The submission window blinked once.
Then again.
Then froze.
Kael frowned and tapped the haptic glyph. The interface, usually smooth and glassy, stuttered like bad signal on a fogged pane of glass.
[ERROR 302] – ENTITY NOT FOUND.
[MINIBOSS_REF.WLD_SECTOR67]: NULL.
[REPORT INVALID – INSTANCE DESYNCHRONIZED]
He blinked. Re-read it. Still there.
The kill report rejected the wolf. No loot drop. No XP increment. No marker on the map. It was like the thing had never existed.
Kael's lips parted slightly. "…That's new."
He canceled the screen, reopened it. Tried again.
[SUBMISSION FAILED – DATA CORRUPTED]
And then—
His Patchband shimmered with static. A low hum vibrated through his wrist like a tiny tuning fork. Barely audible. But very much real.
He stepped back, clutching his forearm. It pulsed. Not painfully — more like the aftermath of a pulse too strong to echo. A lingering recoil.
"Okay," he muttered, eyes narrowing. "So now we're… erasing mobs?"
Behind him, the forest rustled. Normal again. Nothing out of place. No glitch shimmer, no corpse, no aura.
Nothing left but silence — and heat.
Elsewhere, across the city, in the upper levels of a private guild skyscraper—
Aria crossed her arms, leaning over the replay footage for the third time.
"Run it back. Slower."
Her technician, an ex-mage analyst named Venn, frowned. "Slower than 0.25x and it's just frame garbage."
"Good," Aria said. "Garbage is where patterns hide."
The hologrid flickered — showing Kael's POV.
The wolf lunges. Frame skips. Glyph flicker. A slash across reality.
The next instant, Kael is standing over its corpse, glowing like a charged conduit.
No ability active. No visible cooldown used.
Aria narrowed her eyes.
"Frame 1123 to 1126. Show me the glyph flash."
Venn hesitated. "There isn't one."
Aria turned to him slowly. "Then what is that."
She jabbed a finger at the screen — a brief, jagged pattern etched into the air behind Kael, flickering out like heat mirage. Three frames of something that shouldn't be there. Something not part of the raid system.
Something not approved by any known mechanic.
Venn zoomed. The glyph glitched as he tried to enhance it.
"...I can't parse that. It's not in the Awakener lexicon."
"Can the system?" she asked.
"I don't know what system you think we're running," he said slowly. "But whatever that was... it didn't come from us."
Aria leaned back, watching Kael's face in the slowed footage. Exhausted. Drenched. Eyes wide like he'd just been pulled from another world.
"Find the raid log," she said.
Venn swallowed. "I already did."
"And?"
"There isn't one. The raid tracker didn't detect a miniboss there. Says it was a standard field anomaly. Not even C-tier."
Aria blinked once. Her voice was flat.
"Then what tore apart a party of five? What was he fighting?"
Venn said nothing.
Onscreen, Kael's expression — frozen in the aftermath of the kill — flickered one last time.
Then, without warning, the video stuttered.
[ERROR: RUNTIME LOOP]
[REPLAY UNSTABLE]
[REBUILD FRAMESTACK? Y/N]
Venn sat up straight.
"Uh—wait. That's not supposed to—"
The footage snapped off.
Black screen. Static.
The glass panes of the upper spire reflected only Aria's own scowl. Her arms were still folded, one finger tapping her elbow in a silent rhythm. Tap. Tap. Tap.
"Do not let anyone else access that footage," she said.
Venn looked pale. "Aria, that wasn't just a log error. The frames corrupted when I tried to stabilize them. It rewrote the cache."
"So it's learning," she said softly. Then, louder: "Lock it. You're on quiet review status. Tell the others this was a non-event. Low-level false flag anomaly."
Venn hesitated. "You think he's cheating?"
"I think," Aria said, eyes narrowing, "he's doing something no one else has ever done. And the system can't decide whether to flag him or rewrite him."
Venn swallowed.
Kael adjusted the straps on his gear and stepped down from the bus rail, boots hitting the worn pavement of East Transit Row. The raid sector was five miles behind him now — and his limbs still buzzed.
His Patchband was cool again. But his arm still throbbed in that dull, post-patch way — like something had burned too bright too fast and left residue in his bones.
He flexed his hand. No visual cracks. No glow. That was good.
He kept walking. Past closed shops, neon signs glitching. Past a vending machine that stuttered through three different drink brands in one second. Normal district noise.
But his ears were too sharp now. His senses too tuned.
He felt it before he saw it.
A flicker — not ahead. Above.
