We stood at the entrance to the abandoned subway station, weapons raised, hearts pounding. In the darkness of the tunnel ahead, two red eyes glowed with an unnerving, mechanical light. The figure that stepped out was unlike anyone I had seen before. He was tall and impossibly thin, a walking collection of mismatched parts. His arms were cybernetic, one ending in a delicate three-fingered claw, the other a bulky, industrial-looking limb. His legs were a mix of scavenged robotics and crude metal braces. He was draped in a cloak made of torn rags and bundled cables, and he leaned heavily on a long metal staff that sparked with stray electricity.
He was not Ouroboros. He was not a standard player. He was something else entirely. Something born from this broken, hidden place.
My HUD tried to scan him, to give me some kind of information, but the results were a flickering, corrupted mess.
[PLAYER ID: U#KN0WN]
[FACTION: N/A]
[STATUS: UNREGISTERED]
This person existed completely outside the system's knowledge. He was a ghost. A glitch.
The figure let out a low, grinding sound, like the gears of a rusty machine. It might have been a chuckle. His voice, when it came, was a raspy, mechanical hiss from a speaker somewhere in his chest. "Put the toys away," he rasped. "Combat is disabled in the central hub. Bad for business."
Anya and I exchanged a wary glance. The situation felt strangely familiar, echoing my first meeting with her in the Safe Zone. We were the newcomers, and he was the jaded local. Slowly, cautiously, we lowered our weapons. My shotgun still felt heavy in my hands, ready to be raised at a moment's notice.
The cybernetic man, the one who called himself Glitch, tapped his staff on the ground. "First time in the Undercroft, I see. You've got the smell of a clean system all over you. Runaways, right? Escaped a System Purge, I'd bet."
He knew exactly what had happened.
"This place," he continued, gesturing with his clawed hand at the sprawling, dark station, "is what happens when the system deletes something but forgets to take out the trash. A collection of glitched-out back-end tunnels, forgotten code, and deleted arenas. We Exiles... we call it home."
Exiles. So there were others. Others who lived here, outside the endless cycle of deathmatches.
"Everything down here has a price," Glitch said, his red optic eyes focusing on us with an unnerving intensity. "Information. Gear. Safe passage through the tunnels. Nothing is free. And your System Points, your official rewards... they're worthless here. We deal in things that are real. Things you can hold."
I understood. This was a black market. A neutral ground. A place that operated on its own rules. And we had just stumbled right into the middle of it. I had to know if this place could help me with my quest.
I decided to be direct. The situation was too strange for games. "We need to find a System Analyst," I said, my voice steady.
Glitch's head tilted, the movement accompanied by the sound of straining servos. "An Analyst?" he rasped. The red lights of his eyes seemed to brighten. "Now that is a rare request. Very rare. Very expensive. There are not many of those left who remember the old ways. What could a pair of fresh-faced runaways possibly have that would be worth that kind of information?"
His tone was mocking, but I could sense a genuine curiosity beneath it. He was testing us. Seeing what we were worth.
I thought about what he had said. We deal in things that are real. My system-based rewards were worthless. But I did have something else. Something I had earned. Something real and tangible.
I opened my inventory menu. I focused on the small box of ammunition I had received from my MVP crate. I selected a single round.
[TRADE OFFER: 1x High-Caliber Sniper Round]
I sent the offer to Glitch. His HUD must have registered it, because he went completely still. His red eyes stared at the floating trade window between us. To me, it was just one bullet. But to Glitch, a man who lived his life scavenging for parts and patching together his own existence, a perfectly manufactured, system-minted piece of high-tier ammunition was a rare treasure. It was like finding a flawless diamond in a junkyard.
His entire demeanor changed. The mocking tone was gone. He looked at the trade offer with an intensity that bordered on reverence.
"System-minted ammo," he whispered, his mechanical voice filled with something that sounded like awe. "Clean code. No corruption. Flawless construction. It's been a long, long time since I've seen any of this down here."
He looked up at me, his red eyes re-evaluating me completely. I was no longer just a lost newbie. I was someone with access to valuable, real resources.
"You have a deal," he said, accepting the trade.
The sniper round dematerialized from my inventory. With a soft chime of light, it materialized in Glitch's open, mechanical hand. He stared at it for a moment, then closed his clawed fingers around it, and the bullet vanished into a hidden compartment in his arm.
"Alright, kid. You bought yourself a map," he rasped.
He tapped his sparking staff on the dusty floor again. A flickering, holographic map projected out from the tip, painting the ground in lines of green light. It showed a sprawling network of tunnels, chambers, and abandoned maintenance shafts. The Undercroft was huge.
Glitch pointed with his staff to a location deep within the network, far from our current position. "There's only one true Analyst I know of down here," he said. "A crazy old woman who calls herself 'Oracle.' She's been here since the beginning. Lives in the old server farm, plugged right into the system's spine."
He looked up from the map, his red eyes glowing in the dim light of the station. His mocking tone returned, but this time it was mixed with something else. A warning.
"But getting to her won't be easy," Glitch rasped. "This central hub is a neutral zone. But the tunnels between here and there... they aren't part of the 'no combat' agreement."
He leaned in closer, his mechanical voice dropping to a conspiratorial hiss.
"And they're filled with things. Things that crawled out of deleted code and system errors. Things far worse than a few Ouroboros players with guns."