The first monster noticed him by accident.
It crawled out of the dark like a mistake that hadn't finished rendering—small, hunched, its body shaped like a goblin but smoothed over, details blurred as if the world had lost interest halfway through making it. Its skin flickered between shades of green and gray. Its eyes loaded a fraction of a second too late.
A tutorial mob.
Noel recognized it instantly, and the recognition made his chest tighten.
"Okay," he murmured. "Good. Weak enemies. That's… manageable."
He waited.
Normally, this was the moment where a red nameplate would appear above its head. [Feral Goblin – Lv. 1] or something equally uninspired. An HP bar would slide into place. Combat music would swell.
Nothing happened.
The creature sniffed the air, then turned toward him with a jerky motion. It let out a broken snarl—half sound, half static—and charged.
Instinct kicked in. Noel raised his arms, bracing for impact.
The goblin's rusted dagger passed straight through his chest.
No resistance. No force. No pain.
It was like being stabbed by fog.
The creature stumbled, clearly confused, its blade continuing through him until it hit empty air on the other side. Noel staggered back a step, heart slamming against his ribs. He looked down at himself.
No wound.
No blood.
No flashing red warning. No HP -3 floating text.
He exhaled shakily. "I'm… intangible?"
The goblin screeched and lunged again, this time swinging wildly.
The dagger connected.
Pain exploded through Noel's side—sharp, sudden, and gone almost instantly. He gasped, reflexively clutching his ribs. The sensation faded before he could even fully process it, like a memory of pain rather than pain itself.
He looked down again.
Still no wound.
No blood.
But he had felt that.
The goblin recoiled, as startled as he was, staring at Noel with a crooked tilt of its head. It stabbed again.
This time, the blade passed through him harmlessly.
Noel backed away, breath ragged. "What the hell decides that?"
The answer, apparently, was nothing.
The creature continued its assault, each strike a gamble. Sometimes the dagger phased through Noel's body as if he wasn't there at all. Other times it struck true—producing brief flashes of pain that vanished before they could settle, leaving behind no damage he could see or feel.
No weakening. No fatigue. No sense of health decreasing.
No HP bar.
That realization hit harder than the blade ever did.
Noel focused inward, the way every gamer did when they were hurt, searching for that instinctive awareness of remaining health. The red bar at the edge of vision. The creeping danger as it dropped too low.
There was nothing.
He couldn't tell if he was injured.
He couldn't tell if he was dying.
He couldn't even tell if dying was possible.
"Status," he tried again, voice tight. "HP. Condition. Anything."
The system did not answer.
The goblin lunged once more. Noel reacted without thinking, grabbing its wrist mid-swing.
His hand closed around solid flesh.
The monster shrieked.
So did Noel—more in shock than pain—as his grip stuck. The goblin's arm didn't flicker or pass through him. It was real. Solid. The dagger clattered to the stone.
For a brief, dizzying moment, both of them froze.
Then the goblin's body destabilized.
Its arm blurred violently where Noel touched it, pixels tearing at the edges, as if the contact itself was an error. The creature screamed again, its form unraveling, chunks of it phasing in and out of existence until—
It collapsed into dust.
No loot dropped.
No experience notification chimed.
Noel stood there, breathing hard, staring at his empty hand.
"…I broke it," he whispered.
He looked down at himself again, half-expecting to see something—anything—now that he'd killed his first enemy.
Still nothing.
No nameplate hovered above his head.
Not even a placeholder.
In system-based worlds, nameplates were fundamental. Even NPCs had them. Even objects sometimes did.
Noel had none.
He waved a hand in front of his face, then focused, trying to will his own information into existence.
If I exist here, he thought, the system should at least acknowledge me.
A faint pressure brushed against his awareness, like a cursor hovering over empty space.
Then, for less than a second, something flickered.
Not a full window. Just a fragment.
[ ERROR: ENTITY NOT REGISTERED ]
It vanished immediately, leaving behind a dull ache behind his eyes.
Noel swallowed.
"Entity," he repeated softly. "Not player. Not NPC. Not monster."
Not… anything.
He took a step forward—and felt the ground resist him a fraction of a second too late, as if the world had to double-check whether he was allowed to touch it. The stone solidified under his boot with a faint shimmer.
Reality hesitated around him.
Sometimes walls felt solid. Sometimes his fingers passed through them like smoke. His footsteps made sound inconsistently—echoing one moment, silent the next. Even his breathing felt optional, something his body remembered to do out of habit rather than necessity.
And the pain—
The pain was wrong.
When it came, it was sharp and immediate, but it never lingered. No soreness. No exhaustion. No accumulation. His body refused to remember being hurt.
As if the concept of damage couldn't stick to him.
Noel laughed once, breathless and unsteady. "So I can't die normally," he said. "Great. That's either amazing… or very bad."
The silence did not reassure him.
Somewhere in the darkness beyond the broken tutorial platform, something shifted—larger than the goblin, heavier, more aware. Noel felt it not with his ears, but with that same wrong pressure he'd felt before.
The system wasn't just malfunctioning.
It was trying to decide what he was.
And until it did, Noel Simpson existed in a state between states—untargetable, unregistered, and dangerously undefined.
No name.
No HP.
No guaranteed existence.
The tutorial had failed to introduce him to the world.
Now the world had to figure out whether to reject him… or erase him.