Kael stopped.
Turned his head slowly. Toward the roofline.
Nothing.
But something had been there. A heat shimmer where the air shouldn't move. A ripple across the flatness of sky.
He took a step toward the alley and—
A reflection, caught in the cracked glass of a derelict phone booth.
A figure. Cloaked. Head tilted. Watching.
Kael spun.
The rooftop was empty.
Wind. Just wind.
But the shimmer was still on the glass.
Not a reflection. A bleed-through.
The figure in the glass hadn't turned.
Hadn't moved.
Hadn't blinked.
It had only leaned forward — like it knew he could see it now.
Then the glass cracked.
Just a single line. Vertical. Splitting the reflected figure in two.
Kael backed away. One hand slowly rising toward his Patchband.
The figure in the glass began to glow — faintly, at the edge of vision — and then blinked out.
Not vanished. Not fled.
Just blinked. Like it had never been there.
The apartment door slid open with a soft hiss-thunk. Kael stepped inside, boots trailing faint dirt from the raid outskirts.
The warmth hit him first. Not heat. Not temperature. Just home.
"You're late."
Liora's voice — light, amused, but laced with that gentle edge she only used when she'd been worried for too long.
Kael managed a tight smile.
Senna was sprawled on the couch, feet sticking off one end, half-asleep with a sketchpad open across her chest. Crayon glyphs glowed faintly in messy patterns across the paper. None of them correct. All of them close.
He knelt and picked up the sketchbook, careful not to smudge anything.
"Did she wait up?"
Liora leaned in the doorway, arms crossed. "She refused to sleep. Said, and I quote, 'he's glowing again. He'll bring it home.'"
Kael looked down at Senna, then away.
"She shouldn't see that."
"She sees everything, Kael."
He didn't argue. Couldn't.
Later, after tucking Senna into her tangle of sheets, he sat at the edge of their bed, fingers moving in short, precise taps over his Patchband interface.
→ RAID LOG
→ SESSION HISTORY
→ LAST ZONE: 9-G (Outskirts)
→ TIMESTAMP: —
→ ENEMY LOGGED: —
→ DAMAGE REPORT: —
→ KILL CREDIT: —
→ LOOT ROLL: —
His hands stilled.
The interface was blank.
No raid summary. No record. Not even a timestamp.
The system had swallowed the entire event. As if the wolf. The clearing. The kill. He — had never been there.
"You're not even ghost-logged in," Reva had said.
Kael blinked slowly. His fingers hovered over the empty screen.
And then… a flicker.
Just for an instant — too fast for a screenshot.
[UNREGISTERED PATCH DETECTED]
[— SYSTEM PROCESSING —]
[ERROR: INVALID CONTEXT ID]
Then gone.
The interface snapped back to idle mode.
Kael stared at the screen for a long moment.
Liora entered behind him, holding a glass of water. She said nothing. Just stood there, watching the way his posture had shifted. Tense. Alert. Quiet in that dangerous way.
"You didn't win," she said softly.
Kael looked up.
"What?"
"Whatever it was," she continued, "you didn't win. You survived. And now something's following."
Kael said nothing.
He just closed the interface.
And turned off the lights.
Aria stood alone in her private terminal suite — the lights dimmed, the wall-to-wall screens flickering with cross-guild data flows. The guild was asleep. The city half-glitched. And she was still chasing a ghost.
→ REQUEST LOG BLOCK: KAEL VARIN
→ FILTER: RAID ZONE 9-G
→ CONTEXT: LEVEL 3 ADMINISTRATIVE OVERRIDE
The system took longer than usual to respond.
Unusual.
Very.
Then—
[RECEIVED FILE: RAID_INSTANCE_9G.KV]
[SIZE: 0.0MB]
[METADATA: REDACTED]
[ENEMY_ID: REDACTED]
[DAMAGE_LOG: REDACTED]
[KILL CREDIT: NULL]
[FILE HASH: NULL]
[MODIFIED: YES]
[MODIFIED BY: —]
[MODIFIED BY: —]
[MODIFIED BY: —]
She stared at it.
Three separate "Modified By" fields.
All blank.
Not system corrupted — manually scrubbed.
She tapped into the cross-guild audit index. Pulled up the backup server cache. That too had the same empty ghost file, except now it wasn't even titled with Kael's ID — just a hex string and a time delta that didn't match any known raid format.
0x013FA0C2 — TIME: [UNBOUND]
Unbound?
Her lips parted slightly.
She opened the file.
Black screen.
