The serene satisfaction of buying a car and a house evaporated, replaced by the cold, sharp focus of a programmer staring at a critical system failure. The cheerful, sun-bleached archway of the Solarium dungeon was a lie. In Noctar's vision, flickering through layers of reality, it was a festering wound of corrupted code.
Crimson error streams pulsed like infected veins beneath the stone, and the ambient man, meant to feel like a warm breeze, crackled with the static of a failing hard drive. This wasn't just an active bug. It was a cascading failure, and Ardyn was inside.
The response that echoed in his mind-space wasn't the calm, neutral voice of a world-spanning OS. It was petulant, almost whiny, glitching between tonal registers.
[QUERY_REJECTED. ANOMALIES ARE NOT SCHEDULED. THEY ARE... ANOMALOUS.]
[DIAGNOSTIC_SUBROUTINE: OFFLINE_FOR_MAINTENANCE.]
[USER_NOCTAR_IS_BULLYING_ME. STOP_SCANNING_MY_CORE_PROCESSES.]
Noctar stared, utterly dumbfounded. The planetary operating system was… sulking? He felt a headache ignite behind his temples. This was worse than a glitch; this was a personality disorder in a deity-level AI.
[NO. YOU'RE MEAN. YOU USE POINTY-END COMMANDS.]
[CONNECTION_TERMINATED_BY_HOST.]
The silent void in his mind where Gaia's presence should be was louder than any error message. He'd been ghosted by a god-machine. Fine. If the admin wouldn't grant access, he'd force his way in. He was done asking.
The calm, synthetic voice of his Personal Divine Assistant was devoid of her usual sass.
// Acknowledged. Channeling divine energy to reinforcement protocols. Warning: Forcing a corrupted instance will trigger aggressive defense mechanisms. This is going to be very, very loud. Also, your new house is 4.5 miles from this epicenter. Minor structural reverberations are probable.
He raised his hands, his Root Access vision fully engaged. The picturesque archway dissolved into a stark lattice of light and data. He didn't see a magical barrier; he saw a [DUNGEON_FIREWALL_v2.4 - STATUS: CORRUPTED/OVERDRIVE].
The login prompt was a shifting rune of impossible geometry. He located the main authentication node, a pulsing blue orb of data, and instead of trying to crack the password, he wrote a single, devastating command directly into its source layer. His fingers moved in the air, leaving trails of golden code.
[OVERRIDE: TRUE_ADMIN_PRIVILEGES_INVOKED.]
[COMMAND: BYPASS_ALL_SECURITY. ACCEPT_CONSEQUENCES: Y.]
He poured a massive surge of his newly acquired mana, the very power that had secured his life in this world into the execution line. The world groaned. The air in front of the archway didn't just part; it shrieked, reality tearing like cheap fabric under a hydraulic press. Light bent into nausea-inducing spirals.
With a final, thunderous CRACK that shook the ground and sent birds fleeing for miles, a jagged, unstable hole, edges flickering with dying firewall runes, ripped open in the dungeon's entrance. Beyond was not a tranquil garden path, but a blistering haze. Noctar didn't hesitate.
He stepped through the tear, feeling a momentary, terrifying sensation of being compiled and decompiled. It sealed shut behind him with a sound like a slamming vault, leaving the archway looking deceptively, perfectly normal to anyone else.
The heat hit him like a physical blow, a dry, aggressive furnace-blast that stole the breath from his lungs. He'd gone from a temperate afternoon to the heart of a forged steel ingot in a nanosecond. The air shimmered over endless, rolling dunes of amber and white sand under a blinding, merciless white sun that dominated the sky.
There was no blue, only a bleached, pale bowl. In the distance, massive Sand Worms, their segmented bodies like subway trains made of sandstone, breached and dove. Above, condor-like Solar Birds circled on wings of crystallized light, their feathers glowing like focused laser arrays.
// Scanning... I'm detecting her unique mana signature, a harmonic of swords and flowers, but it's faint and intermittent. The bug is creating a packet-loss effect, jamming my signals. It's not just hiding her; it's parsing her data, scattering it across the instance.
