The blast of cold, clean white light from the doorway was a shock. Teo was used to the indigo haze and digital grit of Florika, but this light felt alien—too pure, too focused. It was the light of a server room, not a swamp tunnel.
The figure who stepped through the doorway wasn't a monster or an Aegis soldier. He was slight, dressed in simple, tailored clothes that looked worn but expensive. His eyes were sharp, dark, and utterly devoid of the glazed-over look of a typical Player. He looked like a man who knew exactly what the world was made of.
This was Emanuel Rizero. The name resonated in the deepest, most restricted corners of Teo's NPP knowledge. A phantom from the Haiti server—a legend whispered in debug consoles—a hacker notorious for breaching stable systems for personal, non-game-related profit. Rizero wasn't seeking XP or loot; he was seeking raw data.
"So," Rizero said, his voice carrying a flat, Caribbean rhythm that was jarringly out of place. "You're the one holding the heartbeat." He glanced past Teo at the vibrant mural of the sunset, his lip curling in disgust. "Nostalgia is inefficient. They should have purged these assets years ago."
Rizero took a step, and the cheerful murals on the coral walls began to peel and turn to gray ash wherever his shadow touched. He wasn't damaging the paint; he was deleting the texture file beneath it.
"I need the core," Rizero stated, his voice calm. "The Legacy Core emits a frequency unique to the pre-Sync servers. It's the only thing that can stabilize my connection to the older architecture."
"It belongs here," Teo said, his voice low, his posture still deceptively relaxed. He didn't draw a weapon, but he subtly bent his knees, preparing to engage. He was wearing the Aegis maintenance uniform, making him look even more harmless.
Rizero smiled, a cold, technical expression. "That's what the local NPCs always say. I'm not with Aegis, and I'm not a player, mi amigo. I am an External Client. And unlike the local code monkeys, I understand your vulnerability."
Rizero raised a hand. He wasn't casting a spell; he was writing. A shimmering, green string of pure hex code materialized in the air above his palm.
"Your 'invincibility' isn't immunity," Rizero explained, his eyes glowing faintly as he typed. "It's a flag: [Asset Protection: True]. The local system won't harm you. But I'm not running local code. I'm running a Logic Bomb from the Haiti server. And my code doesn't recognize your asset flag."
He finished the sequence. The green hex code solidified into a jagged, spinning projectile—a weapon made of pure, malicious logic. He hurled it at Teo's chest.
This was Teo's first true test. No simple "collision event" against a clumsy player. This was a direct attack on the fundamental code that protected him.
The Logic Bomb hit Teo squarely in the chest.
Instead of the usual [0 Damage] notification, Teo's entire world stuttered. His HUD dissolved into static. The air around him—the Florika Ceiling—felt momentarily brittle. The Core in his chest flared, and a sudden, sharp, agonizing wave of pain ripped through his body.
[ALERT: Asset Protection Bypassed!] [Error: Unknown Damage Type - 'Corruption'] [HP: 27/100 (Initiating Emergency Re-Sync)]
Teo staggered backward, hitting the cheerful coral-stone wall. He felt the Logic Bomb trying to rewrite his core data, threatening to turn his invincible body into a pile of corrupted, unusable code.
But Rizero had made a critical miscalculation.
Teo's power wasn't just in his body; it was in the environment. He was the Conduit of the 813.
Teo ignored the pain and slammed his hand against the ground, channeling his electrical discharge through the ancient coral floor—the original, unoptimized architectural medium of the tunnels.
"The 3 PM Strike: Environmental Overload!"
He didn't need clear skies. He only needed a conductive medium and enough chaotic energy. The discharge was instantaneous. Not a clean bolt, but a raw, dirty wave of static that short-circuited the ambient magnetic fields.
Rizero screamed, not from physical injury, but from the sudden injection of noise into his elegant code. His skin flashed with random, colorful debug errors. The Logic Bomb destabilized, dissolving into harmless data packets.
