The world did not end with a scream. It ended with a pixel.
Thousands of people gathered in the grand plaza, their faces turned upward, watching the sky burn. A dragon descended from the clouds, its scales shining with the blinding gold light of a divine judgment. To the crowd, it was a god. A beast sent to cleanse the sinner chained to the execution pillar.
Ren saw none of that.
He looked up at the roaring beast, and his left eye began to bleed. The world tore open. The golden fire stripped away, peeling back like old paint to reveal the ugly truth underneath.
It was not a dragon. It was a cluster of high-density data, stitched together by strings of blue code.
[Entity: Guardian Construct (Type-7)] [Status: Execution Mode] [Energy Source: External Server Link]
The crowd fell to their knees as the dragon opened its jaws. A sphere of white annihilation gathered in its throat. But Ren didn't pray. He didn't cry. He just squinted, fighting the migraine that felt like a nail being driven into his skull.
A red warning flashed in his vision, obscuring the beast.
[System Warning: Logic Violation Detected.] [Corruption Level: 92%] [Critical Failure Imminent.]
"Repent, heretic!"
The High Priest stood safe behind a shimmering barrier, his voice amplified by magic. "Accept the judgment of the Heavens! Your soul shall be purified by the Sacred Flame!"
Ren spat a mouthful of blood onto the pristine white stone of the platform. "Judgment?"
His voice was a raw, scraping sound. He raised a hand, shaking, bruised, and weak, toward the empty air. "This is not judgment. It is just lazy programming."
He didn't see the air. He saw the Vector Layer.
Hundreds of white arrows floated around him. They indicated wind direction, gravity, and velocity. The mathematics of the world laid bare.
As the dragon unleashed the breath of god, a beam of energy capable of vaporizing a mountain, Ren didn't try to stop it. He had no mana. He had no strength. He was a cripple in a world of supermen.
But he didn't need to be strong. He just needed to be an admin.
His fingers twitched, grabbing the [Vector: Direction] arrow of the incoming beam.
Grip. Twist. Release.
[Edit Successful.] [Corruption: 95%...]
The beam of light was inches from Ren's face when it simply... turned.
It didn't bounce off a shield. It didn't deflect. It snapped one hundred and eighty degrees in a single frame, violating every law of physics known to man.
The beam shot back into the dragon's open mouth.
There was no sound of flesh tearing. Just the screech of audio feedback, loud enough to burst eardrums. The dragon's head expanded, inflated like a balloon, and then....
Pop.
It shattered into a million polygons of blue light.
Silence descended on the execution square. The High Priest dropped his staff. The crowd forgot to breathe. They stared at the boy on the platform, the boy who should have been ash, standing unharmed amidst a rain of glitching blue sparks.
Ren lowered his hand. His vision blurred, static eating away at the edges of his sight. He knew the System wouldn't ignore this. The Admins would come. They always did.
"One bug fixed," Ren said, wiping the blood from his eye. "A billion more to go."
The world flickered. And then, everything went black.