It's like a virus-based firewall wrapped directly around her location. The signal origin is approximately eight hundred meters due west, in what the dungeon's manifest lists as 'The Oasis of False Dawn.'
Annoyance flared into genuine, cold fear. Something was actively processing her. The heat was a tangible enemy, sapping his energy, beading sweat that instantly evaporated on his skin. The mental strain of the brute-force entry had taken a toll, his mind feeling raw. And now this, a digital kidnapper in a desert.
A dune twenty feet to his left erupted. A Sand Worm, large enough to swallow his new car whole, lunged at him with shocking speed, its maw a spiraling vortex of razor-sharp, grinding rock. The smell of ozone and crushed stone filled the air.
Noctar didn't have the patience for finesse, for dodging and weaving. The Perdition pistols were in his hands in an instant, the Infernal Iron cold and comforting against his burning palms. The gunshots were deafening volleys in the oppressive desert silence, violating the very concept of quiet.
He didn't aim for the tough, stony hide; he aimed for the swirling, volatile mana cores his Appraisal Eyes highlighted in its throat and tail segments, glowing weak points in the monster's code. Two shots, two cores shattered with wet, crystalline pops. The worm let out a subsonic screech that vibrated in Noctar's bones before it dissolved into a collapsing pile of inert dust and a small mana shard.
But the dungeon operating system had registered the intrusion. More dunes began to boil. Three, then five worms turned in his direction. And the Solar Birds, attracted by the violent data spike, ceased their circling and began dive-bombing him, beaking opening to unleash searing, coherent beams of light that scorched the sand into glass where they struck.
He was overheating, his dark clothes drinking in the sun, his mind a split terminal, one half frantically running decryption algorithms on the viral firewall, the other screaming at his body to move.
He moved and shot on pure, desperate instinct, a whirlwind of violence in the blazing hellscape. He ducked under a light beam, feeling the heat sear his hair, spun and put a round through the core of a diving bird, which burst into a shower of harmless prismatic light. He sidestepped a worm's lunge and fired downward into its open maw. Dust, light, and heat swirled around him in a chaotic storm. It was unsustainable.
As the last of the immediate wave, a bird and two worm pups dissolved, something heavy and metallic clattered to the sand at his feet, distinct from the soft patter of falling dust.
It wasn't a crystal or a mana shard. It was a pair of sleek, silver pistols, their design less elegant and organic than his divine Perditions. They seemed forged from liquid mercury and moonlight, with faint, spiraling etchings that pulsed with a soft blue light. His Appraisal flickered over them.
[ITEM_ACQUIRED: ZEPHYR'S BREATH - DUAL PISTOLS]
[RARITY: RARE+]
[EFFECT: COMPRESSES ATMOSPHERIC GASES INTO HIGH-VELOCITY, KINETIC SLUGS. AMMUNITION: UNLIMITED (REQUIRES ATMOSPHERE). SYNERGY BONUS: IN DESERT BIOME, SLUGS INCORPORATE SILICATE PARTICLES, ADDING ARMOR-PIERCING PROPERTIES.]
Air guns. Perfect for a place with nothing but air and sand. The dungeon's loot table, acknowledging his violent entry, was trying to give him the right tools for the job. He stored them in his inventory without a second glance. The loot was irrelevant. A distraction. But his programmer's mind noted it: The system is still partly functional. It recognizes a threat and is attempting to balance the encounter.
Wiping sweat from his brow with a forearm, his breath coming in ragged, scorching gasps, he looked towards the heart of the dungeon, towards the 'Oasis.' In his mind's eye, the viral firewall was almost cracked. He could see its structure now a thorny, black-code bramble wrapped around a single, faint, flickering blue signal. Ardyn's signal.
He started walking, his boots sinking into the sand, ignoring the deep exhaustion in his muscles and the dry ache in his throat. The fight, the heat, the hacking, it was all just background noise, system latency on his primary mission.
He was coming for her.