"You can't code against chaos!" Teo spat out, pushing off the wall. "You're a hacker. I'm a thunderstorm!"
Rizero stumbled back, clutching his head. "Impossible! Your base code... it's too noisy!"
He retreated instantly, a master of withdrawal. Rizero threw a small, glowing sphere onto the ground—a Server Disruptor. The device exploded, not with fire, but with a massive, localized lag-spike that slowed the entire tunnel down to a crawl.
Rizero used the temporal distortion to slip back through the open door, slamming it shut behind him. The lock immediately cycled, sealing the passage.
Teo was left alone in the beautiful, silent tunnel. The Glitch-Walker was gone. He had used the chaos to escape, knowing Teo was too busy fighting for his existence.
Teo checked his HP. It was regenerating rapidly, the Essential Asset protocols overriding the damage. But the message remained: he had been hurt. He was not immune to all damage.
He looked at the locked door. The hacker was gone, but he had left Teo with a chilling truth: the system that protected him could be bypassed. He had to finish the Legacy Quest, not just to save Florika, but to stabilize the very code that made him invincible.
Teo turned and began his search for the Root-Shrine. He had to find the Glitch-Walker.
Teo pushed through the heavy wooden door, leaving the vibrant murals behind. The air shifted immediately, losing its scent of orange blossoms and turning into the sterile, ozone-heavy chill of a high-performance cooling system.
He was no longer in a "Scripted Path." He was in the crawlspace of the world's architects.
Above him, the ceiling wasn't made of rock or brick; it was a transparent lattice of fiber-optic cables pulsing with gold data. This was the foundation of the Aegis Tower, the tallest structure in all of Florika. Every transaction, every login, and every death in the state flowed through the glass veins directly above his head.
Teo realized with a jolt that he had lost the trail of the Glitch-Walker. The tunnels here didn't follow the logic of a map; they followed the logic of a motherboard. He turned a corner, expecting another mural, but found himself standing in a cathedral of glass and steel: the Subterranean Server Access Hall.
The scale was dizzying. Row after row of massive, monolithic doors stretched into the darkness, each etched with the name of a different global server shard. These were the "Cross-Sync Gateways"—portals to territories that had been merged or colonized by Aegis.
His eyes scanned the labels: Georgea, Michigon, and the distant, neon-tinted shards of Aeyanaki and Kyushu.
Teo stopped in front of the Kyushu door. It hummed with a low-frequency vibration that made the Legacy Core in his chest thrum in response. Curiosity, a trait his NPC script usually suppressed, flared up. He placed his hand on the cold, black metal and pushed.
The door hissed open, revealing not a room, but a horizon.
[Notice: Cross-Sync Boundary Breached.] [Location: Soskano Woods (Kyushu Shard)]
Teo peered into the darkness. It was a forest of twisted, obsidian trees under a sky of permanent twilight. The air smelled of burnt incense and old blood. Then, he saw them.
Two blood-red, humanlike eyes stared back from the shadows of a gnarled trunk. They weren't glowing like a digital asset; they were wet, organic, and filled with a predatory intelligence that felt older than the System itself. Above the eyes, a level bar flickered into existence, so long it seemed to stretch into the trees.
[Level: 18,523]
Teo didn't care about the number. Numbers were just code, and he was invincible to code. It was the eyes—the sheer, unadulterated malice in that gaze—that struck a chord of primal terror in his soul. It was a look that said: I don't care if the System says I can't kill you; I will find a way to make you suffer anyway.
SLAM.
Teo threw his weight against the door, his heart hammering against his ribs. He didn't wait to see if the creature moved. He turned and sprinted back the way he came, his boots echoing loudly on the polished floor.
As he reached the end of the hall, a sound froze the marrow in his bones: the heavy, metallic thud of a door being pushed open far behind him, followed by the sound of something sharp dragging across the floor.
