[Perspective Shift: Malakor the Soul-Eater]
The Whispering Sands of the south were far enough from the capital that the annoying blue boxes in the sky were dimmer here.
Malakor did not care for the blue boxes.
He was ancient before the first stone of Tyria was laid. He had mastered necromancy when humans were still banging rocks together. When the Great White Flash had swept over the world days ago, he had felt it not as an awakening, but as an insult. A cage being dropped around his reality.
"Level..." Malakor rasped, his voice like grinding stones. He looked at the floating text above his own clawed hand. [Level 9: Necromancer]. "Arbitrary. Limiting."
At his feet lay the desiccated husk of a Sand Drake—a massive, armored reptile that had terrified caravans for centuries. In this new "System," it was merely a [Level 12 Elite Beast].
Malakor knelt over the corpse. A normal "User" would wait for the loot window. Malakor did not wait. He placed a withered hand on the drake's skull and inhaled deeply.
A swirling mist of sickly green energy—the drake's very soul—was ripped from the carcass and funneled directly into Malakor's mouth.
The blue boxes surrounding him began to spasm.
[Combat Terminated.]
[Calculating XP...]
[Error. XP input exceeds standard parameters.]
[Cap Reached. Awarding maximum allowable XP towards Level 10.]
"You cannot cap... hunger," Malakor sneered.
He kept draining. The soul of an ancient beast was dense, potent, and raw. The System was trying to quantify a Niagara Falls of spiritual energy with a teaspoon.
The blue interface began to fracture, spiderwebs of red cracks appearing in the holographic display. The System's logic gate—the hard-coded restriction keeping mortals at Level 10 for the first week—was buckling under the pressure of raw, unregulated intake.
It was an integer overflow. The spiritual value he absorbed was so high the System's counter rolled over, broke its own rules, and just dumped the raw data into his stat block.
CRACK.
The sound wasn't physical; it was metaphysical. The limiter broke.
A pillar of sickly green light, flecked with screaming faces, erupted around Malakor.
[WARNING: SYSTEM BREACH DETECTED.]
[User Data Corrupted.]
[LEVEL UP!]
[LEVEL UP!]
[LEVEL UP!]
The notifications scrolled so fast they blurred into a green streak.
Malakor stood up. He felt larger. The desert wind, which once stung his dried skin, now felt like a caress. He looked at his status window, which was now glowing with an unstable, glitching red border.
[Name: Malakor]
[Class: N̷̛̗e̷̡̓c̶͚͗r̵̳͝o̷̤͑m̶̗͝a̵͙̓n̴̟̈c̷̪͝ḛ̷͐r̴̗̽ (Unregistered Variant)]
[Level: 15]
"Fifteen," Malakor mused, flexing fingers that now crackled with forbidden energy. "Better. But still... too small."
He turned his gaze toward a ruin half-buried in the dunes nearby. An ancient tomb. He could feel the dormant souls sleeping inside.
"Time to power level."
[Perspective Shift: Elian Vance]
The flight down south had taken an hour, burning through a significant chunk of the server's ambient mana supply to keep Elian moving at supersonic speeds.
He landed quietly on a dune overlooking the Whispering Sands. The desert was usually silent, but now, Elian could hear the System screaming in this sector.
The ambient mana here felt oily. Wrong.
"Query. Pinpoint the anomaly."
"Unable to secure a precise lock, Administrator. The target's data signature is... oscillating. It appears to be using an unregistered API call to bypass XP gain restrictions."
"Show me," Elian activated [Admin Sight].
The world turned into wireframes and data streams. In the distance, near an unearthed tomb, he saw it.
It wasn't a player. Players looked like neat bundles of code—blue nodes connected to the central server.
This thing looked like a computer virus given physical form. It was a swirling vortex of jagged red and green code, actively chewing through the surrounding environmental data. Where it walked, the sand didn't just displace; its textures corrupted, flickering in and out of existence.
Elian checked the readouts floating around the figure.
[ENTITY ID: MALAKOR]
[Warning: Buffer Overflow detected in Soul_Slot_01]
[Current State: UNAUTHORIZED LEVEL GAIN]
"He's not hacking the code," Elian realized with a chill. "He's brute-forcing it with old magic. He's eating souls directly, bypassing the XP conversion tables entirely. The System doesn't know how to categorize raw soul-stuff, so it's just dumping it into his level stat to avoid crashing."
It was a compatibility issue. The new OS hated the old software.
Elian teleported.
Malakor had just ripped the door off the ancient tomb when the air beside him shimmered and coalesced into a man in a strange, glowing coat.
Malakor stopped, holding the multi-ton stone door in one hand like it was cardboard. He turned his ancient, sunken eyes toward the intruder.
"You," Malakor rasped, a flicker of recognition in his gaze. "The Architect. The one who painted the sky with boxes."
Elian didn't flinch. He stood with his hands clasped behind his back, radiating pure, orderly Admin authority.
"User Malakor," Elian said, his voice magically projected to sound echoey and dominant. "You are in violation of the Alpha Test Terms of Service. Specifically, Section 4, Paragraph B: 'Exploitation of game mechanics to bypass progression caps.'"
Malakor stared at him for a beat. Then, he laughed. It sounded like dry bones rattling in a sack.
"Terms... of service," Malakor wheezed. "You drape a net over a leviathan and quote rules to it. Your little boxes cannot contain the Old Hunger."
"The 'Old Hunger' is inefficient," Elian countered. "It's unsustainable resource consumption. The System provides a balanced progression path for all sentient beings."
"Balanced?" Malakor tossed the stone door aside. It landed with an earth-shaking thud. "I was a lord of death before your great-grandfathers were born. And you wish to reduce me to... Level 10?"
Malakor raised a hand. A sphere of that same sickly green soul-energy coalesced in his palm. It was dense, screaming with the tormented echoes of the things he had eaten.
[Warning: High-Level Necrotic Energy detected.]
[Spell Identification: ERROR. Unregistered spell schema.]
"Your System is fragile, Architect," Malakor sneered. "Let us see if it can digest this."
He hurled the sphere.
Elian didn't move. He didn't need to dodge. He was the Admin.
[Admin Command: /cast [System_Bind]]
A cage of glowing blue runic bars sprang up around Malakor instantly, designed to freeze a target in place and negate all actions.
The green sphere hit the blue cage.
There was no explosion. No dramatic clash of energies.
The green sphere simply ate the blue bars. The System code dissolved on contact with the raw, ancient necromancy. The 'Bind' status effect shattered before it could even apply.
The sphere continued toward Elian.
"Shit," Elian muttered, breaking his stoic persona. The old magic wasn't running on his physics engine.
He was forced to use a real command.
[EXECUTE: PHASE_SHIFT]
Elian blipped out of reality for 0.5 seconds. The green sphere passed harmlessly through the space where he had been and struck a dune behind him.
The dune didn't explode. It just turned gray and died. The sand lost its cohesion and collapsed into fine, lifeless dust. The area became a "Dead Zone" where no mana could regenerate.
Elian reappeared, his breath slightly hurried.
"Okay," Elian said, adjusting his cuffs. A notification popped up on his screen.
[System Alert: New Threat Category Identified.]
[Designation: Legacy Code Breaker.]
"So," Elian looked at the Level 15 monstrosity that was immune to standard crowd control. "You want to do this the hard way. Fine. Let's see how the 'Old Hunger' handles a DDOS attack."
Elian raised both hands, and the sky above the desert turned from blue to a threatening, flashing red.