Her voice, ancient and knowing, hung in the silent, cavernous server farm. She knew who I was. She had been waiting for me. Anya and I exchanged a wary look. This old woman was far more than just a simple hermit hiding in the system's forgotten corners.
I stepped forward cautiously, my empty shotgun held loosely at my side. The firelight danced across her strange form. I could see her more clearly now. She was small and withered with age, her face a roadmap of deep wrinkles. The VR visor covering her eyes was an ancient model, its plastic yellowed and cracked. Thin, silvery data-jacks were embedded directly into her temples, and a nest of wires trailed from them, connecting her like an umbilical cord to the towering, silent server racks that surrounded her. She was not just living in this place. She was a part of it. She was literally plugged into the machine.
"How did you know we were coming?" I asked, my voice barely a whisper.
The Oracle chuckled, a dry, rattling sound. "This place... the Undercroft... it has a memory. The system's long-term storage. Everything that is deleted, every player that is terminated, their ghost echoes here for a while. I listen to the echoes." She tapped a long, gnarled finger against the data-jack at her temple. "I heard the system scream when you and the snake-charmer tore down his tower. I felt the tremor when Caden's little room was purged. And I felt the birth of your quest. It's the first new story this world has had in a very, very long time."
She was a living sensor, reading the very code of our reality.
I knew I had to trust her. She was our only hope. I opened my inventory and materialized the [Corrupted Data Fragment]. The crystal pulsed with a chaotic, red-and-black light in my hand.
The Oracle turned her full attention to it. She held out a trembling, cybernetic hand, its fingers long and skeletal. She did not take the fragment from me. She just let her fingers hover a few centimeters above it. The data-jacks in her temples began to glow with a soft, white light. Her eyes, hidden behind the cracked visor, were seeing something I could not. She was reading the data directly.
"Ah," she breathed, a look of pure, academic awe on her wrinkled face. "Caden. That brilliant, foolish boy. He really did it."
Her head snapped up, her unseen eyes fixing on me. "This is not just a map, you foolish boy," she said, her voice filled with a mix of reverence and fear. "This is a key. A root access key. Caden didn't just find a backdoor. He built a master key that could unlock them all. A key that can rewrite the fundamental rules of an arena."
Anya, who had been silent until now, took a step forward. "Rewrite the rules? What does that mean?"
"It means chaos," the Oracle answered, her voice sharp. "It means you could use this fragment to inject a 'glitch' into a live match. You could temporarily disable gravity in a certain area. You could turn friendly fire on for the enemy team, forcing them to fight each other. You could even open a temporary gateway and spawn corrupted creatures like those Scrappers you just fought inside a clean, orderly arena."
I stared at the fragment in my hand. It was not just a key to escape. It was a weapon. A weapon of unimaginable power. A weapon that could break the game for everyone.
"So you can read it?" I asked, my voice tense. "You can get the map? The Exile's Path?"
The Oracle leaned back, the light in her data-jacks fading. "Oh, I can read it," she said with a dry chuckle. "But understanding it, decrypting the map from this mess of corrupted code... that is another matter entirely. The encryption is tied to the system's core processes. It needs a massive amount of power to unlock. Power I do not have down here."
My heart sank. Another dead end.
"But," she continued, a sly look on her face, "you do. Or at least, you can get it for me." She pointed a long, cybernetic finger at me. "The system is a closed loop. The arenas, the matches... they are a massive power source. To decrypt this data, I need to tap into that source. I need a massive, direct surge of processing power. Power I can only get from a live, active match server."
Her price was becoming clear. And it was terrifying.
"In your next match," she said, her voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper, "you must take this fragment to the map's central server hub. Every map has one. It's the brain that runs the match's physics and rules. While the match is live and the server is running at full power, you must plug this fragment in."
"What will happen?" Anya asked, her voice tight with suspicion.
"The system will fight you, of course," the Oracle said, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. "It will detect the fragment as a foreign virus. It will send its Cleansers after you. It will do everything it can to stop the connection. But if you can hold them off, if you can keep the fragment connected for just sixty seconds while the data transfers... I can pull the decrypted map out from my end. I can give you the Exile's Path."
It was an insane plan. A suicide mission. She was asking me to intentionally infect a live match, drawing the full attention of the system's defense mechanisms, all while fighting another team of players.
The Oracle must have seen the doubt on my face. She reached into the folds of her wire-woven cloak and pulled out a small device. It was a sleek, black spike with a port on one end that perfectly matched the shape of the data fragment. [Data Spike].
"This will interface the fragment with the server," she said, holding it out to me. "A little something I built myself. It will make the connection faster."
I took the Data Spike. It was cool to the touch. This was my new objective. My path forward.
As I took the device, the Oracle offered one final, cryptic warning. Her voice was a low, serious rumble.
"Be warned, Marked Man. Using the fragment like this is not without consequence. It will leave a permanent scar on the match's code. You will be injecting a piece of this... this Undercroft... into their clean, orderly world. The system's 'gods,' the ones who watch from the outside... they will notice. They will start hunting for the source of the corruption. They will start hunting for you."
Before I could even process the weight of her words, a brilliant blue light began to glow around me and Anya. It was the light of a forced teleportation.
A system alert, clean and authoritative, appeared on my HUD.
[UNREGISTERED PLAYERS DETECTED. FORCING SYSTEM RESYNCHRONIZATION.]
[INITIATING TELEPORT TO NEXT SCHEDULED MATCH.]
The system had found us. It was ripping us out of the Undercroft, out of our sanctuary. Anya and I looked at each other, our eyes wide with panic. We were out of ammo. We were wounded. We were not ready.
The Oracle just smiled, a sad, knowing look on her ancient face. "The game always finds you, children," she whispered, as the blue light consumed us. "Now go. And try not to die before you get me my data."
We were being thrown right back into the fire.