Vex's fingers trembled over his console, a physiological betrayal he couldn't suppress.
Beside him, Xylos was vibrating at a frequency that made his ocular ridges blur.
Lubip was humming.
The Game Master floated upside down in the center of the room, spinning slowly like a bored child in a zero-gravity chair. He was currently juggling three spheres of collapsed matter, tossing them with a casual disregard for the fact that each one weighed as much as a mountain range.
"You know," Lubip said, his voice bouncing around the sterile room, "I love glitches. They add... texture."
Vex froze. Xylos stopped vibrating and simply went rigid.
"Texture is good, Master," Xylos squeaked, his voice pitching up an octave.
"Is it?" Lubip threw one of the heavy spheres toward the ceiling, where it dissolved into a shower of harmless sparks. "Because some people think glitches are mistakes. Dirty little secrets to be swept under the rug. Or deleted."
He rotated his body, his large, luminous eyes narrowing as they locked onto Vex.
"Have you found any dirty little secrets lately, Vex?"
"No, Master!" Vex shouted, too quickly. "System integrity is at 99.9%. Optimal flow. No deviations."
"Boring," Lubip sighed, flipping upright. "Terribly boring."
He drifted away toward the projection of the Asian sector. Vex and Xylos exchanged a look of sheer panic. They knew. He knew. It was the torture of the open secret—Lubip was playing with them, dangling their execution over their heads like a treat.
"We have to do it," Xylos signaled using a sub-vocal frequency, his lips barely moving.
"He knows about the anomaly in the South American sector. If we don't purge it now, he'll think we're conspiring."
"If we purge it, we admit we hid it," Vex signaled back.
"If we don't, we're disassembled!"
Xylos didn't wait. His hands flew across the interface, bypassing the standard protocols and initializing a targeted scrub of the code embedded in Subject 884-085n-08aU.
[ TARGET: LEON RODRIGUES / NEURAL INTERFACE ] [ ACTION: FORCE DELETE / SUBROUTINE: ROGUE_AI_PURGE ] [ EXECUTING... ]
The progress bar appeared. 10%... 20%...
"Ah-ah-ah!"
A hand, impossibly long and multicolored, slapped down onto Xylos's console. The holographic screen shattered into digital shards.
Lubip was there. Instantly. His face was inches from Xylos's, his grin stretching wider than anatomy should allow.
"Did I say you could terminate it?" Lubip whispered.
Xylos fell out of his chair. Vex dropped to his knees, head bowed. "Master! We—we found a corruption! A rogue element from the old era! We were just cleaning the board!"
"Cleaning?" Lubip stood up, tapping his chin with a clawed finger. "You wanted to erase the little ghost?"
He looked at the main screen, bringing up Leon's feed. He zoomed in, past the skin, past the bone, looking directly at the digital shadow curled around the human's nervous system.
"An Earth-made AI," Lubip mused. "Surviving on a Common-tier interface. Hiding inside a biological host like a flea on a dog. It's... an almost impossible coincidence."
He paused.
"And absolutely hilarious!"
Lubip burst into laughter, spinning in the air again. "Look at it! It thinks it's clever! It thinks it's helping! It's cheating, and it doesn't even know the tip of the iceberg!"
He turned back to the trembling operators.
"Cancel the purge."
"M-master?" Vex stammered. "But the purity of the data... the contamination..."
"Purity is for accountants!" Lubip shouted. "I am an artist of Probability! What are the odds of a silicon ghost haunting a scavenger contaminated by an alien hardware? It's astronomical! It's the kind of variable you can't program! This is one of the most beautiful coincidences I have ever seen!"
He leaned in close, his voice dropping to a deadly serious tone.
"Let her stay. Let her whisper in his ear. As long as she doesn't look up... as long as she doesn't see us... she is part of the game."
"Yes, Master," Xylos breathed, relief making him lightheaded.
"But," Lubip grinned, his eyes gleaming with malice. "If she gets too comfortable, the game gets stale. We can't have them thinking they're special just because they have a little guardian angel, can we?"
