The air in the Dead Zone tasted like rust and regret.
Luzian Kinn's back hit a collapsed pillar, hard. Dust showered down from the crack above, a fine grey powder settling on the blood already drying across his knuckles. Three of them stood over him. Former allies. Current problems.
"Just take the core, Kai." Luzian spat a glob of red onto the cracked asphalt. "You don't have to do the speech."
Kai, S-Rank, team leader, and the biggest snake in the district, didn't even flinch. He was polishing the dungeon core with his thumb, letting the pale light catch the edge of his smug, chiseled face. The man loved his speeches.
"See, that's your problem, Luz." Kai tilted his head. "Zero appreciation for the moment. Your last moment, specifically."
The two goons behind him chuckled. One of them, Vic, if Luzian remembered right, kicked his boot. Just to feel important.
They're going to leave me here. In the Zone. For the Corruption to eat.
Pain throbbed in his ribs. A clean break, maybe two. His left arm hung useless, the shoulder socket screaming every time his heart beat. Standard operating procedure for a party disposing of dead weight. You don't kill the F-Rank. You just… leave him. The monsters do the cleanup.
"I pulled forty percent of that run," Luzian said. Not begging. Stating facts. A terminal habit. "You needed my finder skill to even locate the vault."
Kai sighed, finally pocketing the core. He crouched down, bringing his face level. Close enough for Luzian to smell the expensive mana potion on his breath.
"Forty percent?" Kai's voice dropped to a conspiratorial whisper. "You're F-Rank, buddy. You get nothing. You're not a player. You're a tool the System lets me equip. And now?" He tapped Luzian's forehead. Hard. "Tool's broken."
A flicker of red light pulsed behind Kai's eyes. The activation of a skill. Something meant to intimidate.
He's actually enjoying this. The bastard's getting off on it.
Luzian's right hand curled into a fist. He could throw one more punch. Maybe crack Kai's perfect nose. It wouldn't change the outcome, but the memory of that crunch would be a nice thing to have while the Corruption dissolved his lungs.
"Go on," Kai stood up, spreading his arms. "Last swing. Freebie. Let's see that F-Rank fury."
Luzian pushed off the pillar.
The world tilted. Not from the pain, he was used to pain. No, this was something else. The System interface, that glowing blue screen that lived in the corner of every Awakened's vision, flickered.
[STATUS: CRITICAL]
[HP: 4/120]
[STAMINA: 1/85]
[MANA: 0/0 (F-Rank Limitation)]
Then it cracked.
Not a metaphor. A thin, jagged line split the holographic text right down the middle. Like a rock hitting a windshield. Kai's face, the goons behind him, the decaying skyscrapers of the Zone, everything froze for a single, impossible second.
A new window didn't appear. It forced its way into existence, shoving aside the standard notifications with the weight of a collapsing building. The text wasn't blue. It was the colour of a fresh bruise. Jagged. Violent.
[ERROR: FATAL SYSTEM ANOMALY DETECTED]
[SOURCE: USER "LUZIAN KINN" – RANK: F]
[ANALYZING… ANALYZING…]
[UNKNOWN PARAMETER EXCEEDS SSS-RANK THRESHOLD]
[GLITCH STATE: ACTIVE]
[ABSORPTION – DUPLICATION – OVERWRITE]
[SYSTEM PROTOCOL: OVERRIDDEN]
Luzian blinked.
The crack in his interface widened. Then, with a sound that wasn't sound, more like the universe clearing its throat, the blue screen shattered. Shards of light scattered into the corrupted air, dissolving like ice in acid.
And in their place, a single, pulsing notification remained.
[SSS-RANK GLITCH: ABSOLUTE DUPLICATION]
[SCANNING NEAREST VIABLE ASSET…]
A targeting reticle, hostile and red, snapped onto Kai's chest.
"The fuck is that look?" Kai frowned. His S-Rank instincts were screaming. He just didn't know why yet. "Did you hit your head harder than I thought?"
Luzian looked at his own broken arm. Then at the smug prick in front of him. Then at the notification hovering in the air, waiting for a command he didn't understand.
It's reading him. Like a barcode. Scanning for… what?
The reticle pulsed.
[ASSET IDENTIFIED: S-RANK PHYSIQUE (KAI VAREN)]
[DUPLICATION COST: 50% MENTAL LOAD]
[PROCEED? Y/N]
The pain in his ribs vanished. Not healed, forgotten. His brain was too busy dumping everything else into the background processes to focus on something as mundane as physical agony.
He was running on pure, stupid instinct.
"Kai," Luzian said. His voice came out calm. Weirdly calm.
"What?" Kai snapped. The goons stopped chuckling.
Luzian chose Yes.
It wasn't a button press. It was a thought. A single, focused demand aimed at the glitched wound in reality. Give me what he has.