He didn't look back. He scrambled toward a service elevator marked [Internal Personnel Only], swiping his hand across the sensor. His Essential Asset status overrode the lock, and the lift shot upward, bypassing the basement, the lobby, and the executive floors.
The doors slid open on the 110th floor—the "Sanctum of Aegis."
Teo stumbled out, gasping for air, his maintenance coveralls stained with swamp mud and dust. He didn't even have time to steady his cap before he crashed directly into someone.
It was a tall, imposing man in a suit made of woven light, his hair a perfect, silvered pompadour. He looked down at Teo with the cold, analytical gaze of a man who viewed the world as a spreadsheet.
It was Maximilian Thorne, the CEO of Aegis and his Abuela's direct superior.
"A janitor?" Thorne asked, his voice a smooth, terrifying baritone. He looked at the mud on Teo's boots, then at the elevator that shouldn't have opened for a low-level asset. "On the executive floor? During a Red-Level Audit?"
Thorne reached out, his hand hovering inches from Teo's chest—right where the Legacy Core was hidden. "You have a very interesting energy signature for a simple maintenance worker."
Teo froze, his heart hammering against the Legacy Core in his chest as Maximilian Thorne's hand hovered near his sternum. The air in the executive sanctum felt thin, charged with the literal power of the Aegis Corporation's primary servers.
Ding.
The elevator chime sliced through the tension like a digital blade. Teo's head whipped around, expecting a shadow or a claw to emerge from the lift. Instead, a young man stepped out into the white light.
He wore a simple, light-gray hoodie and green cargo pants, his hands wrapped in white combat tape. A flickering green flame danced lazily in his palm, casting an eerie glow on his youthful face. Teo realized with a jolt of relief—and then a new kind of dread—that this was the source of the red eyes from the Soskano Woods.
The "malice" Teo had felt through the Kyushu door hadn't been a monster's hunger; it was the suffocating, dense arrogance of a player who had reached the absolute ceiling of the world. Up close, the blood-red glint in the young man's eyes wasn't a mutation—it was a status effect of his sheer, overwhelming power level.
"Max," the young man said, his voice smooth and dismissive, barely acknowledging Teo's existence.
Thorne dropped his hand from Teo's chest, though his analytical gaze didn't soften. "Ah, perfect timing. Mateo, meet my associate, Agamenticus Rialto. He's a business partner with... let's say, a very unique set of credentials from across the server boundaries."
Rialto sauntered forward, the green flame in his hand pulsing in time with the hum of the building. He didn't offer a hand. He didn't even look Teo in the eye. He simply stood there, an anomaly of high-level data wrapped in a teenager's streetwear.
"Rialto has a history he prefers not to share," Thorne continued, his tone conversational but firm. "He'll be working closely with your Abuela, Elena, for the next few weeks on a specific 'system optimization' project."
Teo stood stiffly, his Strong Acting Weak persona working overtime to keep his "Essential Asset" signature from spiking in the presence of such a high-level entity. He looked like just another terrified janitor caught in the wrong place.
As Rialto walked past him toward Thorne's office, he leaned in just a fraction. A word drifted into Teo's ear, too quiet for Thorne to catch, but sharp as a needle.
"Insect."
Rialto didn't wait for a reaction. He shot a final, arrogant glare over his shoulder—a look that dismissed Teo as nothing more than a bug to be crushed—and sauntered after Maximilian.
Thorne paused at the door of his office, giving Teo a pointed, lingering look. "We will discuss your 'scenic tour' of the Executive Floor later, Mateo. For now, go back to your Abuelo. I believe you have deliveries to finish."
The heavy glass doors hissed shut, leaving Teo alone in the hall. He looked at the elevator, then back at the doors. His invincibility had protected him from the hacker's logic bomb, but he realized that in the eyes of men like Thorne and Rialto, he wasn't a threat—he was a piece of the furniture.
