The world didn't scream when it broke.
It sighed.
Reiji woke to a silence so absolute it pressed against his eardrums like deep water. He lay on a slab of grey stone drifting through a void of fractured neon. Above him, the sky was a bruised violet, streaked with pale veins of dead code that tangled across the stars like frozen lightning.
For a moment, he didn't move.
The stillness felt hostile. Watchful.
When he finally sat up, his body responded with delay, as if gravity itself had thickened. Every joint protested. A sharp, digital sting crawled through his nerves.
He lifted his left hand.
The fingers were translucent.
They vibrated with a high-frequency jitter, phasing in and out of solidity. The sight made his skin crawl.
> [STATUS EFFECT: DATA CONTAMINATION]
Source: The Void-Bin
Effect: Physical assets becoming compatible with archived entities
HP: -1 per minute
Stamina Cap: 10%
"Ten percent?" Reiji croaked. His voice sounded wrong—thin, stretched, distorted by the air.
"I can't even sprint to the next platform with that."
He pushed himself upright.
It felt like standing inside freezing syrup.
The world around him was a ruin of forgotten assets. Stairs spiraled into nothing. Houses were hollow, two-dimensional shells. Trees were crude totems of green cubes stacked on brown cylinders. Everything was unfinished. Everything was abandoned.
A graveyard of failed worlds.
In the center of a floating plaza sat a mountain of grey shapes.
Reiji walked toward it, each step heavy, each breath slower than it should have been. His heartbeat thudded in his ears like a countdown timer.
The pile wasn't stone.
It was bodies.
Thousands of them.
All identical.
Villager #1042.
His model.
His old skin.
His first body.
"I can fix this," Reiji whispered, reflex kicking in. The gamer instinct. The developer instinct.
"It's just redundant data. I'll purge it."
Glitch-Fire ignited in his palm.
Normally, the blue flames screamed like a jet engine, tearing through reality with raw authority.
Now, they flickered.
A dying candle.
Reiji thrust his hand forward.
"DELETE!"
The flames struck the corpse-pile.
For a heartbeat, a few pixels turned white.
Then the fire went out.
The bodies didn't burn.
Didn't crack.
Didn't react.
They absorbed the attack. The data sank into the mass like a stone into black water.
> [COMMAND DENIED]
Error: This data has already been deleted
You cannot erase what no longer exists
Note: History is read-only, Reiji
Cold sweat broke across his skin.
"No. No, I have Developer permissions."
His voice cracked. "Override. I command a System Flush!"
He slammed his glowing hand into the ground, forcing his code into the layer's logic.
He expected a shockwave.
A crash.
A debug screen.
Anything.
The world ignored him.
No ripple.
No response.
No acknowledgment.
It was like striking a mountain with a toy hammer.
His god-tier authority meant nothing here.
"Why isn't it working?!" he shouted into the empty sky.
"Because skill doesn't matter in a tomb."
The voice crawled through the air like static.
From the shadows of the corpse-pile, something shifted.
It unfolded with the slow precision of a dying machine.
It wore Kael's armor — but the metal had fused into flesh, blackened and bruised like oil-soaked bone. Where Kael's face should have been, there was only a smooth grey surface marked by two glowing red Xs.
"Kael…" Reiji breathed.
He tried to step back.
His legs gave out.
His stamina bar flashed hollow red.
He was exhausted from standing.
"Reiji," the thing whispered. Its voice sounded like a thousand corrupted drives spinning at once.
"I am the memory of your Perfect Run. I am the part of the Hero that remembers the 927 times you let me die so you could shave seconds off your route."
It stepped forward.
It didn't need to attack.
The air itself decayed around it.
Reiji looked down.
Hands were reaching out from the corpse-pile.
Grey fingers curled around his ankles.
Where they touched him, his skin turned into wireframe. Not pain. Not numbness.
Absence.
His feet were vanishing.
"I was just playing a game," Reiji gasped. His pride shattered with his HP bar.
"I was trying to win!"
"You did," the monster said, lowering itself onto a throne of twisted code.
"And this is your trophy room."
The red Xs burned brighter.
"We're not here to fight you. We're here to wait. To watch you finish rendering into one of us."
In the far distance, the massive black Cube began to turn.
The Core.
Miles away.
Slow as a dying god.
Heavy as inevitability.
Its gravity pulled at the world itself.
Reiji reached for his menu, hands trembling.
Logout.
Reset.
Cheat.
Anything.
The interface was a blur of broken symbols.
Unreadable.
Unresponsive.
He was a pro gamer who couldn't move.
A developer who couldn't code.
A hero who couldn't save his own legs from dissolving into static.
The Corrupted Kael tilted its head.
"Tell me, Player," it whispered,
"what's your strategy for a game that has already ended?"
Reiji didn't answer.
He just watched his HP tick down.
92… 91… 90…
The Void-Bin waited.
To be continue...