The ladder seemed to go down forever.
"I hate ladders," Zayn grumbled from above, his boots clanking on the metal rungs. "It's 2026. Where are the elevators? Where are the escalators? My knees are clicking louder than my bow."
"Elevators need power," Bhy Khay called up. "Ladders need gravity. Gravity is free."
"Tell that to the Godfather," Elara muttered.
They hit the bottom. Bhy Khay dropped into a corridor that looked nothing like the forest above. It was sterile, white, and humming with the sound of high-voltage cooling fans. The walls were lined with thick bundles of fiber-optic cables.
"This isn't a military bunker," Bhy Khay ran his hand along the smooth wall. "This is a Data Center."
"Under a tree?" Tomiwa asked, sketching a quick map of the hallway on her palm. "That's... oddly secure."
"The best place to hide a needle is in a haystack," Bhy Khay walked forward. "The best place to hide a server farm is in a forest where the trees eat people."
They reached a heavy blast door. It was slightly ajar, sparks showering from a broken control panel.
[ZONE: PROJECT NAIJA-ZERO (Black Site)]
[STATUS: ABANDONED]
[SYSTEM INTEGRITY: 12%]
"Twelve percent?" Zayn raised his bow. "That's lower than my phone battery on a good day. That means containment is failing."
"Containment of what?" Elara asked.
Bhy Khay pushed the door open.
Inside, the room was a massive, circular control center. Screens covered the walls, most of them smashed or displaying static. But in the center of the room, hovering above a main console, was... something wrong.
It wasn't a monster. It wasn't a person.
It was a Glitch.
A floating, jagged shape that looked like broken pixels. It shifted constantly—one second it was a cube, the next a stretched-out texture of a human face, then a wireframe sphere. It made a sound like a scratched CD skipping on repeat.
kzzt-kzzt-SCREEE.
[ENEMY: DATA FRAGMENT (Corrupted)]
[LEVEL: NaN (Not a Number)]
[HP: ???]
"What is that?" Tomiwa stepped back, her charcoal stick trembling. "I can't draw it. My eyes hurt just looking at it."
"It's a bug," Bhy Khay said, his voice dropping. "A literal bug in the System. The reality rendering engine failed here."
The Glitch noticed them. Or at least, it processed their presence.
It didn't roar. It simply... lagged toward them. It teleported two meters forward, then rubber-banded back, then suddenly appeared right in front of Zayn.
"Shoot it!" Bhy Khay shouted.
TWANG.
Zayn fired a bamboo bolt.
The arrow passed straight through the Glitch's body as if it were a ghost. But the Glitch didn't ignore it. It touched the arrow.
ZZZRT.
The arrow didn't break. It deleted. One second it was there, the next—gone. No dust. No sound. Just erased from existence.
"It deletes matter!" Zayn screamed, scrambling back. "Don't let it touch you! It's a walking Recycle Bin!"
"Elara, Wall!" Bhy Khay ordered.
"[Frost Wall]!"
Elara slammed her staff. A thick wall of ice rose up.
The Glitch collided with the ice. It didn't smash it. It simply merged with it, turning the blue ice into a flickering, purple texture of "Missing Asset" errors.
[ERROR: OBJECT ID NOT FOUND.]
The ice wall vanished.
"It's eating the code of the objects," Bhy Khay realized. "Physical attacks won't work. Magic won't work. It interprets them as data and deletes them."
"So we run?" Tomiwa asked, already backing toward the ladder.
"No," Bhy Khay activated his [Sovereign Eyes]. "We debug it."
He looked at the Glitch. He didn't see a monster. He saw a swirling vortex of red numbers.
[EXCEPTION: MEMORY LEAK AT ADDRESS 0x004F]
[CAUSE: OVERLOAD]
"It's stuck in a loop," Bhy Khay said, equipping his dagger—not to fight, but to use as a conductor. "It's trying to process a command it can't understand. We need to crash it."
"Crash it?" Elara asked. "How?"
"Overload the buffer," Bhy Khay grinned. "Tomiwa! Draw everything!"
"What?"
