The situation was beyond farcical. Noctar stood, a divine debugger in a borrowed cloak, holding a broken rusty knife that might as well have been a spoon for all the good it would do.
His Perdition pistols were paperweights, with 23 hours left before its next rounds of ammunition loaded. His optimized Wind Cutter could maybe give the creature a fancy haircut. And the five adventurers in front of him were collectively melting at the sight of the fluffy white Pomeranian.
"Ooooh, it's so cuuute!" Lyra cooed, her healing staff forgotten.
"Never seen a Spatial Pupper look so... harmless," Finn whispered, lowering his bow.
Elara, ever the curious mage, took a step forward, her hand outstretched. "It seems friendly now. Perhaps we can..."
Noctar's arm shot out, barring her path. "Don't."
She looked at him, startled. "Why? What's wrong?"
Noctar said nothing. How could he explain the three-headed, reality-glitching abomination his eyes were reporting? They'd think he was insane.
"Ville," Kaelen's voice was low and dangerous, his hand on his dagger. "You've been a walking question mark since we found you. Now you're stopping us from completing our quest. If you're going to interfere then walk away. Now."
Noctar looked from the assassin's sharp eyes to the "Pomeranian," which chose that moment to roll onto its back, kicking its little legs in the air. The hellhound in his vision mimicked the movement, a grotesque parody of playfulness. The three heads biting into each other and regenerating in mixed red glitchy codes.
He sighed, the sound heavy with the weight of cosmic annoyance. "That thing isn't a just a space monster. It's a bug. A corruption in the system. It's not a creature you can kill; it's a line of bad code you have to patch."
The stares he received were blanker than a wiped hard drive.
"A... bug?" Borin repeated, his face a mask of confusion. "Like a beetle?"
"What did I expect," Noctar muttered under his breath. He looked at their utterly unconvinced faces. Arguing was a waste of cycles.
So, he ran.
In a burst of speed they didn't know he possessed, Noctar turned and sprinted back towards the archway leading to the fourth floor. The party watched him go, stunned.
"Is he... fleeing?" Borin asked, disgusted.
"I believe he's not interfering as I requested," Kaelen added.
But Noctar didn't ran far. He stopped just at the entrance, right at the edge of the fifth floor's domain. He turned, cracked the knuckles of his free hand, and then the one holding the rusty knife.
"This is my fight," he said, his voice carrying across the square. "You just try to stay alive."
The team of 5 were confused by his words but, as if on cue, the Pomeranian rolled back onto its feet. Its cute, button eyes fixed on the clustered adventurers. Its mouth opened, not in a yap, but in a distorted, screeching roar that tore at the air. The illusion shattered. The friendly city dogs all turned, eyes blazing red once more.
The fight was on.
Borin roared, catching a pouncing mastiff on his shield. Elara unleashed a firestorm at a few borbells that were covered in earth shields, while Kaelen became a blur of blades slicing throats and piercing hearts. Lyra's healing light flared making sure her team was functioning at 100%, and Finn's arrows found their marks expertly.
But Noctar didn't join their battle. He stood at the edge, his Root Access vision fully engaged. The world was a torrent of green code. He watched the Pomeranian, the epicenter of the corruption. He saw the corrupted data packets it was emitting, controlling the other dogs. He saw the flawed subroutines that defined its existence.
He couldn't fight it with strength. He had to fight it with logic.
When a data stream shot from the Pomeranian to empower a nearby Doberman, Noctar didn't throw a knife; he threw a line of code, a [TERMINATE_PROCESS] command. The Doberman froze and dissolved into motes of light.
When the Pomeranian tried to warp space to teleport behind Lyra having observed her usefulness, Noctar saw the spatial coordinates before they were executed. He wrote a quick [DIVERT_COORDINATES] script, sending the creature slamming into a nearby wall instead.
It was a battle of wits against a glitching, chaotic intelligence. For hours, he stood there, a conductor of an unseen orchestra, deconstructing the monster's attacks line by line, function by function, while the Lucky Tree guild fought the physical manifestations of its rage. He was a programmer facing a rampant virus.
Finally, after what felt like forever, he found it. The core corrupted file. The [ENTITY_DEFINITION.PUPPER] was a mess of recursive loops and memory leaks. It wasn't just broken; it was breaking everything around it.
He focused all his will and mental energy, his Debugger class flaring. He didn't delete it. He couldn't delete it because that would crash the local reality instance.
Instead, he rewrote it. He painstakingly patched the loops, fixed the leaks, and restored the original, non-malicious definition.
With a final, silent command of [SAVE_AND_EXECUTE], the work was done.
The effect was instantaneous.
The red glow vanished from the eyes of every dog in the city. The Pomeranian, which had been mid-snarl, suddenly stopped. It shook its head, let out a confused, genuine little "yip?", and then trotted over to a flower bed, sniffing it with benign curiosity.
The dungeon was clean.
The adventurers, battered and breathless, stared in wonder. They had done it, they had survived the torrent of dogs but they didn't know it wasn't them rather the man standing far away from them.
But Noctar wasn't celebrating, his nose bled slightly from using Root Access too much. A final system message flashed before his eyes, a personal log from his Root Access skill.
[BUG_REPORT: ETHRON_OS]
[CORRUPTION_PATCHED: 1]
[REMAINING_CORRUPTED_FILES: 99,999]
[...]
[TOTAL_ESTIMATED_BUGS_IN_SYSTEM: 100,000]
One.
He had just gone through all of that for one.
Out of one hundred thousand.
The heat that rose in Noctar's chest had nothing to do with blood, mana or kinetic energy. It was pure, undiluted, planetary-scale rage.
That smug, forgetful, Hawaiian-shirt-wearing son of a bitch.
He. Fucking. Lied.**
The apocalypse wasn't a single bug. It was an infestation. And he was the lone exterminator on a contract he never would have signed if he'd known the true scope.
He looked up at the dungeon ceiling as if he could see through the layers of reality straight into Byte's domain.
"This isn't over," he whispered, the promise a vow etched in code.