Time in the Void-Bin did not pass in minutes.
It passed in glitches.
Reiji sat at the base of the corpse-pile, his back pressed against the cold, untextured legs of a hundred dead versions of himself. Identical faces stared skyward in frozen screams, their data long since compacted into pale, hollow mannequins.
His HP hovered at 44%.
The grey wireframe infection had crawled past his knees, turning his legs into semi-transparent grids of trembling light. He couldn't feel his toes anymore. When he tried to move them, all he received was a faint, rhythmic static pulsing behind his eyes.
Like a broken heartbeat.
Five feet away, the Corrupted Kael sat unmoving.
It was a monument to grief. A statue sculpted from regret and bad endings. Its eyes were black X-marks, fixed on a point three inches above Reiji's head—as if staring at a version of him that no longer existed.
"How long has it been?" Reiji croaked.
His voice scraped out of his throat like sand through rusted gears.
The monster didn't blink.
"The clock broke in the third millionth iteration, Reiji. There is only Before the Deletion and After the Deletion. You are currently in the middle."
Reiji let his head thud back against the pile of Villager #1042 bodies.
His HUD flickered.
His Stamina bar was gone.
In its place was a long, unstable grey meter:
[LOAD_WEIGHT: CRITICAL]
The system wasn't treating him as a character anymore.
It was treating him as clutter.
The layer was compressing him to save space—folding his existence inward, grinding his data down like garbage in a compactor.
"I can't just sit here," Reiji whispered. "I'm the True Player. I've beaten games with a zero-point-zero-one percent clear rate. There's always a way out."
He pushed himself forward.
It was ugly.
He dragged his wireframe legs across the dust, fingers clawing uselessly at the stone. Every inch forward made his vision stutter. Every movement sent a spike of static through his skull.
43%… 42%…
"Where are you going, Player?" Corrupted Kael asked.
Its voice sounded like metal being crushed in a hydraulic press.
"There is no Exit trigger. There is no Secret Passage. This is the trash heap. It doesn't have a door."
"Shut… up," Reiji rasped.
That's when he saw it.
About twenty yards away, half-buried beneath a discarded Boss Arena fog-gate asset, something flickered.
Not grey.
Not broken.
A dull, rusted yellow.
It took him what felt like hours to reach it.
His vision swam with artifacts—bright green hitboxes, floating error prompts, flashing TEXTURE MISSING icons that blinked in and out of existence like dying fireflies.
When he finally reached the object, his trembling hand brushed away the digital dust.
It was a terminal.
Not sleek. Not futuristic.
An old beige CRT monitor sat on a desk made of raw, unpolished wood. Its plastic casing was yellowed with age. A peeling sticker clung to its side.
PROPERTY OF S. WATSON
"Steve…" Reiji breathed.
His glitching hand hovered for a moment.
Then pressed the power button.
The monitor whined to life.
A high-pitched, aching sound—like a machine waking from a long coma.
BOOT_SEQUENCE: INITIATED
USER: S_WATSON (ADMIN_DEV)
STATUS: OFFLINE / ARCHIVED
LOG_ENTRY_404:
"I tried to build a world that lived.
But I accidentally built a world that remembers.
The Observer isn't the villain.
The Observer is the antivirus.
And the Player...
The Player is the virus."
Reiji stared at the screen.
The words flickered in the reflection of his hollowed-out eyes.
"I'm the virus?" he whispered. "I'm just a guy who bought a game."
"You're the guy who forced it to keep running."
The voice came from behind him.
Corrupted Kael stood at his shoulder without a sound, its shadow stretching across the ancient desk.
"Steve wanted to delete us to save us from the loops. But you…"
It leaned closer.
"You kept hitting Continue. You kept feeding the Observer data until it grew eyes."
Reiji gripped the desk.
His HP dropped to 39%.
The terminal chirped.
A new window opened.
Not a log.
A live feed.
The screen shifted to a top-down view of another layer.
A white hall. Sterile. Endless. Perfect.
At its center, Kael—the real Kael—was strapped into a chair of glowing blue light. His hair was white now. His face hollow. His body trembling against restraints made of pure code.
Standing before him was Code A.
A silhouette of black and red smoke, holding a needle forged from condensed Narrative Logic.
"The Hero Flag is shifting back, Reiji," the monster whispered. "The system is fixing the bug by gutting the Hero. Once Code A finishes the extraction, Kael will be just like us."
Its breath brushed his ear.
"And you will be nothing but a memory the system finally deletes."
Reiji looked down at the keyboard.
Half the keys were missing.
He had no stamina.
No powers.
No legs.
But he had a terminal.
And he was the best damn gamer the world had ever seen.
"You think I'm a virus?" Reiji growled, eyes locking onto the blinking cursor.
"Fine. Then it's time I start acting like one."
He placed his hand on the keys.
[SYSTEM WARNING]
Source Code access requires Physical Allocation.
Cost to initiate "COMMAND: INJECT":
15% Total Body Integrity.
Reiji didn't hesitate.
He slammed his hand onto Enter.
His left arm detonated into a storm of unformatted pixels.
There was no scream.
His voice file was deleted as part of the cost.
But on the screen, a line of gold code began to write itself.
[INPUT COMMAND]: SAVE_KAEL
To be continue