"Draw everything! Boxes! Cats! Cars! Anvils! Spam the chat!" Bhy Khay shouted. "Elara, cast every spell you have! Ice! Water! Mist! Zayn, shoot every arrow!"
"You want us to DDOS a monster?" Zayn asked, bewildered.
"Yes! Give it more data than it can eat!"
The team didn't hesitate.
Tomiwa went wild. She sketched circles, squares, chickens, chairs—hundreds of ink constructs flooding the room.
Elara unleashed a blizzard of ice shards, mist, and water bolts.
Zayn fired rapidly, turning his bow into a machine gun.
The room became a chaotic storm of particles and objects.
The Glitch shrieked. It spun wildly, trying to delete the ink chicken, the ice wall, the arrow, the chair, the mist...
kzzt-kzzt-kzzt-kzzt.
It expanded, glowing brighter and brighter purple.
[SYSTEM ALERT: PROCESSING LOAD 99%]
[WARNING: BUFFER OVERFLOW.]
"More!" Bhy Khay shouted. "It's choking!"
The Glitch froze. It stopped flickering. It turned into a solid, grey cube.
[FATAL ERROR.]
[PROCESS TERMINATED.]
POP.
The Glitch imploded. It vanished, leaving behind a small, glowing pile of blue dust.
[ENEMY DEFEATED: DATA FRAGMENT.]
[XP GAINED: +0 (Bug Fix Reward: +1000 Coins)]
"Zero XP?" Zayn panted, lowering his bow. "We fought a hole in reality and got zero XP?"
"Admin work is thankless," Bhy Khay walked over to the dust. "But it pays well."
He picked up a shard of something that dropped from the Glitch. It looked like a piece of glass, but it reflected things that weren't there.
[ITEM: MEMORY SHARD]
[USE: VIEW CORRUPTED LOG.]
"What is it?" Elara asked.
Bhy Khay crushed the shard in his hand.
Instantly, a hologram projected into the room. It was shaky, like bad CCTV footage. It showed a man in a lab coat—Dr. Balogun—standing in front of the main console in this very room. He looked terrified.
"Log 404. Date: October 2025. Five months before the crash."
"We found it. The signal from deep space. It wasn't a message. It was an executable file."
"We tried to run it in a sandbox environment. We thought we could control it. But the file... it rewrote the OS. It turned the simulation into reality."
"The System isn't an invasion. It's a Patch. Earth was failing. The climate, the wars... the Universe sent a Patch to optimize us."
"But the Patch is corrupted. The Lagos Node... it's the source of the corruption. If we don't fix the Lagos Server, the Patch will delete the user base."
"Meaning us. It will delete us."
The hologram flickered and died.
Silence filled the bunker.
"A Patch?" Tomiwa whispered. "We're just... buggy software?"
"And Lagos is the virus," Bhy Khay looked at the blank screen.
"So the Godfather isn't just a Warlord," Zayn realized. "He's sitting on the corrupted hard drive."
Bhy Khay turned to the console. He plugged in his [City Lord Token].
[DOWNLOADING MAP DATA...]
[LAGOS SERVER: RED ZONE.]
[THREAT LEVEL: CRITICAL.]
"We have to go to Lagos," Bhy Khay said. "Not just to fight the Syndicate. But to fix the server."
He pulled up a schematic on the screen.
"There's a train line. The Lagos-Ibadan Standard Gauge Rail. It runs directly from Moniya to Mobolaji Johnson Station in Lagos."
"The trains aren't running," Elara said.
"Not yet," Bhy Khay pointed to a blueprint on the screen. "But this bunker has a prototype. An armored locomotive designed for hazardous transport."
[OBJECT: THE "DANFO" MK II (Armored Train)]
[STATUS: DORMANT]
"We don't take the road," Bhy Khay grinned. "We take the express."
He turned to his team.
"Next stop: Lagos. Please mind the gap."
[QUEST STARTED: THE MIDNIGHT TRAIN.]
[OBJECTIVE: LOCATE AND REPAIR THE ARMORED TRAIN.]
Bhy Khay walked toward the hangar door at the back of the room.
"Zayn, you wanted an elevator? I got you something better. A tank on rails."