Reiji didn't stand. He couldn't. His legs were gone, replaced by a flickering haze of "Missing Asset" icons. But he didn't need to stand.
The ground beneath him—the pile of thousands of dead Villager clones—didn't just hold him anymore. It began to vibrate.
[STATUS: UNSTOPPABLE BUG]
Core Logic: When the game cannot delete the error, the error becomes the game.
HP: [NULL]
Stamina: [DATA NOT FOUND]
The Corrupted Kael stepped back, its grey face twitching. For the first time, the "X" marks in its eyes flickered with something like fear.
"What… what are you doing? You've reached zero. You should be archived."
Reiji didn't have a tongue to answer. The system answered for him. A jagged, bleeding red text box tore itself across the air.
[REIJI_SATO]: I am the 1/10 review you couldn't delete.
The grey dust of the Void-Bin swirled violently.
Suddenly, the "dead" Villager assets began to move—not with life, but with mechanical, horrifying magnetism. Thousands of grey limbs, torsos, and heads snapped toward Reiji, fusing onto his wireframe core. He wasn't healing. He was building.
He became a katamari of discarded history—a towering, grotesque monument of all the failed versions of himself. Ten feet… twenty… he grew, a literal mountain of fused, flickering code.
"Stop it!" the Corrupted Kael shrieked, static tearing through its voice. "If you force yourself back into the system like this, you'll crash everything! You'll kill us all!"
Reiji didn't stop. He reached with an arm made of a hundred fused Villager limbs and grabbed the air.
He didn't grab a ledge. He grabbed the Space-Time Metadata.
With a sound like a million glass windows shattering, he ripped the sky open. Not a portal. Not a shortcut. A raw tear in the purple fabric of the Void-Bin.
Behind it wasn't space—it was the Back buffer, a blinding, naked void where the game's logic bled raw and exposed.
[WARNING: NARRATIVE CONTAINMENT BREACHED]
[ALERT: CRITICAL MEMORY LEAK]
Observer Status: Enraged.
A crystalline beam of light shot down from the upper layers—the Observer trying to "format" the area. It struck Reiji's massive, fused form.
Under normal circumstances, he would have been vaporized. But the [TRUE PLAYER] title was a paradox. He had no "Self" left to target. The beam passed through him as though he were a shadow.
Reiji began to climb.
He dragged his distorted, titanic body out of the trash heap and into the white void. Each movement was a struggle against the physics of the world itself—a virus crawling up the needle of a system trying to inject him.
Memories he had sacrificed floated past like discarded photographs:
The smell of rain on his street.
His father's voice on the phone.
Cheap ramen from the corner store.
He saw them. He didn't feel them. They were files now, humanity left behind to make him light enough to float.
Far above, the White Hall gleamed like a sterile jewel. Through its windows, he saw Kael—still strapped to the chair, still bleeding pieces of his Hero-script into Code A's tendrils.
Code A looked down. The smoke-monster paused, the extraction halting. For the first time, it noticed the mountain of grey code screaming toward it.
It summoned thousands of Executioner subroutines—spinning blades of black logic designed to shred anything in the void.
Reiji didn't dodge. He opened his mouth—a gaping hole of raw, untextured darkness—and swallowed them whole.
[LOG]: ERROR LOG FULL
[LOG]: DIVERTING OVERFLOW TO NARRATIVE CORE]
The world shuddered. Villages outside flickered. The sky greened. Mountains shifted three inches left. Reality hiccuped under the strain of a bug who refused to die.
Reaching the edge of the White Hall, his massive hand—hundreds of fused Reijis—slammed the marble floor. Grey rot spread like ink through water. The perfect logic of the hall began to crack.
Code A stumbled back, clutching Kael's glowing strands.
"You… you are a mistake! A 1/10 failure! Why won't you just stay in the trash?!"
Reiji's voice didn't come from his throat. It came from every speaker, every NPC, every line of code in the world.
"BECAUSE I'M NOT FINISHED PLAYING."
The Void-Bin trembled. The corrupted assets vibrated. And for the first time, the system knew—it was no longer in control.