The captain's glaive missed Kael's face by a glitch-frame.
It left a streak of static in the air where his head had been. Stone shattered when it hit the pillar behind him, showering him with debris.
[WARNING: NEAR MISS (0.13m).]
[HP: 3 / 100]
Kael's legs felt like jelly.
"Less dramatic dodging, more stabbing!" Joon yelled, locked in a brutal exchange with one of the bodyguards.
"I am very motivated not to get deleted, thanks," Kael shot back.
The battlefield was controlled chaos.
They had managed to thin out the adds—kobold skirmishers lay dissolving into black dust all over the clearing. The shaman had gone down early thanks to Kael bumping its FLEE_THRESHOLD and Joon chasing it out of its comfort zone.
But the captain was still a relentless, roaring algorithm of hate.
Its PACK COMMAND aura filled nearby kobolds with unstable energy, making their movements sharper, less predictable. Even with the aura radius slightly shrunk, fighting in that field was like trying to swim upstream through someone else's code.
Kael ducked behind a pillar, chest heaving. He could feel Debug Sense buzzing at the edge of his perception, hungry for something to latch onto.
"Third Bug – Hide," he muttered. "You picked one hell of a time."
He risked a quick Scan of the surroundings.
The pillars.
He zoomed in on one.
[OBJECT: PILLAR_17-F2-ALTAR_RING_03]
[FLAGS: STRUCTURAL_INTEGRITY = 1.0, COLLISION = TRUE,…]
[MINOR BUG DETECTED.]
[DESCRIPTION: VIBRATION RESPONSE CURVE MISALIGNED.]
Vibration.
The captain's glaive had just made one pillar shudder like jelly.
Kael's brain connected threads.
"If I can make one of these crumble at the right time," he thought, "I can pin him. Or at least trip him."
"Hey!" Joon shouted between grunts. "Not to rush your genius, but ow!"
Kael opened LOCAL PATCH on the nearest pillar's structural flag, dropping STRUCTURAL_INTEGRITY from 1.0 to 0.6.
[LOCAL PATCH APPLIED.]
[DURATION: 300 SEC.]
[DETECTION_RISK: 0.09 → 0.10]
He leaned out just enough for the captain to see him.
"Hey, Broken-Tooth!" he yelled. "Your texture quality sucks!"
The captain roared and charged, glaive raised.
Kael dove behind the weakened pillar.
The glaive hit.
Stone exploded.
The pillar didn't just crack—it folded, half-collapsing into the captain's path. The boss stumbled, falling to one knee, aura flickering.
Joon didn't waste the opening.
He slammed his blade down in a heavy overhead strike, enhanced by every buff Kael could squeeze out of his limited skills.
[DAMAGE: 150]
[CRITICAL HIT.]
[KOBOLD WARPACK CAPTAIN – HP: 150/600]
The boss howled, a horrible glitching scream, and its FRENZY_THRESHOLD tripped.
[FRENZY ACTIVATED.]
[ATTACK SPEED: +30%]
[DAMAGE: +20%]
[DEFENSE: -15%]
"Less than ideal," Kael gasped.
He bumped the captain's DAMAGE_TAKEN_MULTIPLIER up another tiny notch—1.1 to 1.15. It was risky, but at this point everything was.
They danced on a knife's edge.
Joon took hits—big ones. His HP bar seesawed.
[Joon – HP: 180 → 120 → 80 → 40/180]
Kael burned his pathetic Minor Adrenaline Boost on cooldown, timing it with Joon's desperate dodges. He patched one more pillar's integrity at the last second to catch a wild swing, buying a heartbeat of safety.
Each patch tickled Watchdog's logs.
[WATCHDOG_PROCESS_Ω: VARIANCE CLUSTERING DETECTED (TOWER_17_F2_BOSS_AREA).]
[INVESTIGATION PRIORITY: INCREASED.]
"Yeah, yeah, you're very observant," Kael muttered. "So observe this."
He pulled up his own DETECTION_RISK flag.
[CURRENT VALUE: 0.10]
[EDITABLE.]
