The alert came at 02:17.
Not through his guild band.
Not through the public job board.
It hit Kael's patchband directly — a priority flag marked "INTERNAL: NOT FOR DISPATCH" across the header.
For most raiders, the message would've bounced.
But Kael wasn't most raiders anymore.
Not since the rollback.
He rolled onto his elbow and stared at the flickering glyph on the wall.
The pattern wasn't familiar.
It shifted too fast — a debug sequence, not a glyph signature.
Even the mission type was strange.
[EMERGENCY: MINOR INSTANCE INSTABILITY DETECTED]
LOCATION: SECTOR 9-G / DEAD-GROWTH QUAD / BIOME TIER 2.
THREAT TYPE: GLITCHED MOB — PATHING UNSTABLE.
NOTES:
// hotfix not applied
// instance stuck in loop
// mob persistence > 100%
// reaper activity: N/A
GUILD FLAGS: NONE.
RETRIEVAL: NONE.
RAIDER COUNT: 0.
He sat up slowly.
No guild had claimed it.
No team had queued it.
No recovery or death alerts were tied to the sector.
Which meant someone — or something — had tried to delete the mission before it ever hit the system.
But it didn't work.
And now it was bleeding through.
Kael tapped the side of his band.
A callout to Aria.
No answer.
He waited.
Thirty seconds. A minute.
Nothing.
Liora stirred in the next room.
He didn't wake her.
Didn't even move loudly.
He just looked at the cracked glyph spiraling faintly along his arm… and stood.
The patchband was already heating. Not from combat — from proximity to the mission call.
That was new.
That was dangerous.
Kael slipped his coat on without a word.
Walked to the mirror in the hallway.
Looked into it.
And blinked first.
Dead-Growth wasn't on most maps anymore.
Not because it was hidden.
Because no one cared to fix it.
It was an old buffer zone — a forgotten bite of outer-city terrain where the system had once tried to simulate organic biome blending. Terraform trees. Weather fog. Breathable life spaces.
The program had failed.
The trees kept growing. The ground kept glitching.
And eventually, the patch queue for that region just… stopped receiving updates.
Kael stood just outside the perimeter line.
No guild banners.
No checkpoint guards.
No glyph pulses to measure the threat tier.
Even the gate marker — a weathered totem of admin-grade glass — buzzed and blinked like a bulb struggling to stay on.
[SECTOR 9-G / STATUS: NULL]
[INSTABILITY DETECTED]
[REPAIRS: 0%]
[RAID ENTRY LOG: —]
Kael didn't hesitate.
He stepped through.
Instantly: the hum.
Not loud. Not painful.
Just ever-present.
A frequency beneath hearing, like the pressure behind your eyes before a thunderstorm.
The fog in Dead-Growth was thick, natural at first glance.
But Kael could see the pixel seamlines.
Mist that wasn't rendered — it was replicated.
It looped in patterns, like someone had stitched it from old code.
And it moved with him.
Not away from him. Not like weather.
It moved with him.
The buildings here were hybrids: concrete floors threaded with wild roots. Broken walls flickering between three architectural styles every few seconds. Some doors repeated. Some signs had been overwritten with foreign glyphs that shouldn't even exist in this region.
One bench on the side of a path blinked in and out, half-swallowed by terrain — as if the engine kept forgetting it wasn't supposed to be there.
Kael walked slowly.
Patchband open. Glyph arm humming faintly.
He didn't say a word.
Because something in the air was already listening.
Then he saw it.
Ahead — near the base of a collapsed tower overgrown with biome-thorns:
A single set of claw marks gouged deep into the concrete.
Not slashed.
Melted.
The signature of a phase-claw.
And just past that — grass bent inward. A heat shadow in the shape of a massive quadruped.
Still fresh.
Still near.
Kael narrowed his eyes, stepped forward—
—and the trees on either side of the path glitched.
Their trunks shifted out of alignment.
Branches warped like strings.
Leaves rearranged into arrowhead patterns all pointing inward.
Toward him.
The system wasn't simulating nature anymore.
It was hunting him with it.
The glitch started before Kael saw it.
A flicker in the air. A bending of shadow across the tree bark.
Then the tree itself folded, not physically—but visually, like a render plane crashing out of sequence.
And from inside that fracture: movement.
It didn't walk.
It didn't run.
It slid through the tree like a puppet caught between frames.
Tall as a horse. Shoulders armored in bark-metal plating. Hind legs bent wrong, like someone patched its gait too late.
Its fur was dark—but not black. Not grey.
It was transparent, coded to resemble fur but lacking texture detail.
And where its eyes should've been—
Static.
Just blank sockets filled with screen snow.
Kael didn't move.
He didn't reach for his patchband yet.
He just watched.
The wolf's head turned without turning — its model pivoted clean in one glitchy swing.
Facing him.
Staring with empty static.
Not sniffing.
Not growling.
Not preparing to lunge.
Just… loading.
Like it was still buffering his presence.
And then—
it blinked.
Kael snapped his hand to the patchband.
The wolf's body stuttered.
Half-phase. Legs blurring.
It launched.
Not with power.
With code.
A teleport-lurch — from twenty meters away to right in front of him, skipping frames, ignoring ground physics.
Claws out.
Glitch light leaking from its joints.
Kael ducked.
Rolled to the side.
Felt the air behind him ripple as the claws passed through solid stone without resistance.
The wolf didn't stop.
It hit the wall—then flickered through it, vanishing.
Kael spun on one knee, glyphs already burning along his arm.
