Reiji woke up to pain.
Not the fun kind. The "someone threw my brain into a blender and pressed pulse" kind.
He forced his eyes open.
He wasn't back in the chamber.
He wasn't anywhere recognizable.
The world around him looked like a beta-version that never passed QA.
Floating tiles of terrain.
Dead code raining like ash.
Fog made of half-rendered particles.
And somewhere in the distance, a looping sound effect of wind that cut off every three seconds.
"Awesome," Reiji muttered. "I'm trapped in a tech demo."
He tried to stand. His knees nearly buckled.
Then he saw Kael.
The guy was sprawled out on a floating chunk of stone, unconscious, armor glitching in and out like it couldn't decide on a texture pack. His body was stable, but the air around him wasn't—little sparks of code flickered in random directions, all in that same pale-blue hero color.
Reiji rushed over, kneeling beside him.
"Hey. Knight-boy. Wake up. Don't make me carry you like a princess."
Kael didn't move.
And for the first time, Reiji wasn't just annoyed. He was worried.
Before he could check again, the void around them trembled.
A cold voice seeped through the cracks in the world.
"Outsider…"
Reiji froze.
Not again.
The voice wasn't the Observer.
This one was sharper. More… amused.
"Bold of you to return from the Undocumented Zone in one piece."
A figure walked out of the fog.
Tall.
Too tall.
Armor made of black code stitched with red lines, like it was built entirely out of corrupted files. His face wasn't visible—just a smooth mask with two crimson eyes glowing like someone copy-pasted intimidation directly into his model.
He stopped a few meters away, watching Reiji with an uncomfortably casual stance.
"You don't belong here," the figure said.
Reiji raised an eyebrow. "Join the club. I'm the president."
The figure chuckled. The sound warped the environment around them, the sky bending for a moment.
"My name is Rex."
"I control this layer."
Reiji made a face. "Rex? Seriously? Sounds like a kid's pet dinosaur."
Rex tilted his head.
The floating tiles under Reiji's feet suddenly snapped downward as if gravity broke.
Reiji barely jumped away in time.
"Okay! Okay. Touchy."
Rex stepped closer, the world glitching with every footstep.
"You're interesting, Outsider. You survived where you should've been erased. You pulled the Hero out of the Observer's correction zone. You even avoided system overwrite."
Reiji shrugged. "Yeah, I'm stubborn. Ask anyone."
"Stubborn isn't the word."
"You're… disruptive."
Rex raised his hand, and the shadows around him split and reshaped themselves into humanoid figures—glitch-clones wearing corrupted versions of Kael's armor.
They stared at Reiji with empty, pixelated faces.
Reiji swallowed. "Okay, that's—yeah. That's nightmare fuel."
Rex pointed toward him.
"Let's see how long you last before this world deletes you for good."
The clones charged.
Reiji grabbed Kael's unconscious body and rolled off the platform just as corrupted blades sliced where he had been. He landed on another floating chunk of stone, barely keeping balance.
His HUD flickered violently.
> [WARNING: MULTIPLE HOSTILE SUBROUTINES DETECTED]
[SKILL: EMERGENCY OVERRIDE — COOLDOWN: 72%]
[ADVICE: RUN.]
"Thanks, UI," Reiji muttered, dodging another attack. "Peak moral support."
He kept moving, hopping between collapsing platforms with Kael's dead-weight body dragging him down. The clones followed without effort, phasing through missing tiles like they were built from pure cheat codes.
Rex watched from above, hands behind his back, like a player spectating a match he knew he'd already won.
Reiji skidded to a stop on a larger tile, carefully lowering Kael.
"Buddy… any time you wanna stop cosplaying as Sleeping Beauty, that'd be great."
A faint spark of blue pulsed from Kael's chest.
Rex's eyes narrowed.
"Huh. So the Hero is reacting to you…"
"How fascinating."
Reiji pointed at him. "Back off. He's not your toy."
"Everything in this world belongs to the system," Rex said.
"Including you."
Reiji's hand lit up with glitch-fire.
He didn't fully understand it yet.
He didn't know what it could do.
But he knew one thing:
He wasn't running anymore.
"Come take us then," Reiji snapped. "If you can."
Rex smiled behind the mask.
"Not yet."
"You'll grow. Struggle. Break a little."
"Then I'll take you both."
The world around them folded like corrupted paper, reality resetting into stability.
The clones vanished.
Rex stepped backward into the fog—his body dissolving into lines of red code.
"Don't die before I return, Outsider."
And then he was gone.
Reiji slumped down beside Kael, breathing hard.
"…What the hell did we just trigger?"
Kael didn't answer.
But somewhere deep in the code of the world, Reiji felt it:
Something had shifted.
Something had marked him.
Something had decided he wasn't just a bug.
He was a problem.
A big one.
To be continued...