"Third Bug – Hide," he said under his breath. "You want me to conceal my footprint, right? Not delete it. Conceal."
He opened Watchdog's config again in a tiny overlay, even as Joon shouted and metal clanged somewhere to his left.
[ANOMALY_SCORING_INPUTS:]
– FLAG_VARIANCE
– USER_CORRELATION
– LOCATION_HEATMAP
– RNG_SEED_SKEW…
[WEIGHTING_MATRIX_ID: Ω_DEFAULT.]
"Weights," Kael breathed. "You're just math."
He couldn't touch Ω_DEFAULT directly.
[ERROR: CRITICAL CONFIG – LOCKED.]
But he could see a secondary, less important parameter:
[FLAG: HUMAN_UNPREDICTABILITY_FACTOR = 0.02]
[DESCRIPTION: MODELS PLAYER BEHAVIOR NOISE.]
[MINOR FLAG: EDITABLE.]
He stared.
"Bug can patch bugs," he murmured. "You've been underestimating us."
He opened EDIT_FLAG.
[CURRENT VALUE: 0.02]
[ENTER NEW VALUE:]
His hands were shaking, though his physical body was only clinging to a pillar, trying not to get decapitated.
"0.08," he thought.
Big enough to matter. Small enough not to scream.
[APPLYING CHANGE…]
[RECOMPILING ANOMALY MODEL…]
[DONE.]
The impact was immediate.
[WATCHDOG_PROCESS_Ω: UPDATED MODEL LOADED.]
[ELEVATED VARIANCE NOW PARTIALLY ATTRIBUTED TO HUMAN_UNPREDICTABILITY.]
[ANOMALY SCORE (USER: KAEL_RYU): REDUCED.]
His quest bar ticked up.
[QUEST "THIRD BUG – HIDE" – PROGRESS: 60%.]
"Lied to a god," Kael whispered. "Told it we're just more random than it thought."
"Kael!" Joon bellowed. "A little less philosophizing, a little more 'make things die!'"
"On it," Kael said.
He pushed everything he had left into the captain's vulnerabilities—no more structural hacks, no more floor friction. Just small, surgical tweaks to DAMAGE_TAKEN, timed when Joon's hits were about to land.
[DAMAGE: 90]
[DAMAGE: 70]
[DAMAGE: 85]
The boss's HP cratered.
[KOBOLD WARPACK CAPTAIN – HP: 30/600]
[STATUS: UNSTABLE.]
It staggered, aura flickering like a bad connection.
Kael felt Watchdog's attention brush past him like the gaze of something enormous, measuring, recalibrating.
He shoved that awareness aside.
"Now!" he yelled.
Joon roared and hurled himself forward, putting everything into one last, reckless swing.
The glaive arced toward him at the same time.
For an instant, Kael saw two possible futures overlapping: Joon's blade cutting through the captain's neck… and the glaive punching through Joon's chest.
He didn't have time to think.
He hit Local Patch on Joon himself.
[OBJECT: USER_JOON_INERTIA_FLAG]
[FLAG: MOMENTUM_TRANSFER_EFFICIENCY = 1.0]
[EDIT TO: 1.15]
[DURATION: 1.0 SEC.]
The System should have screamed at him for touching another user's flags.
It didn't.
[WARNING: AMBIGUOUS SCOPE – TREATED AS LOCAL ENVIRONMENT MODIFIER.]
Joon's swing accelerated, just slightly.
It made all the difference.
His sword connected first.
[DAMAGE: 45]
[KOBOLD WARPACK CAPTAIN – HP: 0/600]
[BOSS DEFEATED.]
The glaive's blade missed his ribs by a blur and buried itself in the dirt instead.
Silence fell.
Then:
[FLOOR 2 MINI-BOSS CLEAR.]
[EXP GAINED: 1,250.]
[LOOT DROPPED: WARPACK CAPTAIN'S BONE GLAIVE (RARE), KOBOLD CAPTAIN'S TOOTH (QUEST ITEM), ASSORTED SHARDS.]
