The silence after the kill was heavier than Kael expected.
Not triumphant.
Not even relief.
Just silence. Cold and deep, as if the world itself had paused to watch what he would do next.
His hands were still shaking. Not from fear—but from something else.
Power.
He felt it in his skin. Beneath the surface. A static hum, like barely-contained voltage surging through the framework of his body.
He had killed.
He had leveled.
And the System—his enemy—had responded.
[Fragmented Nullwalker - Path Initialized]
[Current Soulcode Status: Empty / Influx Detected]
[Warning: Soul instability may cause… divergence.]
Divergence?
Kael didn't know what that meant. But he felt it—like something was blooming inside his chest. Not light. Not fire.
Something colder.
Something... other.
He turned his back to the ruined outpost and walked east—toward the jagged skyline of a forgotten city, half-submerged in corrupted fog.
The land between was broken.
Not in the poetic sense.
Literally broken—as in code fragments rising out of the ground like dead trees, logic gates hanging in the air, loops of nullspace twisting across the soil.
Kael watched a crow fly into one of those loops—and vanish with a quiet pop.
Gone.
Not dead.
Just... undeclared.
Even time felt strange here. The sun flickered as if it couldn't decide on a time of day. One minute, it was late afternoon. Then a blink later, dusk.
The System's clock was failing.
And something inside Kael whispered that this wasn't just a side effect.
It was a symptom.
A sound cut through the haze.
Low. Wet. Like dragging meat across stone.
Kael dropped low behind a jagged slab of glassmetal and peeked over.
A creature moved along the ruins ahead—eight limbs, most of them wrong. It dragged a twisted mass of armor and bone behind it. Its face was split in three directions, each with a different expression: rage, sorrow, and... laughter.
[Entity Detected: Scriptwraith (Lv.4)]
Origin: Corrupted Human Class – Former Vanguard
Abilities: Code Leech, Recompile Slash
Threat Level: High (Recommended: Avoid or Lure into Logic Collapse Zone)
Kael grimaced. "Yeah... let's not."
But the moment he moved, the wraith's heads twitched in unison.
It had seen him.
[Hostile AI Response Detected.]
[Combat Imminent.]
He turned and ran.
Not bravely. Not tactically.
Just ran.
The creature shrieked, and the sound was like something chewing through a hard drive—metallic and painful. It surged after him, limbs clicking against the broken ground like mismatched data packets hunting a process.
[Echo Step Activated.]
Kael blinked out of existence—
—reappeared thirty meters away, gasping, knees almost giving out from the strain.
[Cooldown: 9 seconds remaining.]
Damn it.
Behind him, the wraith didn't stop. It didn't care about stamina. Or exhaustion. It had no mind left. Just a loop. A directive. Purge anomaly. Rewrite deviation.
Kael spotted a shimmer ahead.
A loop. A logic collapse zone. Dangerous to touch. But deadly... to code-bound things.
Perfect.
He skidded to a stop just beside it, turned, and shouted:
"Come on, you glitch-faced freak!"
The Scriptwraith lunged—and Kael dove out of the way.
The creature hit the collapse zone.
The effect was instant.
Its code shattered mid-motion—body glitching, limbs freezing, three faces caught mid-expression. For a moment, it was stuck between frames, a broken animation.
Then—
[Logic Zone Interference Triggered.]
[Code Breakdown: 83% Complete.]
[Optional Input: Patch Drain?]
Kael grinned, teeth bared. "Yes."
He activated Patch Drain.
Tendrils of null-light surged from the air, curling around the frozen Scriptwraith. Data bled from its form like leaking ink, rushing into Kael's core.
[HP Restored: +21]
[Residual Code Absorbed: +12% Soul Stability]
[Entity Purged.]
[EXP Gained: 42]
[Level Up: Lv.3]
And then—
[Soulcore Fragment Detected.]
[Would you like to integrate?]
Kael blinked.
He hadn't even known that was possible.
"Do it."
It wasn't clean.
Integration felt like swallowing barbed wire and fire—his insides twisted, bones rattled, and his vision fractured into a dozen flickering windows filled with code. For a moment, he saw something impossible.
A class. Half-formed. Stripped of name and color.
It hovered before him, flickering.
Then—
Gone.
But the data remained.
[Soul Fragment Integrated: Vanguard Root Class – Severed Node]
[New Trait Unlocked: Combat Instinct I]
You gain a passive sense of directional danger.
[Stat Points Earned: +2]
Kael collapsed to his knees, panting.
He felt changed. Not stronger. Not smarter. But... more real. Like the world could see him now. Like he had stepped onto the system's radar as more than a Null.
A threat.
He stayed there for minutes, just breathing.
The system had tried to kill him—again. And he'd used its own broken pieces to grow.
He looked up, and for the first time, he saw a faint glow on the horizon.
A pillar of light, barely visible through the fog.
[Beacon Detected.]
Status: Offline
Distance: ~12.4 km
Route Status: Hazardous / Partially Corrupted
System Response Nearby: Moderate
He stood.
The beacon would have answers. Maybe backup data. A terminal. A chance to interface with deeper layers of the world.
Or maybe just a place to rest.
Either way... it was forward.
And Kael wasn't going back.