This wasn't just a glitched spawn.
This was something worse.
A repeater.
An enemy stuck in a half-deleted loop.
Which meant no matter what he did—
It would come back.
Unless Kael changed the rules.
The air where the wolf had vanished still pulsed.
Kael knelt in the rubble, fingers flying over his patchband interface, glyph arm alight.
The last time he'd tried to patch a system script during live combat, it was under guild supervision — three ranks higher than him, with admin-level support watching.
Now?
Just him.
And a mob that could rewrite reality faster than he could blink.
"Mob class: Invalid. Behavior tree: loop-locked."
The interface stuttered.
Code rows blinked out of sequence. The wolf's metadata was corrupted — incomplete.
No cooldown cycle. No position state.
Which meant no rules.
Which meant Kael had to make one.
"Writing patch: Mobility freeze. Frame anchor. One-second stasis."
He sketched the glyph with his other hand as he typed, a split second ahead of the rendering buffer.
Spiral hook. Frame lock. Anti-loop bind.
The glyph sparked once, nearly fizzled—
—but Kael forced it active.
"Injecting patch: Target → last phase echo."
The wolf reappeared.
Flickering out of the wall behind him.
Kael turned, shouted the command:
"Anchor patch — EXECUTE!"
And the wolf froze mid-air.
Not stopped.
Frozen.
Like a statue.
Limbs in mid-sprint. Mouth open. Static eyes flickering wildly. Its body glitching along the edges.
The world around it didn't react.
The dust didn't move.
The shadows didn't shift.
For that one impossible second, the wolf was trapped in a locked frame.
Kael didn't breathe.
Didn't wait.
He ran straight toward it.
Patchband heat climbing up his arm, cracking skin, the glyph pulses stuttering as the patch strained to hold.
The wolf's front claw twitched.
It was trying to break free.
"No."
Kael whispered it.
And stabbed his blade into the beast's chest.
No blood.
No howl.
No death animation.
The wolf simply—
vanished.
Erased.
Like it had never been rendered at all.
The moment the wolf disappeared, the fog twitched.
Not moved — twitched.
Like reality flinching from its own memory.
Kael braced for a counter-attack, for a backup spawn, for the system to do anything.
But nothing came.
Not silence.
Absence.
He turned in place.
Three-sixty. Blade raised. Glyph arm dimming, hissing with residual charge.
The tower ahead of him flickered.
For half a second, it was whole again — unbroken, pre-collapse.
Then it snapped back to its ruined form.
The path beneath his feet rearranged itself — gravel to concrete to grass, and back again.
Time hadn't rolled back.
Space had.
"No body," Kael muttered. "No data. No loot packet."
He checked the patchband.
Still hot.
Still showing an active thread.
But the kill didn't log.
[STATUS: UNKNOWN]
[TARGET: NULL]
[RAID: UNRESOLVED]
The band didn't even recognize the fight had ended.
Or started.
It read like he hadn't been there.
Then came the surge.
A shiver in the air.
Cold and bright, like lightning without sound.
Kael's glyph arm recoiled, flaring with involuntary light.
The wall nearest him bent outward, like being sucked into itself and pushed away at once.
A line of code flickered in his vision — just one:
::rollback=skipped::
And then it was gone.
Kael stood very still.
The fog around him resumed its loop.
The trees fell back into sync.
The ground no longer shimmered.
Everything settled.
Except him.
He looked at his arm.
A new crack had formed — small, but deep.
Like the patch he'd forced left something unfinished inside him.
He didn't try to heal it.
Not yet.
Instead, he turned and walked away from the site — careful not to touch the spot where the wolf had vanished.
Something told him that space wasn't safe anymore.
Or real.
By the time he crossed back over the perimeter line, the world had quieted again.
No flickers.
No rollback tremors.
Just wind.
Just fog.
Just the long, aching silence of a system pretending everything was fine.
Kael didn't slow his pace.
The patchband still pulsed on his wrist, glyphs chasing each other like fever.
His skin beneath it burned with hairline fractures, too small to split flesh but deep enough to pulse with light.
He couldn't feel his fingers.
He didn't care.
The raid should've logged by now.
But it hadn't.
The mission status stayed open.
[SECTOR 9-G / MINOR INSTANCE INSTABILITY]
[STATUS: UNRESOLVED]
[RAIDER COUNT: 0]
[ENEMY COUNT: —]
No mob. No player. No kill confirmation.
Kael hadn't been removed from the record.
He'd been skipped.
Like the fight had happened between ticks.
Between timestamps.
Like the system couldn't decide if he existed long enough for it to matter.
He reached the transit node just outside the outer corridor and paused to rest against a rusted pillar. The glyphs along his arm dimmed slightly, but the heat lingered. Every breath dragged. Every blink stung.
He wasn't bleeding.
But he was breaking.
And still...
His hand curled into a fist.
"I won."
He said it out loud.
As if saying it would force the system to agree.
A low ping from the patchband made him glance down.
A line of new debug text crawled across the interface:
user_kael.varin :: unauthorized mobility patch accepted
—recompiling failsafe protocol—
—logging false data packet—
// target flagged: invisible instance
// mission unchanged
The text flickered once.
And deleted itself.
Kael stared at the screen.
Then shut the band off entirely.
He stood up straight.
His arm ached. His back burned. His glyphs stung every time he moved.
And still, he turned toward home.
No loot.
No report.
No recognition.
But something deeper than all of that had changed.
The system saw him now.
Not as a mid-tier raider.
Not as a bug.
As a threat.