[BONUS: UNDERDOG CLEAR – +10% EXP.]
Joon collapsed onto his back, laughing breathlessly.
"Did you see that?" he wheezed. "Did you see that? We just two-manned Broken-Tooth!"
Kael sagged against a cracked pillar, legs shaking.
[LEVEL UP!]
[USER: KAEL RYU – LEVEL 7]
[HP: 3 / 100]
[DEBUG POINTS: +1]
He checked the logs.
[WATCHDOG_PROCESS_Ω:]
– VARIANCE: ELEVATED.
– HUMAN_UNPREDICTABILITY_FACTOR: COMPENSATING.
– ANOMALY SCORE (KAEL_RYU): MODERATE.
– STATUS: PASSIVE MONITORING.
His detection risk ticked down again.
[DETECTION_RISK: 0.10 → 0.07]
[QUEST "THIRD BUG – HIDE" – PROGRESS: 80%.]
"You're buying me dinner," Joon said from the ground, holding up a shaky thumbs-up. "And I get the glaive."
"You can barely lift the glaive," Kael said.
"I will grow."
Kael snorted.
"We exit after this," he said. "No exploring. No greed."
"For once, I agree." Joon grimaced as he sat up. "My everything hurts."
They moved to the exit gate at the rear of the clearing. System windows fluttered around them like digital confetti.
One more appeared just for Kael.
[QUEST COMPLETE: "THIRD BUG – HIDE."]
[REWARD: STEALTH MODULE I.]
[NEW SKILL: TRACE MASKING I.]
[PASSIVE: USER FOOTPRINT IS BLENDED INTO HUMAN_UNPREDICTABILITY MODEL.]
[NOTE: EFFECTIVENESS SCALES WITH CROWD SIZE AND CHAOS.]
He opened the skill.
[TRACE MASKING I]
"If everything is an anomaly, nothing is."
EFFECT: Minor System-level attempts to cluster your actions as 'aberrant' are diluted into assumed human noise.
LIMIT: Less effective in isolated environments.
SIDE EFFECT: Occasionally makes local RNG slightly weirder.
Kael exhaled slowly.
He hadn't erased himself from the System's sight.
He'd convinced it to file him under "humans being humans."
As they stepped through the gate, he finally noticed Haneul's earlier message blinking at the edge of his UI.
His heart lurched as he read the words.
Soul is "fragmented"… tagged to something called a "Root Process shard." Also it knows your name.
The Tower plaza's noise hit him like a wave as they re-emerged. Joon whooped and held the glaive aloft, immediately drawing stares and envy.
Kael barely heard it.
"Root Process shard," he whispered. "Link to me."
He opened his own HP bug log again, hands cold.
[NOTES: POTENTIAL LINK TO ROOT_PROCESS STATE?]
[UPDATE: CORRELATED WITH HOSPITAL PATIENT ID: RYU_HANEUL (FRAGMENT HOST).]
[STATUS: OBSERVATION ONLY.]
Observation.
For now.
Somewhere deep in the System, in layers even Debug Sense couldn't easily pierce, something tagged both of them as pieces of the same problem.
"Kael?" Joon nudged his shoulder. "You look like the boss dropped on your head instead of dropping loot."
"I need to go to the hospital," Kael said.
"Bad?" Joon asked.
"Root Process bad," Kael said.
Joon's expression went carefully blank.
"Want backup?" he asked.
"Not yet," Kael said. "If this goes sideways, someone has to be on the outside."
Joon nodded once.
"Then go," he said. "I'll, uh… see how much I can pawn this glaive for without getting mugged."
"Don't sell it to the first weasel in a cloak," Kael said automatically.
"I make no promises."
Kael managed a weak smile, then turned and headed for the transit line.
He had bugs hidden in Tower code, a watchdog partially fooled, and a new stealth layer around his own existence.
Now he had to look his sister in the eye and tell her that whatever the System had broken in him, it had shoved into her too.
And somewhere, in buried logs he hadn't dared open yet, a quest called "Inheritance" waited patiently, promising answers he wasn't sure he wanted.