And that was exactly how he was going to destroy them.
Teo couldn't let Rialto out of his sight. The arrogance, the absurd power level, and the fact that he seemed to recognize Teo's own innate "noise" made him far more dangerous than any programmed threat. Ignoring Thorne's warning, Teo slipped out of the Executive Hall, taking a maintenance stairwell that allowed him to shadow Rialto without triggering the floor's motion sensors.
Rialto strode directly to Elena's executive suite. The door was unlocked, as Elena was, according to Thorne, in a board meeting downstairs. Teo used the minimal gap before the door sealed to slip inside.
🤫 The Dragon King's Monologue
Elena's office was sleek and massive, all seamless glass and chrome, built to look out over the entire Florika Sector. Rialto stood in the center of the room, looking bored, tapping his foot impatiently as he waited. He was muttering to himself, his voice a low, resentful drone.
Teo flattened himself behind a sculpture of shimmering, fractal coral—an expensive, non-functional art asset. He listened, his heart rate spiking as Rialto's monologue unfolded.
"This is beneath me," Rialto muttered, rubbing the back of his neck. "This pathetic, low-polygon world. And this project... 'Optimization'? I'm a Dragon King. I command armies of five-digit-level assets, and they want me to review Elena's firewalls? My Defense is pathetically low, yes, but this world has a ceiling of Level 100. My base Defense of 10 is enough to tank anything they throw at me."
He paced to the panoramic window, his shadow distorting the entire city below. "And that annoying Princess Marienne. She's going to track me here. If she breaches this server, she'll delete the entire Florika Sector just to spite me. I need that Legacy Core now."
Teo's blood ran cold, not from fear, but from the sudden, sharp inconsistency of the information. Dragon Kings and Princesses were not part of the established Florika lore. They didn't exist in the Aegis database. They were concepts from deep, pre-Sync fantasy servers, the kind of chaotic, high-magic realms that Aegis had aggressively suppressed or quarantined.
He's not a player, Teo realized, sweat prickling beneath his Aegis uniform. He's a refugee. And he's insane.
To Teo, who lived by the ironclad logic of the System, Rialto's words were the ravings of a madman. A Dragon King? That was pure, unadulterated nonsense—a sign of deep code corruption. Yet, the malice in his eyes and the power level of 18,523 were terrifyingly real.
Teo realized the immediate danger wasn't the Audit Team; it was the fact that a high-level lunatic was talking about attracting a princess capable of deleting his entire home. The Legacy Core was the key to stabilizing Florika, and Rialto wanted it for an insane, external war. Teo had to warn his Abuela now.
💥 Interruption on the 100th Floor
Teo burst from the office, sprinting toward the executive elevator bank. He knew which floor the primary Board Room was on—the 100th, the secure data core of Florika's financial operations.
He slammed his hand on the [Priority Override] panel. The doors zipped open, and he launched himself into the car. He hit the button for the 100th floor repeatedly, ignoring the automated system's polite request for authorization.
The doors parted with a loud chime. Teo barreled out of the elevator and skidded to a stop at the entrance of the Board Room.
The meeting was in full swing. Twenty of the most powerful corporate avatars in the Florika Sector—executives, data lords, and lead developers—were seated around a holographic table displaying financial models of the new Optimization Project.
Teo, mud-stained and wearing the ill-fitting Aegis maintenance uniform, stood framed in the doorway.
Silence descended, heavy and immediate.
The first voice to break it was a sharp, high-pitched shriek: "Security! Get that rogue janitor out of here! Now!"
"He's clearly glitched!" another executive yelled, pointing at Teo's muddied boots. "He's contaminating the floor logic!"
The yelling intensified as security guards—Level 50 automated NPCs—started marching toward the door.
Elena, seated at the head of the table, closed her eyes for a brief moment of profound annoyance. She then stood up. She didn't use a powerful command or a System ban. She simply walked around the table with the exaggerated, slow-motion grace of a grandmother.