Kael limped toward the remains of a crumbling overpass, seeking shelter. His body still buzzed with foreign energy, but his limbs were screaming. The drain of activating Echo Step twice in a row had left his nerves twitching.
He found a shadowed corner beneath the structure, where moss-covered concrete jutted like ribs out of the earth. It wasn't safe, not truly—but it was hidden. Quiet. For now, that was enough.
Kael slumped against the wall, eyes drifting toward the jagged skyline.
That thing—the Scriptwraith—had once been human. Not a beast or a monster from some other plane. A Vanguard, the system said. Likely a frontline fighter. Maybe a guild leader. Maybe someone who had once been praised for their strength.
And now? Glitched. Repurposed. Hunted. Devoid of will.
The system corrupted its own when they failed.
He ran a hand over his face. "What the hell kind of world is this?"
[New Entry Added to Lexicon: Scriptwraith]
Corrupted AI-ghost of a former class-holder. Often generated from players who die during unstable zone collapses. Retains fragmented memories, attack routines, and instincts.
Weakness: Logic Collapse Zones, Disruption Fields, Mirror Nodes.
Drops: Code Fragments, Soulcore Shards (rare), Obsolete Class Traits.
Kael blinked.
That explained the Fragment he'd absorbed. And it made something else clear: enemies weren't just challenges.
They were resources.
He opened his Status again.
Name: Kael [Uncoded]
Level: 3
Soulcore: Uninitialized
Traits:
– Fragmented Nullwalker (Locked)
– Combat Instinct I (Passive)
Stat Points Available: 2
Skills:
– Echo Step [Lv. 1] (Blink movement. 10s cooldown.)
– Patch Drain [Lv. 1] (Absorb residual code for healing or stability.)
Soul Stability: 17%
System Affinity: Unknown
Code Access: Tier-0 (Restricted)
He stared at the Soul Stability line. It ticked up whenever he absorbed something, but what did it lead to? Full initialization of a Soulcore? Something else?
There were no answers in the interface. And no guidance.
Just him. Alone.
Always alone.
That night, Kael didn't sleep. He watched.
Watched the skyline. Watched the flickering moon that glitched in and out of different phases.
And he watched the logs.
[Nearby Signal Intercepted...]
[Log File Recovered: #A3.78 – Broken Guild Memory Core]
"We reached the Beacon... but it's not a safehouse anymore. It's watching us. The light isn't pure. If anyone sees this—don't approach alone. The signal lies."
Kael's gut twisted.
The beacon wasn't just broken.
It was hunting.
Morning.
If it could be called that.
The sun stuttered overhead, casting fragmented rays that seemed to skip frames. Time here wasn't just unstable. It was trying to collapse.
Kael continued moving toward the beacon—but slower. He avoided data streams in the air, dodged crawling bugs of corrupted code that wriggled across stone, and kept one eye on the sky.
And that's when he saw it.
Another player.
A woman—alone—dragging a blood-covered blade behind her.
Her cloak was burned. Her right arm shimmered with partial code, like it was stuck mid-repair. But her eyes...
They weren't empty like the Scriptwraith's.
She saw him.
And she narrowed her gaze.
[Player Identified: Arin Nyx]
[Level: Unknown]
[Status: ???]
[Class: CENSORED]
[Soulcore: Corrupted-Shielded]
Warning: Instability Detected
Kael raised his hands slowly.
"I'm not hostile."
Arin didn't respond. Her fingers tightened around her weapon, which hummed with layered commands—more than one element, more than one class type. Advanced.
Too advanced for him.
She took a step forward. "Nullwalker?"
Kael tensed. "Yeah."
She blinked. "You should be dead."
"Get in line."
Silence.
Then, surprisingly, a grin tugged at the corner of her mouth. It wasn't warm. But it wasn't hate either.
"Come with me," she said. "If the beacon's waking up, you'll want a guide."
He hesitated. "Why help me?"
Arin turned, already walking. "Because no one survives solo past Day Three."
They traveled together in silence for a while.
She knew the terrain—dodged corruption zones like she'd been through it before. Once, she marked a tree with a flick of her code-infused blade, leaving behind a glowing sigil Kael couldn't read.
"Warning glyph," she said.
"For what?"
"Deadzone shift. The logic field moves every twelve hours. If you stand in the wrong place when it resets, the system folds you like bad code."
He frowned. "And you're not affected?"
She glanced back. "My class lets me cheat. A little."
Kael didn't ask more.
Yet.
As the beacon drew near, he saw the towers—ancient, steelbones half-melted and surrounded by black glass. No life. No birds. Only static in the air.
It was massive. Larger than any outpost. And at its heart, the light.
Or rather, the absence of it.
What should have been a bright pillar of golden system-energy was instead flickering—black and red and purple, pulsing like a corrupted heartbeat.
[System Node: Beacon Ruin Alpha-07]
[Status: Infected / Mutating]
[Activation Requires: Dual Interface / Soul Input]
Warning: Risk of Contamination – Level B
Arin looked at him. "You came here for answers?"
Kael nodded.
"Then pick. You help me activate it… or you run now."
Kael stared at the flickering light.
It could rewrite his soul. Or burn it out.
And yet… he stepped forward.
"I'm done running."
Arin smiled.
"Good."