The world stuttered.
A wave of pressure detonated from Luzian's chest, silent, invisible, but felt. Vic stumbled back, clutching his ears. The other goon dropped his weapon, eyes going wide.
Kai grunted, a hand flying to his chest.
"What,?"
Luzian saw it. The System tried to hide it, to process the data too fast for the human eye to track, but the glitch didn't care. A perfect, shimmering copy of something deep inside Kai's soul, his muscle density, his reinforced bone structure, the fucking elasticity of his tendons, ripped free from the original and slammed into Luzian's frame.
It hurt.
It felt like being born again. Bones knitting, not healing, but rewriting. Muscles tearing and reforming denser. His left arm snapped back into the socket with a wet pop that made Vic gag.
Luzian caught himself on the pillar. His head was splitting. Blood dripped from his nose. The [MENTAL LOAD: 50%] warning flashed in the corner of his vision, turning his thoughts to sludge.
But he was standing.
Kai was still standing too. But his face had changed. The smugness was gone. Replaced by something raw. Something Luzian had never seen on an S-Rank's face before.
Confusion.
"How," Kai's hand went to his chest, patting himself down like he'd misplaced his wallet. "I just… my passive. The density buff. It dropped. It's on cooldown. I didn't use it."
The silence that followed was the most expensive sound Luzian had ever heard.
He pushed off the pillar. His legs felt new. Unstable. Like riding a bike for the first time after watching someone else do it for years. But they held.
"You dropped it?" Luzian's voice was still calm. The calm of a guy who'd just had his entire understanding of reality turned into a pretzel. He wiped the blood from his nose with the back of his hand. "Weird."
Vic was already backing up. "Boss… his arm. It was broken."
"I saw it." Kai's eyes narrowed. A combat skill activated, Analysis, probably. Luzian felt the scan wash over him like lukewarm water. "You're still F-Rank. Your Status says F-Rank. That's impossible."
He sees the old screen. The fake one. He doesn't see the crack. He doesn't see what's underneath.
Luzian grinned. It wasn't a nice grin. It was the grin of a man who'd spent twenty years being told he was garbage finally finding the receipt that proved the system was wrong.
"You know what my favourite part is, Kai?" He took a step forward. The goon on the left, the one who'd dropped his weapon, actually stumbled over a chunk of rebar trying to get away. "You stood there. You gave me the speech. You let me take a swing."
He raised his right hand. The one that had been a useless, bloody mess thirty seconds ago. Now it was steady. Dense. Packed with S-Rank muscle fibre that his F-Rank skeleton was definitely not designed to support.
Going to hurt like a bitch to use. But it'll work. Once.
"And while you were busy being an artist," Luzian's grin sharpened, "I was watching."
He lunged.
Not with skill. Not with technique. Just with raw, duplicated, stolen power. His fist connected with Kai's chest before the S-Rank could finish activating his defensive skill.
The sound was meaty. Final.
Kai flew backward. Ten feet. Twenty. He crashed through a collapsed billboard frame, the rusted metal screaming as it bent around his body. He hit the ground, rolled twice, and came to a stop in a pile of debris that used to be a bus stop.
The two goons just stared.
Luzian stared too, for a second. His fist was throbbing. His arm screamed from elbow to shoulder. The borrowed strength was tearing him apart from the inside.
But Kai wasn't getting up.
[MENTAL LOAD: 68%]
[DUPLICATION BUFFER: FULL]
[WARNING: PROLONGED USE MAY RESULT IN…]
He dismissed the notification.
Vic was the first to break. The big guy, the one who'd kicked him, who'd laughed when Kai called him a broken tool, turned and ran. His partner followed a heartbeat later, their footsteps echoing down the ruined avenue like panicked drumbeats.
Luzian let them go.
He walked over to Kai's crumpled form. The S-Rank was alive. Breathing. His eyes were open, fixed on the pulsing notification that only Luzian could see, wide with something that might have been fear.
"The System doesn't make mistakes," Kai wheezed. Blood bubbled at his lips. "You're F-Rank. You'll always be F-Rank."
Luzian crouched down. Reached into Kai's jacket. Pulled out the dungeon core. Pale light. Warm. Heavy with potential.
He held it up between them, letting Kai watch as the notification flickered again. A new scan. A new option.
[ASSET IDENTIFIED: S-RANK DUNGEON CORE (PURITY: 84%)]
[DUPLICATION COST: 35% MENTAL LOAD]
[PROCEED? Y/N]
"You're right," Luzian said, standing up. He tucked the original core into his own pocket. "The System doesn't make mistakes."
He turned the core over in his hand. Felt the weight of it. The glitch was already calculating, dissecting, preparing to copy.
"It has bugs."
Behind him, Kai's ragged breathing was the only sound in the Dead Zone.