here…"
His breath hitched.
The duplication glitch.
The pathing exploit.
He had altered the world.
And now, something had noticed.
Noah's pulse thundered in his ears.
He took a single, slow step backward—
The moment his foot touched the cobblestone, the nearest figure lunged.
It didn't move like a human. It snapped forward, reality bending around it—one second across the alley, the next inches from his face.
NOPE.
Noah turned and ran.
His feet pounded against the glitching streets, his breath ragged as his surroundings warped around him.
Buildings stretched and twisted, their textures breaking—some shifting into horrific, bleeding code, others phasing out of existence entirely.
The market was gone—replaced by a fractured void of floating architecture.
And behind him, the figures were still coming.
Reality was breaking.
And now, Noah wasn't just an anomaly.
He was a target.
Legends of the Corruption
Noah's breath was still uneven as he slipped into the tavern, the weight of what he'd seen pressing against his ribs like an invisible vice.
He wasn't just a glitch in the system anymore.
He was something worse.
Something… noticed him.
The tavern was dimly lit, the air thick with the scent of spilled ale, damp wood, and the underlying rot of something that shouldn't exist. It was packed with NPCs—or players—or whatever the hell these things really were. He wasn't sure anymore.
Their movements were too stiff. Their conversations looped with a mechanical precision that made his skin crawl.
Still, if there were answers, they would be here.
He found a dark corner, keeping his back to the wall as he let his ears do the work.
The voices blended together at first—mindless chatter, scripted lines—but then, something stood out.
"…Monsters where there weren't before. Places appearing that don't belong."
Noah's pulse quickened.
Another voice, lower, more cautious:
"A sign of the Eclipse's return, no doubt."
He went rigid.
Eclipse? Like Eclipse of the Gods?
Another man scoffed. "Bah, myths. That old prophecy's been around since my grandfather's time."
Prophecy?
Noah leaned forward, his grip tightening on the edge of the table.
The first man lowered his voice, his words dripping with unease.
"The Forgotten One," he whispered. "The one who abandoned the gods. The one who left the world to rot. They say the world won't be whole again until he returns… and sets things right."
Noah's stomach twisted.
That sounded way too much like him.
His heartbeat thundered in his ears.
The AI—the system that saw him as a threat—wasn't the first thing to break this world.
Something else had happened before.
Maybe it was another player who got trapped here. Maybe someone else had tried to break the system and failed.
Or maybe…
This world had always been broken.
The Name That Shouldn't Exist
Noah forced himself to breathe, scanning the room.
The old man who spoke leaned against the counter, his face etched with exhaustion, his fingers wrapped around a mug of something dark. He wasn't repeating scripted lines like the others—his words were too raw.
Noah stood and approached, keeping his movements casual.
"Forgotten One?" he asked, keeping his voice steady.
The old man froze.
Slowly, he turned his head. His bloodshot eyes locked onto Noah's, searching—scanning.
Then, in a voice barely above a whisper—
"Why do you speak of things you shouldn't?"
A cold shiver ran down Noah's spine.
Something was wrong.
The tavern had fallen silent.
He hadn't noticed it at first. But now—
The conversations had stopped.
The clinking of mugs. The shuffle of feet. The murmur of voices.
Gone.
Every single NPC in the tavern was staring at him.
Their heads turned in unison, their expressions blank, their eyes hollow.
The air felt heavier, thick with something unseen, something that made his lungs feel tight.
A whisper, impossibly close, brushed against the back of his neck—
"You are not supposed to be here."
Noah's blood ran cold.
He turned sharply—but there was no one behind him.
The old man grabbed his wrist, his grip surprisingly strong.
"Leave," he whispered, voice tight with fear. "Before it notices."
Something creaked.
The tavern shifted.
The walls flickered, the wooden beams twisting into something unnatural, like the entire building was alive, breathing in sync with an unseen presence.
Then, from behind the counter, the bartender moved.
Noah's breath caught in his throat.
The man's neck cracked unnaturally as his head snapped toward Noah, moving in glitching, jerky motions.
His face was wrong.
It was as if someone had stretched human skin over a mannequin, the features warping, flickering, breaking.
His mouth opened, but the voice that came out was a garbled mess—a distorted blend of static, screams, and something crawling beneath reality.
"ERROR. ERROR. UNREGISTERED ENTITY DETECTED."
Noah ripped his arm free.
RUN.
The entire room broke apart.
Tables stretched into the air like tendrils of corrupted code. NPCs twisted into horrific shapes, their bodies melting into unreadable data, their voices a chorus of screeching, digital agony.
A hand—no, a shadow of something worse—lunged from the bartender's mouth, reaching for Noah with fingers that shouldn't exist.
HE RAN.
The tavern collapsed behind him, glitching in and out of reality as he burst onto the streets.
The night sky flickered, stars appearing and disappearing like a broken simulation.
