The bronze coins felt real.
That was the part Ethan couldn't stop thinking about as he crouched behind an overturned vending machine, listening to the chaos outside. Not the monsters. Not the impossible blue windows. Not even the eldritch eye that had briefly studied him from beyond reality's rendering distance.
The coins were heavy. They had temperature. When he rubbed his thumb across one, he could feel the ridges of some unfamiliar script.
A game drop shouldn't feel like anything. It should just... be numbers. Data. But these coins existed, somehow straddling the line between digital abstraction and physical matter.
"You're doing it again," Maya whispered.
Ethan blinked, realizing he'd been staring at the coins for too long. "Doing what?"
"That face. Like you're debugging reality." She shifted her grip on the fire extinguisher. Somewhere in the last hour, she'd acquired a actual weapon—a crowbar that now hung from her belt—but she kept the extinguisher close. "Most people are screaming or crying right now. You look like you're taking notes."
"I am taking notes." He pocketed the coins and glanced at his status window. Still Level 2. The XP bar showed 75/300—he'd need three more Hollow Hounds to level again. "How are you holding up?"
Maya's stats floated beside her head, visible only to him:
[Maya Chen]
[Level: 2]
[Class: Ranger]
[HP: 100/100]
She'd leveled from the shared kill. Good. Higher stats meant better survival odds.
"I'm compartmentalizing," she said. "Crisis response training. You process the trauma later." She paused. "You never answered my question. How did you know to hit that thing where you did?"
Ethan considered lying. It would be easy—claim he got lucky, or that he'd played too many games, or that the creature's weak point was obvious. But something about Maya's eyes stopped him. They were too sharp. Too focused. Not the eyes of someone simply compartmentalizing.
Those were the eyes of someone gathering information.
Reporter, some instinct whispered. Investigator. Not just a random survivor.
"I saw it," he said carefully. "The weak point. It was highlighted."
"Highlighted how?"
"Like a target in a video game." He gestured vaguely at his own eyes. "Red wireframes around the creature's body. Yellow spots on its vulnerable areas. The System is showing me things it's not showing everyone else."
Maya stared at him for a long moment. Then she pulled up her own status window—at least, Ethan assumed that's what she was doing based on her eye movements—and frowned.
"I don't see anything like that. Just the basic interface. Health, level, skills." She looked at the wall where the dead security guard had been. Someone had moved Marcus's body while they'd been hiding. "My skill options are pretty straightforward. Archery bonuses, tracking abilities. Nothing about seeing 'wireframes.'"
"That's because you picked Ranger." Ethan pulled up his skill list, mostly to confirm what he suspected. "I picked... something else."
[SKILLS]
[Glitch Vision] - Passive (Unique) Rank: F Effect: Perceive System errors, rendering artifacts, collision boundaries, and exploitable code structures. Note: This skill cannot be learned, taught, or copied. It is bound to your existence within the System. Warning: Extended use may cause [REDACTED].
[Exploit Detection] - Passive Rank: F Effect: Automatically highlights exploitable elements in monsters, objects, and environments when within range. Current Range: 10 meters Evolution Condition: Exploit 50 unique bugs (Current: 1/50)
[Debug Sense] - Active Rank: F Cost: 50 MP Cooldown: 5 minutes Effect: Focus on a single target to reveal detailed System code, including hidden stats, resistances, and potential exploits. Note: Some entities may detect this ability's use.
That last warning made his skin prickle. Some entities may detect this ability's use. Like, for example, the geometric eye that had noticed him after his first exploit?
"What class did you pick?" Maya asked.
"It doesn't have a name." Ethan closed his skill window. "It's glitched. I think I'm running on default parameters."
A crash from outside cut off her response. Through the lobby's shattered windows, they could see movement—not monsters this time, but people. A group of five or six, running toward the building. One of them was injured, being half-carried by the others.