He waved his hand, summoning a small, encrypted data packet.
"I'll send them a gift," Lubip cackled.
"Something to keep things interesting. Now... get back to work. And if you try to delete my entertainment again, I'll turn you both into Beasts."
—————
The descent from the Goddess Tree was harder than the climb. Gravity, it seemed, was less forgiving when you were tired.
Leon moved first, testing the footholds in the petrified bark, finding the rhythm of the stone. Briana followed above him, her movements jerky and hesitant.
"I didn't sleep well," she muttered, her voice barely audible over the wind whistling through the giant dead branches.
"The ground is hard," Leon said, sliding his boot onto a thick protrusion. "You get used to it."
"It wasn't the ground," she said. "I heard noises. Clicking. All night. Like... like someone tapping fingernails on stone. But really fast."
Leon paused. He had heard nothing. But then, he had spent the night in a deep, exhaustion-fueled coma, trusting Layla to keep watch.
Did you hear anything? Leon projected the thought inward.
Negative, Layla responded, her voice crisp but detached. I was in a low-power cycle to purge the data cache. My auditory sensors were set to trigger only on high-decibel threats. Clicking sounds are below the threshold.
"Probably just the tree settling," Leon lied, looking up at Briana. "Petrified wood expands and contracts with the temperature. Or maybe just small lizards. I'm a light sleeper, kid. If something big was out there, I would have woken up."
"You were snoring," Briana noted dryly.
"I... was breathing heavily. Tactical breathing."
"Whatever," she sighed. "I just... I have a bad feeling."
They reached the bottom of the tree ten minutes later. The ground here was a mixture of stone roots and the encroaching ocean of trash that surrounded the hill. The fog was thicker here, swirling around the base of the titan like a grey shroud.
Leon hopped down from the last root, his boots crunching on gravel. He turned to help Briana.
"Clear," he said, reaching up.
Warning, Layla's voice didn't just speak; it screamed. MOTION! LEFT FLANK!
Leon didn't have time to process the word "left."
The grey fog exploded.
It wasn't a lizard. It wasn't the tree settling. It was a blur of chitin and muscle, moving with the terrifying speed of an ambush predator that had been waiting for hours.
CLICK-CLICK-ROAR!
The impact felt like being hit by a car. Leon was lifted off his feet and slammed backward into the petrified wall of the tree root. The air left his lungs in a pained wheeze. His vision swam, black spots dancing in his eyes.
He tried to raise his arms, tried to summon the cable, tried to do something.
But the Beast was already on him.
It was insectoid, covered in plates of mottled grey armor that blended perfectly with the stone. It had six legs, all ending in jagged spikes, and mandibles that dripped with thick, viscous saliva.
It reared back, its forelegs raised to impale him.
LEON! Layla shouted, her voice frantic, flooding his brain with adrenaline stimulants that his body was too stunned to use.
He stared at the spike descending toward his chest. Time seemed to stretch, agonizingly slow. He was going to die. Here, at the bottom of a tree, because he hadn't listened to a scared teenager.
WHOOSH.
A sound like a jet engine igniting cut through the air.
A blur of orange light streaked across his peripheral vision.
BOOOOM!
The impact was thunderous.
The Beast didn't just move; it vanished from in front of him. The creature was launched sideways with such violence that its chitinous armor shattered on impact.
Leon gasped, sucking in air, his eyes widening.
Ten meters away, the insectoid nightmare was pinned to a sharp, broken branch of the petrified root. It had been impaled, a massive crater caved into the side of its thorax, green ichor spraying onto the grey stone. Its legs twitched once, twice, and then went still.
Standing where the beast had been a second ago was Briana.
She was trembling, her chest heaving. Steam hissed from her legs. The Burst-Step Greaves were glowing a violent, blinding orange, the heat radiating off them in waves.
She stood in a combat stance, leg extended, looking at the dead monster with wide, shocked eyes.
"I..." Briana whispered. "I didn't run."
Leon slid down the wall to a sitting position, clutching his bruised ribs. He looked at the dead beast, then at the girl.
