Silence was a luxury Reiji could no longer afford. Now, there was only the Hum—the low vibration of millions of lines of dead code grinding against each other at a frequency that made teeth ache and eyes water.
He stared at the CRT monitor. His left arm was gone—not severed, just omitted. Where his shoulder ended, a cloud of flickering blue cubes hovered, dissipating into the grey air of the Void-Bin.
[SYSTEM LOG]
Current Integrity: 24%
Warning: Critical Memory Sectors Accessed for Fuel
Deleted: Memory of Mother's Face (Partial)
Reiji's breath hitched. He tried to picture her—the woman from the beginning, the one whose death had started his shut-in life. He could remember the fact of her, but the image was a corrupted thumbnail. A blur of colors that didn't resolve into a person.
"Worth it," he whispered. Though no sound came out; his voice file had already been sacrificed.
The Corrupted Kael moved closer. Its "X" eyes reflected the beige glow of the terminal. It didn't stop him. It just watched, fascinated by the way a human could willingly delete himself to save another.
"You're trying to write a 'Bridge' command," it said, voice a slow, grinding crawl. "To reach the White Hall, you must bypass the Observer's firewall. That requires more than an arm, Reiji. It requires a heart."
Reiji ignored the ghost. His right hand—the only one left—clattered against the plastic keys. Each keystroke felt like dragging a needle through his own soul.
The terminal screamed. A progress bar crawled across the cracked screen.
[0.01% … 0.02% …]
His vision began to tunnel.
He looked back at the Live Feed. In the sterile White Hall, Code A loomed over the real Kael. The smoke-creature's tendrils were inside Kael's chest, pulling out glowing strands of gold. Each strand was a piece of the "Hero" script. Kael's eyes rolled back, jaw slack—hollowed out.
Reiji's jaw set. He had no strength, no stamina, barely any body—but he had Spite.
The terminal's "Physical Allocation" prompt glowed:
[ALLOCATION REQUIRED: 10% INTEGRITY]
Equivalent Value: Language Processing Center / Social Interaction Logic
He slammed ENTER.
Pain exploded through him. Words—the very concept of them—slipped away. He knew what he wanted to do, but he no longer had names for "Kael," "Game," or "Home." They were variables now. His right leg dissolved into wireframes. He slumped against the desk, held up only by his remaining elbow.
[0.45% … 0.89% … 15.0% …]
The Corrupted Kael knelt beside him. Its oily, black hand rested on the desk. "Look at you. You're becoming a ghost before you're even dead. Is one NPC worth the erasure of your entire existence?"
Reiji couldn't answer with words. Instead, he looked the creature in its X eyes and smiled—a jagged, broken, defiant gamer's grin.
Suddenly, the terminal's beige plastic cracked. Golden light bled from the fractures, forming a tether that shot out from the screen and into the Void-Bin.
[RELAYER LINK: ESTABLISHED]
[DATA TRANSFER: INITIATED]
His consciousness split.
He was still in the Void-Bin, dying among the grey corpses of Villager #1042. But he was also in the system—a stream of jagged, angry red data screaming through the veins of Elysia. He was the virus, and he had finally found a vein.
Ahead, he saw the White Hall. He saw Code A.
And then: a massive shadow loomed over the data-stream.
THE OBSERVER.
The giant crystalline eye slammed down a barrier of Perfect Logic, cutting him off from the White Hall.
[THREAT DETECTED: UNKNOWN MALWARE]
[ACTION: QUARANTINE]
Reiji—the data version of him—shattered against it.
Back in the Void-Bin, his body convulsed. HP dropped: 12% … 11% … 10%.
The terminal sparked. Smoke curled from the CRT. One last flicker of gold appeared:
[HACK FAILED: INSUFFICIENT PERMISSIONS]
[NOTE: YOU ARE NOT STRONG ENOUGH TO BE THE HERO. YOU ARE ONLY STRONG ENOUGH TO DIE.]
He fell to the grey dust. Limbless, voice-less, memory-less—a fragment of a man.
The Corrupted Kael stood over him. Its gaze held something almost like pity.
"I told you, Reiji. The trash heap doesn't have a door."
Then, a faint beep.
Not from the terminal. From himself.
A hidden, gold-trimmed window appeared.
[HIDDEN TITLE ACTIVATED: TRUE PLAYER]
Condition Met: Total loss of self in pursuit of the objective.
Effect: Player no longer bound by Character HP.
NEW STATUS: UNSTOPPABLE BUG
Reiji's wireframe eyes flared with cold, white light.
He didn't need a terminal anymore.
He was the terminal.
And the Observer, Code A, and
even the Void-Bin itself would now have to play by his rules.
To be continue...