"Survivors," Maya said, already moving. "We should help—"
"Wait." Ethan grabbed her arm, his Glitch Vision flickering as he focused on the incoming group.
Their status windows appeared:
[Kevin Price] - Level 1 - Warrior - HP: 100/100
[Linda Torres] - Level 1 - Healer - HP: 45/100
[James Wright] - Level 2 - Mage - HP: 80/100
[Unknown] - Level 1 - Rogue - HP: 12/100 [CRITICAL]
[Unknown] - Level 1 - Warrior - HP: 65/100
[Unknown] - Level 1 - Ranger - HP: 30/100
Six people. Two in critical condition. The Healer's HP was low, which meant she'd probably been burning her own health to heal others—a common mechanic in games with sacrifice-based healing.
But that wasn't what had caught his attention.
Behind the running group, at the edge of his Glitch Vision range, something was following them. Not chasing—stalking. Its movement was wrong, stopping and starting in ways that suggested broken pathfinding. Like a creature that kept losing its target and then reacquiring it.
He zoomed his perception, a trick he'd already learned by focusing his concentration.
[D-Rank Monster: Shadow Stalker]
[Level: 7]
[HP: 450/450]
The creature was almost invisible—a smear of darkness against the night sky, barely distinguishable from the shadows it moved through. Its hitbox was massive, extending several feet in every direction like an aura of lethality. But its actual body, the core of the thing, was tiny. Maybe the size of a housecat, centered somewhere in its "chest" region.
And there—a single golden highlight. A glitch in its stealth rendering that created a one-second window of visibility every time it shifted direction.
"There's a Level 7 monster following them," Ethan said. "D-Rank. It can turn invisible."
Maya's face went pale. "Can you see it?"
"Barely. It has a visibility bug—flickers when it changes direction." He was already running calculations in his head. Level 7 versus their Level 2. Even with the exploit, the stat difference would be devastating. "We can't fight it directly. Not yet."
"Then what do we do?"
Ethan's eyes swept the lobby. Glitch Vision highlighted everything—the structural wireframes, the collision boundaries of debris, the pathing routes the creature would likely take. In the corner, near the emergency exit, he spotted something.
A purple void patch. An area where the System hadn't finished loading.
He'd seen one earlier, when the Architect's eye had appeared. At the time, he'd assumed it was dangerous. But now, looking more closely, he noticed something else: the void patch had edges. Clean, geometric edges that suggested intentional design rather than random corruption.
A loading zone boundary.
In games, loading zones sometimes broke enemy AI. Creatures would lose aggro, reset to default positions, or simply despawn when players crossed certain invisible lines.
"I have an idea," Ethan said. "But it's really, really stupid."
The survivors burst through the lobby doors thirty seconds later, gasping and crying. The one being carried—a young man with a deep gash across his chest—was barely conscious.
"Please," the woman in front begged. Her status identified her as Linda Torres, the Healer. "Is there anywhere safe? That thing killed two of our group already—"
"Back exit," Maya said, taking charge. "Through there, into the alley. Move fast."
Ethan was already at the emergency door, holding it open. His Glitch Vision tracked the Shadow Stalker as it approached the front of the building, its massive hitbox pressing against the walls like a living stain.
The survivors rushed past him, too panicked to question the escape route. Maya brought up the rear, her eyes meeting his.
"You're not coming," she said. It wasn't a question.
"I need to test something."
"You're going to get yourself killed."
"Probably." He pushed her through the door. "Run straight down the alley for exactly forty meters. There's a loading boundary there—a purple shimmer, you might be able to see it if you look closely. Cross it, and I think you'll be safe."
"And if you're wrong?"
Ethan smiled grimly. "Then my respawn timer is probably pretty short at Level 2."
He slammed the door shut before she could argue.
The Shadow Stalker had reached the lobby.
Ethan could see it now, even through its stealth—a writhing mass of darkness that moved like smoke given hunger. Its hitbox extended toward him, and he felt cold, a bone-deep chill that had nothing to do with temperature.
