Not pain. Not fear. Not even the final, blood-choked scream from his squad captain. Just... darkness. The kind that hums against your skin like an old machine left on too long. It didn't feel like death. Death should've hurt more.
Rael Vale blinked into nothing. No cold stone floor. No burning wounds. No interface. Just a void—a hollow, crawling silence where the dungeon used to be.
"Subject: Rael Vale. Designation: Failed."
A voice. Not the System. This one echoed like it had teeth. It sounded cracked, layered, like five versions of someone whispering all at once.
"You were not meant to survive."
Rael winced. "Yeah, no kidding."
He reached out, fingers brushing something sharp and unstable—like broken glass vibrating in midair. The world around him glitched: walls flickered between dungeon stone and... code. Green lines. Floating numbers. Reality had teeth marks.
What the hell?
His last memory came in pieces: a B-rank dungeon raid. Five-man squad. Mostly rookies. He was the tagalong E-rank, the errand boy. The monster—some winged shadow thing—wasn't in the raid report. The squad tried to run. Rael tried to help them. He got slammed through a wall for his trouble.
He could still remember the way the air bent around the creature—like even the light didn't want to be near it. Its claws were made of static, and its roar sounded like corrupted audio files screaming all at once. It was a glitch... a literal system error.
Then—
Blackout.
"You have entered a corrupted instance. Accessing error layer..."
"Would you like to continue?"
[YES] | [NO]
Rael stared at the floating prompt. Classic System blue—but the edges were twitching, distorting, like it didn't want to be seen.
He had no stats. No HP bar. No inventory.
Just a question.
He snorted, half-coughing. "Am I seriously getting patched into a bug report?"
No answer. Just the cursor flashing.
He took a breath. If this was death, it was a really boring version of it. And if it wasn't...
He tapped [YES].
ERROR SYNC COMPLETE
Welcome to the Echo Protocol.
You are now leveling outside the System.
All limitations removed.
Stability: [UNDEFINED]
Then everything exploded.
Rael dropped to his knees, screaming as glitch energy pulsed through him. It was like his skin was being rewritten—scraped off, line by line, and replaced with something... other. Visions flickered: shadows of battles, cities crumbling, stars collapsing inward. And through all of it—
Himself. Older. Stronger. Dying.
"Hello, Rael Vale. I am... you."
The voice again. Clearer now. Familiar. Frayed.
"You died. I failed. So I sent this back. Through the glitch. Through the fracture. You're our last version."
His lungs burned. His body shook. His memories fractured as if something was trying to force a new history into him.
"This is your Echo. Accept it... or die forgotten again."
Rael gritted his teeth. "Like hell I'm dying twice."
He saw flashes—alternate timelines. Some where he ruled cities of flame, others where he died again and again in the same loop. In one version, he saw a girl with silver hair reaching out to him, and in another, a sword that whispered back. He didn't understand it yet.
But one thing was clear: he had been chosen. Not by the System. Not by fate.
By himself.
[New Class Acquired: ???]
[Skill Gained: Echo Adaptation – Lv. 1]
[Title Gained: Glitchborn]
The void shattered like glass.
He gasped, collapsing onto rough dungeon stone. Real this time. The walls were cracked, the air thick with smoke and mana residue. The dungeon core chamber. It was still collapsing.
But the door—the one that sealed when they entered—was open.
Rael stood, swaying. The others... weren't here. Just dried blood, half-melted gear, and silence.
He looked down at his hands. Faint purple circuits pulsed under his skin like veins. His reflection in a broken sword shard showed glowing silver eyes.
He wasn't just Rael anymore.
Something deep beneath the System had accepted him.
Or maybe... rewritten him.
He walked among the wreckage of the squad's last stand, stepping over shattered shields, bent daggers, and the remnants of someone's lucky charm. He remembered her—a healer named Liri. Always humming.
Now just dust.
His fingers curled into a fist.
"You are now Echoborn. You may level beyond the System's limit. You may break what was made unbreakable."
He grinned through the ache in his chest.
"Bet."
Rael stepped through the dungeon door, leaving behind the bloodied room.
Above him, far above the surface, the Guild logs would mark him as deceased.
His squad would be given burial honors.
No one would come looking.
Perfect.
Because when Rael Vale returns—
he's not playing by the rules anymore.
He looked up through the tunnel toward the faint shimmer of light far above. Somewhere beyond that, the world was still turning—Guild politics, dungeon rankings, arrogant S-ranks hoarding contracts and glory. A world that never once cared for the kid stuck running errands in a party doomed to fail.
They forgot him.
But he remembered everything.
And far, far below, in the forbidden layers beneath Elysira, something ancient stirred.
Something... that remembered him.
A ripple of light moved through the dungeon wall.
A single star blinked, unnoticed by the surface.
And it whispered back.
[End of Chapter 1]