Then a line of text scrolled across it, slow. Glitching. As if handwritten by something very old and very tired.
He is not the first to unmake the order.
Only the first to do it *twice*.
The screen glitched again, then—
Gone.
No file. No history. No log of the access.
Like she'd never opened it.
Aria stood there in the darkness, backlit by static.
This wasn't just about Kael breaking cooldowns anymore.
This wasn't patching.
This was interference.
System-level. Root-layer.
Something — or someone — was redacting reality in real-time.
The apartment was dark, save for the pulsing blue hum of the bathroom nightlight — a gentle glow made for Senna's midnight water runs. Kael lay still on the couch, his body half-twisted out of the blanket. He hadn't made it to bed.
Something woke him.
Not a sound.
Not a shake.
Just… pressure.
Right arm. Inner forearm.
It didn't hurt — not at first.
It felt like static crawling under his skin. Like a current was buzzing through bone marrow. His Patchband was still inactive. No alarm. No notifications.
But the glow was back.
A slow pulse. Blue.
Not red. Not glyphfire. Not heat-triggered.
Blue — system-level.
Kael sat up slowly, rolling his sleeve back, heartbeat spiking even before he looked.
There it was.
A line of symbols.
Etched along his skin. Crawling down from the elbow like someone had scribbled directly onto his flesh with light.
Except— he hadn't patched anything.
Not recently. Not now.
And the shapes…
They weren't his.
They weren't his language.
He reached out, fingers trembling, to hover just over the sequence — and that's when it pulsed again.
Faster.
Like it recognized him.
[—INTERFACE OVERRIDE—]
The words didn't appear on his HUD.
They whispered in his head.
Kael flinched, grabbing the edge of the table.
His Patchband activated on its own, flickering once.
Trying to resist.
Failing.
A new line wrote itself into the glyph chain down his arm.
The symbols didn't translate.
But they pulsed in a rhythm that matched something ancient and terrible inside him.
Debt.
Not the kind he owed.
The kind that remembered.
His hand spasmed — once — then stilled.
The glow stopped.
Silence again.
He breathed hard.
And across the room… Senna stirred.
Just a soft murmur.
"Papa…?"
Kael looked up. Froze.
She was still asleep.
But her hand, resting outside the blanket, was glowing too.
The same blue.
Kael crossed the room in three steps — silent, controlled, too fast for thought. His body still buzzed, but he reached her gently, lowering to one knee beside the couch.
Senna's hand twitched again.
A spiral of blue, drifting up from her fingertips like smoke made of code.
Kael grabbed a blanket edge and pulled it over her hand — not to hide it, but to cut off whatever that motion was becoming.
He whispered, "Senna."
No response.
Her eyes were moving beneath her lids. Rapid. Dreaming.
Then her lips parted.
"One-two-one-two-zero-one…" she whispered. "The code doesn't end here."
Kael froze.
Those numbers — that sequence — weren't anything. Not commands. Not activation. Not math.
They were padding.
Rollback padding. Fill-in gaps used in Anchor protocols during system resets. He'd seen them once. In a rollback collapse log.
"The code doesn't end here."
He touched her shoulder. "Senna," he whispered again. Louder. "Wake up."
Her eyes snapped open.
She looked right at him.
No confusion.
No fear.
Just clarity.
"You were glowing again," she said, blinking. "But… not red this time."
Kael's breath caught in his throat.
Senna yawned. Scratched her cheek. Started to sit up. He gently guided her back down.
"You were talking in your sleep," he said. "It scared me."
"I was?"
"What were you dreaming about?"
She blinked again. Then smiled.
"I don't think it was a dream. It was a… place. But not real. Everything was made of windows."
Kael stiffened. "Windows?"
"Like… like glass. But wrong. Everything moved backwards. Even the sky."
She hesitated. Then lifted one hand again and began to trace a shape in the air.
Kael grabbed her wrist — not hard, but fast.
"Senna," he said, "where did you learn that symbol?"
She blinked.
"I didn't. It just… it feels like a door. I had to draw it. It wanted to be drawn."
She looked at him, eyes wide and trusting.
"Is that bad, Papa?"
Kael swallowed.
And very slowly… released her wrist.
"No, baby," he said softly. "That's not bad."
He looked down at her hand.
The air where she'd drawn was still flickering — faintly — with the ghost of a glyph Kael had only ever seen once before.
A glyph logged inside a corrupted Anchor file.
A glyph labeled:
[ORIGIN: SYSTEM NULL]
[DESCRIPTOR: ANCHOR: CHILD]