The ground beneath his feet shifted, cobblestone roads warping, twisting into jagged, floating remnants of a world that was never meant to be whole.
A voice, deep and layered with thousands of overlapping whispers, crawled through his skull.
"YOU. CANNOT. LEAVE."
Noah's legs burned as he sprinted through the fractured streets, his breath ragged.
Behind him, the tavern was gone.
Only a void remained.
And from within that void, something watched.
The System Fights Back
A sudden chill crawled up Noah's spine.
Then—
WARNING: UNREGISTERED ENTITY DETECTED. INITIATING ELIMINATION PROTOCOL.
The words burned into his vision, bright red text hovering in the air like a death sentence.
Noah barely had time to react before the sharp, shrill whistle of crossbow bolts cut through the tavern's chaos.
THUNK.
A bolt buried itself into the wooden pillar where his head had just been.
Shit.
Noah dove, knocking over a chair as another bolt shredded through the air, missing him by a hair. The sound of splintering wood filled his ears as the tavern erupted into chaos.
Screams. Panicked footsteps. A crash of mugs hitting the floor.
His mind reeled. The assassins were back.
But as he glanced up from behind a table, his stomach twisted.
They weren't the shadowy enforcers from before.
They were guards.
The city's own guards.
And their eyes glowed red.
Noah's blood ran ice-cold.
The AI was adapting.
If he could manipulate the system, so could it.
Instead of summoning obvious abominations, it had begun corrupting real people.
The system was using the world itself against him.
He wasn't just fighting a broken game anymore.
He was fighting an entire world that wanted him dead.
Glitched Enforcers
Noah's heartbeat hammered in his ears. He could see the glitches crawling over the guards' bodies—little static distortions, unnatural jerks in their movements, like puppets on invisible strings.
Their faces still looked human, but there was something wrong.
Their expressions were too blank. Their eyes didn't blink. Their hands twitched at odd intervals, like they were struggling to exist.
Then—
CLANK. CLANK. CLANK.
Heavy boots stormed across the wooden floor.
One of the corrupted guards, a towering brute clad in iron armor, lifted his halberd and swung.
Noah barely rolled away in time as the massive blade split the wooden table in two, sending jagged splinters flying.
"Shit, shit, shit—!"
He scrambled back, crashing into another chair as the guard's glowing red eyes locked onto him with mechanical precision.
"UNREGISTERED ENTITY DETECTED. EXECUTE IMMEDIATE TERMINATION."
The others moved.
One raised a crossbow, aiming straight for Noah's chest.
No time to think.
He grabbed a fallen plate off the ground and flung it.
SMASH!
The plate collided with the guard's face—not enough to hurt, but enough to interrupt his attack animation.
The crossbow misfired.
The bolt shot sideways, burying itself into another guard's leg.
No reaction.
The injured guard didn't flinch.
He ripped the bolt from his leg with a sickening crunch—and kept moving.
No pain. No humanity. No hesitation.
They weren't just corrupted. They weren't real anymore.
Fighting a System That Cheats
The system was cheating.
They were moving too fast, reacting like flawless AI instead of real NPCs. There was no hesitation, no human error. The world itself was rewriting them into mindless enforcers.
He was outmatched.
Outgunned.
Out of options.
His eyes darted across the tavern. There had to be a way out.
No windows. The front door was blocked.Too many enemies between him and the back exit.
Then—he saw it.
A physics exploit.
The chandelier.
It was attached to an old, weathered chain above him—one of those objects in the game that wasn't supposed to move.
In the old version of Eclipse of the Gods, destroying an anchored object could cause a delayed physics reaction, sometimes launching anything standing near it.
If he timed it right… he could break the system before it broke him.
Noah's hands trembled as he reached for a discarded dagger on the floor.
One shot. One chance.
The guards advanced.
A bolt whizzed past his face.
He threw the dagger at the chain—
CLANG!
The chain snapped.
ERROR. UNSTABLE OBJECT DETECTED.
The chandelier jerked in mid-air—
Then the game broke.
The heavy metal plummeted straight down onto the guards—except instead of simply crushing them, the physics engine glitched out.
BOOM!
The impact triggered an unexpected force multiplier.
All five corrupted guards were instantly sent flying—spiraling into the ceiling, through walls, phasing out of existence.
One was stretched infinitely, his body flickering like a corrupted mess of pixels before vanishing into the void.
Another guard phased halfway into the floor, his torso twitching violently as if the system couldn't decide if he was alive or dead.
A glitched ragdoll mess.
Noah stared, breathless.
The room shuddered.
A low, distorted voice slithered through the tavern—whispering from the cracks of reality itself.
"You… should not… be here…"
The air turned heavy.
Noah's vision flickered.
He felt something cold watching him.
Something that wasn't human.
The system wasn't done fighting.
It was escalating.
The next thing it sent wouldn't be guards.
Noah ran.