She placed a gentle, but firm, hand on Teo's arm.
"Mateo," she said, her voice dripping with disappointed warmth. "My apologies, gentlemen. It seems my grandson has forgotten his basic etiquette scripts."
She steered Teo back out into the hall, her grip like steel.
"I am so sorry, everyone," she called back to the stunned board members. "We will just have a quick discussion about proper manners and the chain of command."
👵 The Etiquette Script
Elena dragged Teo twenty feet down the hallway and around a corner, out of sight of the board room's motion detectors. She released his arm, and her face immediately shifted from "Disappointed Grandma" to "Raging Data Architect."
"What in the name of the original Kyushu server do you think you are doing, nieto?!" she hissed, her eyes glowing faintly with suppressed electric-blue energy. "You just disrupted a multi-trillion Data Credit merger! You are one collision event away from being forcibly archived!"
"Abuela, you have to listen to me," Teo whispered urgently, still gasping for breath. "That man, Rialto—he is not a partner. He is a hacker, an External Client! He just said he is a Dragon King and that a Princess Marienne is coming to this server. He said he needs the Legacy Core to stabilize his connection!"
Elena stared at him, her expression shifting from fury to cold calculation. "Dragon King? Princess?" She raised a hand and brought up a diagnostic overlay visible only to her. She looked at Teo's terrified face, then back at the corporate parameters. "Mateo, that is pure fantasy. Those assets were purged during the Great Sync. The man is either an exceptionally high-level griefer, or he's suffering from a highly aggressive Logic Corruption. But you did not need to make a scene!"
"But he said he would erase the sector! He hurt me, Abuela! His attack—it got through the protection!"
Elena paused. She looked at Teo's eyes, then initiated a quick health scan on his person. A stream of green text scrolled across her vision. "Zero damage. System integrity is 100%," she reported, then her voice dropped. "Wait. You have an anomaly. There is a trace signature of 'Corruption' on your local stack. A signature that... bypassed the Essential Asset flags."
Her eyes went wide. She grabbed Teo's shoulders, her composure finally breaking. "I have to know, Mateo. Where did you leave the Legacy Core? If Rialto can bypass your protection, he can find that core and turn the entire Florika Sector into his own private fantasy server!"
While the board members upstairs were still debating "maintenance glitches" and the grandmother-and-grandson duo were whispering in the hallway, the true architect of the Logic Bomb was far beyond the Florika reach.
🏝️ Port-au-Prince Shard: The Rizero Residence
Thousands of virtual miles away, in a sleek, obsidian-glass villa overlooking the digitized Caribbean waves of the Haiti Server, Emanuel Rizero was leaning over a holographic workstation. His fingers moved like spiders across a keyboard made of pure light, trying to re-calculate the "Noise Variable" he had encountered in the Neo-Ybor tunnels.
"The resonance was all wrong," Emanuel muttered, his brow furrowed. "It wasn't a player, and it wasn't a standard NPC. It was like hitting a wall made of static and—"
Suddenly, his nose twinkled.
"ACHOO!"
The sneeze was so violent it sent a ripple through his holographic interface, momentarily turning his coffee mug into a low-resolution cube. Emanuel rubbed his nose with a silk handkerchief, glancing around his high-security, empty office.
"Someone is talking about me," he grumbled, his dark eyes narrowing. "Probably those corporate vultures at Aegis. Or maybe that 'Dragon King' lunatic. He always did have a big mouth."
He went back to his work, unaware that in the confused mind of Mateo Valdes, the legendary Haitian hacker and the arrogant "Dragon King" from Soskano Woods had been blended into a single, terrifying, and utterly nonsensical threat.
In classic NPC style, Teo had processed the two most dangerous people he'd ever met, shaken them together, and handed the resulting mess to the most powerful woman in the sector.
The board meeting was about to become the least of Elena's problems.