Chapter 146: The Glitch in the Garden
The town of Oakhaven was no longer the peaceful sanctuary it had been for the past year. The sky, once a natural blue, was now fractured by long, jagged lines of static that looked like cracks in a glass ceiling. Birds flew in stuttering patterns, and the sound of the ocean was replaced by a low-frequency hum that vibrated in everyone's teeth.
"Aki! Get back from the window!" Von shouted, his voice echoing with a command he hadn't used since the fall of the Mother-System.
Aki didn't listen. He was staring at the middle of the street where a small, localized vortex of pixels was swirling. It looked like a corrupted save file trying to manifest itself in three dimensions. Suddenly, the pixels solidified, and a figure emerged.
It was a Level 45 Shadow-Stalker—a monster from the early dungeons of Server 777. But it wasn't a glowing hologram anymore. It had physical weight. Its claws scratched the real asphalt, leaving deep, smoking gouges. Its eyes were red LEDs that bled digital light onto the pavement.
"No way..." Aki whispered, his hand instinctively reaching for a wrench on his workbench. "That thing shouldn't exist here. It doesn't have a biological body!"
Improvised Warfare
The Shadow-Stalker let out a screech that sounded like a dial-up modem, and lunged toward a group of terrified tourists.
"Sai! Cover them!" Von roared.
Sai didn't have his enchanted shield, but he grabbed a heavy steel manhole cover from the street with a strength that defied human limits. He slammed the metal disk into the monster's chest, sending it tumbling backward. "It feels solid, Von! But it's cold... like ice made of electricity!"
Aki realized he couldn't fight a Shadow-Stalker with a wrench. He ran back into his repair shop, his mind racing through the "Sabotage Code" he still carried in his DNA. He saw a row of old, high-voltage toasters he had been fixing for the local bakery.
"Leo said the system is using the internet grid, right?" Aki muttered, his eyes glowing gold. He grabbed several power cables and stripped the wires with his teeth. He didn't just plug them in; he "Linked" them to his own neural signature.
Command: Voltage_Amplification = 1000%
Target_Frequency: Anti-Data_Pulse
The Toaster Cannon
As the Shadow-Stalker prepared to lunge at Rena, Aki sprinted out of the shop, carrying two glowing, sparking toasters like they were dual daggers.
"Hey, Pixel-Face! Eat some breakfast!" Aki yelled.
He slammed the two toasters together, creating a massive discharge of "Dirty Electricity"—power that was modified by his internal code to be poisonous to digital entities. A beam of white-hot static shot out, hitting the Shadow-Stalker directly in its core.
The monster didn't bleed. It glitched. Its form began to stretch and flicker, turning back into raw blocks of unrendered data before finally dissolving into a cloud of harmless sparks.
"Toasters, Aki? Seriously?" Rena panted, her hands glowing with a faint green light as she tried to stabilize the local reality.
"Hey, it worked, didn't it?" Aki grinned, though his hands were shaking from the feedback. "But Von... that was just one Level 45 scout. If the 'Mirror-World' starts spawning High-Server bosses, we're going to need more than kitchen appliances."
The Gathering Storm
Von looked at the sky, where a massive, golden eye was beginning to form in the clouds—the symbol of the Architects. "They aren't just sending monsters, Aki. They are 'Mapping' our world. They want to turn the entire planet into a new server where they are the absolute masters."
"Guys!" Leo's voice broke through the static on Aki's phone. "The Oakhaven glitch was just a distraction! They've already taken over the capital's power grid. You have to get to the 'Seed' in the Old Sector. It's the only thing that can broadcast a signal strong enough to 'De-Sync' the Mirror-World!"
Von looked at his friends—the thief, the healer, and the warrior. They looked like ordinary humans, but he could see the code shimmering in their eyes.
"The peace is over," Von said, his voice echoing with the weight of a King. "Load the van. We're going back to where it all began. We're going to the Old Sector."
As they drove away from the beach, the ocean behind them began to turn into a frozen sea of unmoving pixels. The world was dying, and they were its only antivirus..