The aftermath of my conversational blunder was a profound and deeply uncomfortable silence. The previous day's camaraderie had been replaced by a tense, professional chill that no amount of wasteland wind could account for. Erina and Miyuri now walked several paces ahead, their backs ramrod straight, forming a united front of cold disapproval. Elara, when she did look at me, did so with an expression that suggested she was calculating the precise amount of force needed to launch me into the grey, featureless sky.
Silas, nursing a fresh bruise on his jaw, had apparently learned his lesson and remained utterly silent, his usual smirk replaced by a grim, focused watchfulness. It seemed our little 'boys will be boys' moment had successfully united the women of our party against us. I didn't dare speak unless spoken to, focusing entirely on the mission, hoping that sheer competence might eventually earn me some measure of forgiveness.
Our journey continued, a monotonous trek across an endless grey canvas. The wasteland wasn't just empty; it was fundamentally broken. But the brokenness wasn't entirely hostile. We did encounter monsters, but they were nothing like the focused, rage-filled Lineage Orc. They were more like… system errors given form.
The first was a pack of what Silas called 'Static Hounds.' They looked vaguely like wolves, but their bodies were a shimmering, unstable mass of black-and-white digital noise, and their howls were the grating screech of a corrupted audio file. Erina dispatched them with an almost bored efficiency, her blade cutting through their glitching forms and causing them to dissipate into harmless pixels. Miyuri provided support from the rear, tapping on her crystalline slate and chanting in a low, formal tone. "Applying Administrative Debuff: Packet Loss Protocol." One of the hounds simply froze, its animation loop stuttering, before it dissolved. It was the most bureaucratic takedown I had ever witnessed.
We faced other oddities. 'Lag Spiders' that would teleport in short, jarring bursts. 'Null Elementals' that were simply floating spheres of absolute blackness, absorbing light and sound. The team handled them with a practiced, weary competence. They were a nuisance, an environmental hazard, not a true threat.
The real challenge was the land itself. Every few miles, Miyuri would stop, and Elara would close her eyes, her head tilted as if listening to a silent song.
"The data-stream here is frayed," she would murmur, a frown touching her lips for the first time. "The foundation is a mesh of conflicting code. Unstable."
Miyuri would make a note on her slate. "Zone 17-Gamma. Unsuitable for construction. Data integrity below 5%."
And we would walk on.
The more we ventured into the grey emptiness, the more I began to notice the strangeness of the debris around us. It wasn't just random, corrupted data. It was… familiar. We passed a half-formed tower, its architecture ornate and unlike anything in Out of Boundary City. I recognized it from an old developer blog for Eternal SoulS. It was supposed to be part of a high-level expansion that was announced, hyped up, and then quietly cancelled.
Later, I saw the petrified, half-pixelated corpse of a creature with six wings and a crystalline beak. It was a monster from a concept art poll on the game's official forums years ago, a fan-favorite design that never made it into the final release.
This place wasn't just a wasteland. It was a digital graveyard. A recycle bin for every abandoned idea, every scrapped asset, every failed line of code the developers had ever created. This was where dreams and concepts came to truly die.
"It's all here," I muttered quietly, mostly to myself. "Everything they ever threw away."
"The Master calls it the 'Great Un-Archive'," Elara's soft voice said from beside me. She had drifted back, her gaze sweeping over the landscape with a sad, knowing look. "Data is not so easily destroyed. It leaves echoes. Fragments. This world is composed of those abandoned echoes."
Her words confirmed it. We were walking through the digital ghosts of what might have been. It was a profoundly melancholy thought.
By the time we made camp for the second night, the initial resolve of our party had begun to fray. We had covered dozens of miles and found nothing. Every potential site had been a bust. The sheer, repetitive failure was a grinding stone against our morale. The fire crackled, a small point of warmth and color in the vast, silent grey, but it did little to lift our spirits.
We ate our rations in silence. The tension from the previous day had dissolved, replaced by a shared, heavy weariness. Even Erina's usual vibrant energy was muted. She stared into the flames, her brow furrowed with a frustration that mirrored my own.
I clutched the survey beacon in my pack, the cold, smooth metal a constant reminder of the weight of our mission. Two days, and we had nothing to show for it. How long could we keep this up before the Builder's hope in me, in us, was proven to be misplaced?
The third morning dawned as grey and lifeless as the ones before it. We packed our camp with a grim, practiced efficiency. There was no cheerful banter, no strategic discussion. Only the silent understanding that we had to keep going.
We stood together for a moment, a small, weary group on the edge of a broken world, about to take another step into the unknown. A collective sigh seemed to pass between us, a shared breath of discouragement.
And then the world trembled.
It wasn't a violent earthquake. It was a low, deep, resonant hum that vibrated up through the soles of our boots and settled in our bones. It was a feeling of something impossibly vast shifting its weight in the distance.
I felt it through the orb first—a sudden, ice-cold spike in the ambient data-stream. But this wasn't the chaotic static of the wasteland. This was something different. It was a presence. A vast, cold, and utterly malevolent consciousness. It felt ancient, deliberate, and powerful on a scale that dwarfed the High Orc.
Erina's hand snapped to her sword, her weary posture vanishing, replaced by the coiled tension of a predator. Miyuri's crystalline slate began to flash with a frantic, blood-red rune, emitting a high-pitched warning tone. Elara's face went pale, her violet eyes wide with a terror I had never seen on her before.
But it was Silas who truly scared me.
He had been leaning against a grey, petrified tree, his expression one of bored resignation. The moment the tremor hit, his entire demeanor changed. The casual slouch, the cynical smirk, the lazy demeanor—it all evaporated in an instant. He shot upright, his body rigid, his eyes locked on the distant, hazy horizon. His face, usually a mask of laid-back amusement, was now pale and taut with a raw, primal fear. He looked like an animal that had just scented the approach of an apex predator, one it knew it could not fight.
He didn't draw his crossbow. He didn't say a word. He just stared, his eyes wider than I'd ever seen them.
"Silas?" I asked, my voice barely a whisper. "What is it? What do you feel?"
He swallowed hard, his sharp eyes never leaving the horizon. All the humor, all the bravado, was gone from his voice, replaced by a quiet, horrified awe.
"That," he uttered, his voice strained. "That presence… It's a Founder."