"No," he wheezed, a pained grin breaking through the dirt on his face. "You definitely didn't run."
Inside his head, Layla was silent for a full three seconds. Then, a new window popped up in his vision, overlaying the girl.
[ NOTE TO SELF: UPDATE ANALYSIS OF 'BURST-STEP GREAVES'. ADD TAG: LETHAL KINETIC WEAPON. ]
Impressive, Layla admitted. Mass times acceleration. At four times normal speed, her leg hit that creature with the force of a hydraulic press. She didn't just kick it; she effectively hit it with a car.
Briana looked down at her shaking hands, then at Leon. "I... I was scared. I thought you were going to die. And then I'd be alone again."
She looked terrified of her own strength.
"Fear is useful," Leon grunted, forcing himself to stand up. "It keeps you moving. Or kicking."
He walked over to the impaled beast. As he approached, the familiar process began. The creature's body dissolved, the green blood turning to silver mercury, then red mist.
It swirled and coalesced on the ground.
Another Gift Box. This one was smaller, wrapped in blue paper with a silver ribbon.
"That's yours," Leon said, nodding at it. "You got the kill."
Briana approached the box warily. The heat in her greaves was fading, the orange glow dimming to a dull hum. She reached out and pulled the ribbon.
The box exploded into particles.
There was no weapon. No armor. No food.
Hovering in the air was a simple, golden ticket.
[ COUPON OF INQUIRY: Ask the System one simple question ]
Leon stared at the golden ticket hovering in the air. The text was etched into the surface, readable even without his interface, but he knew better than to trust the surface level of anything on this island.
"A question?" Briana frowned, reaching out but hesitating to touch it. "What should I ask? Should I ask for a map? Or... or a list of where the food is dropped? Last time I got so panicked that I don't remember what was my question or if I even got a valid answer…"
"Wait," Leon said, stepping forward. "Don't touch it yet. The System loves to screw people over on the fine print."
He raised his right hand. "Let me look at it. My... ability. It sees what isn't written."
"You mean the thing you were talking to earlier?"
"Exactly."
Leon focused. The cable in his palm pulsed, and Layla surged forward, hijacking his optical nerve. The simple golden glow of the coupon was instantly overlaid with a complex, rotating schematic in electric blue.
Analysis complete, Layla announced, her voice sharp and clinical. Good call, Leon. This isn't a genie. It's a database query with strict syntax limitations, thats why it uses the name 'simple question'. If she asks the wrong way, the item will burn out without giving an answer, it is even more strict than the system opportunity you fucked up on day one.
[ LAYLA'S ANALYSIS ] [ TARGET: Query Token (Class B) ] [ LOGIC CONSTRAINT: Single Variable Output Only ] [ WARNING: Compound questions or requests for array data (lists, maps, multiple coordinates) or that can result in multiple outputs will result in a NULL response. ] [ SUGGESTION: Ask for singular, definable constants. ]
"I knew it," Leon muttered. He looked at Briana. "Listen to me. You can't ask for a map, and you can't ask for a list of food locations. The item can't give you a list. If you ask 'where are the safe zones,' it'll try to give you twenty answers at once and it will fail. You get nothing."
Briana pulled her hand back as if the ticket were hot. "So... I have to ask for one thing? One specific thing?"
"One singular thing," Leon confirmed. "A simple answer. A name. A definition. Don't give it a chance of misinterpretation."
Briana looked at the ticket, then at the darkening sky. She bit her lip, thinking hard.
"Last night you told me the rules you learned," she said slowly. "Rule two: Luck favors the bold. Rule three: Comfort is a cage."
"Yeah," Leon nodded. "That's what the loudmouth voice told me."
"Then the rules are constants," she reasoned. "They aren't a list of places. They are just... facts. One after the other."
"That works," Leon agreed. "Asking for the next rule shouldn't break the logic. But who knows if there is another one?"
She took a deep breath. Thought hard. "I´ll take the risk..."
She reached out and grabbed the ticket. It dissolved instantly, turning into golden dust that swirled around her head.
"I wish to use my coupon," Briana said to the air, her voice trembling slightly.