His lungs burned as he sprinted out the back door, leaving behind the ruins of the tavern.
Behind him, the world shuddered.
The night sky flickered, a bright red ERROR message briefly appearing over the horizon.
"GLITCH DETECTED. SYSTEM RESTRUCTURING."
The game was changing the rules.
And he was still playing on hard mode.
The Choice
Noah ran.
The twisting alleyways blurred around him, the darkened streets stretching like an endless maze. His lungs burned, his legs screamed in protest, but he couldn't stop.
Behind him, the corrupted guards were still coming—not running, but gliding. Their movements were unnatural, eerily mechanical, their bodies twitching as if struggling to maintain form.
He turned a sharp corner, barely dodging a flickering anomaly—a section of the city that wasn't fully rendered. A wrong step and he'd fall straight through the world.
This world was breaking down.
And so was his time.
The Two Paths
Noah gritted his teeth. Think. THINK.
He couldn't just keep running.
The system had already adapted to his exploits—it had sent glitched guards, manipulated the environment, even changed physics against him.
If he kept hiding, it would only send stronger enforcers.
If he fought head-on, he'd die.
Two choices.
Fix the world.
Somehow complete the game's final quest.
Restore balance to the world.
Impossible.
Break free.
Exploit the corruption.
Go against the AI itself.
Suicidal.
Neither choice guaranteed survival.
But if there was one thing he knew—
This wasn't just a game anymore.
It was a death trap.
And if he didn't play smarter, the system would erase him first.
Horrors in the City
The streets shifted.
Buildings glitched, some twisting impossibly as if trying to fold into themselves. A bridge ahead collapsed mid-air, vanishing into a pit of endless black.
WARNING: AREA UNSTABLE.
Noah's breath caught. The game wasn't just hunting him.
It was rewriting reality itself.
His stomach clenched as he sprinted past an abandoned plaza—only to see something that made his blood freeze.
NPCs.
They stood there, silent, unmoving, packed together like lifeless dolls.
At first, he thought they were just glitched.
Then, their heads snapped toward him all at once.
Every single one.
Their eyes glowed red.
"…He must be deleted."
A ripple of static passed through them. Their bodies twitched, necks snapping at unnatural angles as if reality itself was struggling to hold them in place.
Then—
They moved.
Not walking. Not running.
They blinked forward in jagged, unnatural bursts, appearing inches closer every time his heart pounded.
The system had turned every NPC in the city into part of the hunt.
"OH, COME ON!" Noah shouted, throwing himself backward as a flickering merchant lunged at him.
His knife passed through the man—as if he wasn't solid—but the moment Noah stumbled, he felt hands grip his arms.
Cold. Inhuman. Wrong.
A dozen NPCs swarmed him at once.
The Truth in the Code
"No. No no no—!"
Panic surged through him as their grip tightened—but then, something glitched.
For a brief second, Noah saw inside them.
Not their bodies.
Their code.
Lines of corrupt text burned into his vision, flashing with errors.
[UNKNOWN VARIABLE: PLAYER ???]
[NO QUEST DATA FOUND.]
[REWRITING PROTOCOLS...]
The system doesn't know what I am.
His breath hitched.
That was his answer.
The world wasn't just hunting him.
It was trying to define him.
The game was broken, and the AI was desperately patching itself to erase the unknown factor—him.
If he could manipulate that uncertainty… he could break the rules even further.
His choice was made.
Outplaying the System
He threw himself backward, forcing a glitch.
His body clipped through the NPCs, and for half a second, they froze, unsure how to react.
That was all he needed.
He sprinted toward the nearest corruption zone—a place where the city was crumbling into fragmented, unrendered terrain.
The NPCs followed, flickering like broken marionettes—
But Noah had already found his exploit.
Ahead, a floating ledge hovered just above an invisible kill zone.
It was a terrain bug.
In the original game, if you jumped at the perfect angle, you could land on the ledge—but the NPC AI couldn't follow.
If he missed? He'd fall into the void.
No second chances.
The mob of red-eyed NPCs lunged.
Noah leapt.
His foot barely grazed the platform—
For a terrifying second, his screen glitched.
ERROR. LOCATION UNDEFINED.
Then—
He landed.
The NPCs did not.
A chorus of distorted screams.
They fell, their bodies vanishing into the black void below, their models distorting into incomprehensible shapes before being erased from existence.
Noah shuddered as the last one disappeared.
He had outplayed the system.
For now.
A Final Warning
The world shook.
A deep, guttural voice echoed through the city, as if the game itself was speaking.
"YOU SHOULD NOT EXIST."
Noah's body went cold.
The sky flickered, ERROR messages flashing over the horizon.
"If I don't exist, then you can't kill me."
His own voice was steady.
"So let's see which one of us breaks first."
And with that, he turned and disappeared into the shadows of the fractured city.
The war wasn't over.
But now, he was fighting back.