[Shadow Stalker is targeting you]
[Threat Assessment: LETHAL]
"Hey," Ethan said, raising his baseball bat. "Over here, you rendering error."
The creature's stealth flickered—there, the visibility bug—and for one heartbeat he saw its true form. Not smoke. Not shadow. A mass of writhing tendrils wrapped around a core that pulsed with sickly purple light.
It shrieked, a sound that made his vision blur at the edges, and lunged.
Ethan ran.
Not toward the back exit. Not toward safety.
He ran straight at the purple void patch in the corner.
The Shadow Stalker's hitbox slammed into his back, and agony exploded through his body. His HP bar plummeted:
[HP: 100 → 23] [CRITICAL DAMAGE!]
But he didn't stop. His feet hit the void boundary—
—and the world stuttered.
For a fraction of a second, reality simply ceased. No sound. No light. No sensation. Just an infinite moment of nothing.
Then:
[LOADING ZONE DETECTED] [Monster AI reset initiated] [Shadow Stalker returning to spawn point...]
Ethan collapsed against the far wall of the loading zone, which turned out to be a service corridor that definitely hadn't existed in the building's original architecture. His health was still at 23—far too close to death—but the Shadow Stalker was gone. He could see it on his Glitch Vision, already moving away from the building, its pathfinding reset to default patrol mode.
Exploit successful.
[Achievement Unlocked: Boundary Breaker] First player to intentionally cross a loading zone boundary. Reward: +100 XP, Title [Zone Runner]
[LEVEL UP!] [Ethan Cross: Level 2 → Level 3] [+5 Stat Points] [+1 Skill Point]
[Exploit Logged: 2/50]
Ethan lay on the cold floor of the impossible corridor, gasping for breath, and started to laugh.
"Two down," he wheezed. "Forty-eight to go."
In the distance, through walls that should have been solid but now flickered with unrendered textures, he saw the purple shimmer of another loading boundary. And beyond it, faintly visible, more corridors. More zones. A whole hidden layer of reality that the System hadn't meant for players to access.
His Glitch Vision pulsed, highlighting paths forward.
The game had just gotten a lot more interesting.
He found the survivors three blocks away, huddled in what had been a 24-hour convenience store. The loading zone had dumped him onto a side street he didn't recognize, but his minimap—another System feature he was still exploring—had shown him the way.
Maya saw him first. Her expression cycled through relief, anger, and something that might have been respect.
"You're alive," she said.
"Barely." He pulled up his status and dumped all five stat points into VIT, watching his max HP climb from 100 to 150. The smart thing would have been to diversify, but he'd nearly died from a single attack. Survivability first. "The monster is gone. Loading zone exploit—I reset its AI."
The other survivors stared at him like he was speaking a foreign language. Which, in a way, he was.
"Who are you?" the Warrior—Kevin Price—demanded. He was a big guy, maybe mid-thirties, with the look of someone who'd never backed down from a fight in his life. "How do you know all this stuff?"
Ethan considered the question. In the old world, the real world, the answer had been simple: I'm a professional at breaking games. I find bugs for a living.
But this wasn't a game. Not really. Those coins in his pocket were real. The blood drying on his clothes was real. Marcus the security guard was really dead.
"I'm a QA tester," he said finally. "I find bugs. Exploits. Ways the system isn't supposed to work." He met Kevin's eyes. "And right now, I'm the only one who can see them."
Silence.
Then Maya stepped forward, pulling out her phone. Its screen was cracked, but still functional—recording.
"You're saying," she said carefully, "that this whole apocalypse... is running on buggy code?"
Ethan looked out the convenience store window. In the distance, he could see more purple void patches scattered across the city. Loading boundaries. Unrendered zones. Cracks in the System that nobody else could perceive.
"I'm saying," he replied, "that whoever built this world? They shipped it before it was finished."
And somewhere, behind the curtain of reality, he knew the Architect was still watching.