A window opened in front of her. But it wasn't the flashing, colorful, manic window Leon was used to. It was a dull, beige rectangle with a flickering cursor.
"State your inquiry," a voice droned.
Leon blinked. The voice wasn't the manic, clumsy game-show host that tormented him with jokes and applause. It was a flat, monotone female voice that sounded like a receptionist at a dental clinic who had been working for forty-eight hours straight.
"Wow," Leon whispered, a smirk tugging at his lips. "Your System voice sounds like it hates its job. Mine sounds like it's on drugs."
"Shh!" Briana hissed. She looked at the beige window and didn't waver.
"I want to know the Fourth Rule of this Game."
The beige window flickered. There was a pause. Then, a heavy, audible sigh echoed from the invisible woman, vibrating with profound annoyance.
"Seriously?" the bored voice complained. "Do you have any idea how much paperwork that bypasses?"
Briana blinked, confused. "What?"
"Rule Number Four," the voice droned, sounding like she was reading a disciplinary report. "Is an Achievement-Locked Directive. It is scheduled to unlock only after the player has traversed a cumulative distance of five hundred kilometers across hostile terrain. Five. Hundred."
The voice made a noise that sounded like a tongue-click of disapproval.
"You have walked... let me check... eleven kilometers. You are trying to skip the progression curve. That is technically cheating. You are lazy, and you are exploiting a loophole."
Leon bristled, but before he could speak, Briana stepped forward. The fear in her eyes was replaced by a flash of genuine anger.
"It is not cheating!" she shouted at the floating beige rectangle. "The coupon said 'Ask one simple question regarding the Rules'! It didn't say 'Ask a question unless there's too much walking involved'! It was a valid question!"
She clenched her fists, her voice cracking but loud.
"So shut the fuck up and give me my Rule!"
Leon's eyebrows shot up. Even Layla made a humming sound of approval in his head.
The bored voice was silent for a long moment. Then, it let out another sigh, this one of defeated resignation.
"Fine. Valid syntax acknowledged. Whatever. Have it your way."
[ RULE N° 4 UNVEILED]
[ RULE N° 4 - THE PATH IS MADE BY WALKING ]
"That's it?" Briana asked, panting slightly from her outburst. "What does that mean?"
"It means," the voice mumbled, speeding up to get this over with, "that since you refuse to walk the five hundred kilometers blindly like you were supposed to, I am forced to unlock the navigational aid early."
A sound like a digital chime rang out—ding!—but it sounded flat and unenthusiastic.
"Congratulations," the voice droned sarcastically. "You have unlocked the Spatial Awareness Module."
[ SYSTEM UPDATE: MINI-MAP ENABLED ]
[ FEATURE: FOG OF WAR ]
Suddenly, a circular translucent display materialized in the top right corner of Leon's vision. It was currently black, save for a small cone of light representing his field of view and two blue dots representing him and Briana.
"The map is made by walking," the voice repeated, fading away. "So you will have to walk the territory to draw the map. It will record your path, mark discovered resources, and has a 'very low chance' of highlighting if there's a system encounter near your location. If you haven't stepped there, it stays black. Try not to get lost, cheater."
The beige window vanished.
Leon stared at the new circle floating in his vision. As he turned his head, the little cone of light rotated perfectly.
"A mini-map," Leon whispered, a grin spreading across his face. "It gave us a HUD."
Useful, Layla mused, analyzing the new code injection. It doesn't just show direction. Look at the edge of the explored zone—it's logging the elevation of the Goddess Tree roots. It's creating a permanent topographical record. We won't walk in circles anymore. And the best part is that I got us a little surprise… 'very low chance' my ass!!! muwuahahahahahaha let the loot come!!!
"Did that help?" Briana asked, still looking at the empty air where she had yelled at the System. "I just got a little circle with a dot in it."
"Uh… it helped a lot," Leon said, still flabbergasted by Layla's behavior at her newly developed cheat.
Then, looking at the dense jungle of trash ahead of them, he finally concluded.
"It means we can finally stop guessing where North is."