The smell wasn't just in his nose. It was in his pores.
Ren waded through knee-deep sludge that felt like cold oatmeal. The only light came from the [Logic Drive] in his hand, casting long, dancing shadows against the wet brick walls.
Drip. Drip. Splash.
Every sound echoed, amplified by the tunnel.
Ren shivered. The adrenaline from the heist was gone, replaced by a bone-deep chill. His wolf-fur coat was soaked with sewer water, making it heavy and useless.
He stopped to catch his breath, leaning against a rusted pipe. He wiped his face, smearing grime across his cheek.
"System," he whispered. "Status."
The blue box flickered into existence. It looked unstable, the edges jagged with static.
[User: Ren] [Corruption: 9.4%] [Status: Hypothermia (Stage 1), Exhaustion]
9.4%.
Ren touched his left eye. It was wet. He pulled his hand away and looked at his fingers in the blue light. They were stained with a dark, viscous liquid. Not blood. It looked like ink.
"I'm leaking," Ren muttered. "My texture file is corrupting."
He pushed off the wall. He couldn't stop here. If he slept in this water, he wouldn't wake up.
He trudged deeper. The map in his head, the one he extrapolated from the surface layout, said there should be a maintenance junction ahead.
Ten minutes later, he found it.
It was a dead end. A massive concrete wall blocked the tunnel, marked with a spray-painted skull and the words: NO ENTRY.
Ren frowned. He held up the glowing cube.
The concrete looked solid. Moss grew on it. Water trickled down the cracks.
But his left eye twitched.
He activated the Glitch Vision.
The world turned gray. The water became a flat mesh. The rats scuttling on the ledge became low-polygon blobs.
And the wall?
The wall wasn't there.
Where the concrete should have been, there was a void. A blank space in the code. A texture pasted over nothingness to hide what lay behind.
[Object: Illusory Barrier (Tier 2)] [Source: Legacy Admin] [Collision: False]
Ren stared at it. A "Tier 2" illusion. That was high-level magic. Or high-level coding. Someone didn't want this place found.
"Collision is false," Ren noted. "Meaning it's just a hologram."
He reached out. His hand passed straight through the mossy stone. The sensation was cold, like dipping his hand into mist.
He stepped through.
The sound of the sewer cut off instantly.
He was standing in a room. It was dry. The air was stale, smelling of old paper and dust, but clean. The floor was tiled with pristine white ceramic, untouched by the filth outside.
Ren looked around.
It wasn't a dungeon. It was an office.
Metal shelves lined the walls, filled with rotting books. A desk sat in the center of the room. On the desk sat a computer terminal that looked like it belonged in a museum, bulky, gray, with a curved glass screen.
And sitting in the leather chair behind the desk was a skeleton.
It wore tattered robes that might have once been blue silk. Its bony hand was resting on a small, metallic card on the desk.
Ren approached slowly, his boots squeaking on the clean tile.
[Entity: Unknown (Deceased)] [Cause of Death: System Purge]
Ren felt a chill that had nothing to do with the cold. System Purge. That didn't sound like a monster attack. That sounded like deletion.
He walked to the desk. He looked at the skeleton's hand.
The metallic card under the bony fingers wasn't gold or silver. It was black plastic with a magnetic strip.
[Item: Access Key (Level 1)] [clearance: Maintenance & Waste Management]
Ren gently moved the skeleton's hand aside. The bones rattled, dry as chalk. He picked up the card.
"Sorry," Ren whispered to the corpse. "You don't need this anymore."
He looked at the terminal. The screen was dark.
Ren placed the [Logic Drive] on the desk. He touched the cube to the terminal's casing.
"Interface."
The cube pulsed. The terminal groaned, a fan spinning up inside with a sound like a dying jet engine.
Flicker.
Green text scrolled across the curved screen.
> SYSTEM REBOOT... > ERROR: NETWORK DISCONNECTED. > ERROR: MAIN SERVER UNREACHABLE. > WELCOME, USER [ADMIN_44].
Ren leaned in. An Admin terminal. This was the holy grail.
He typed on the clunky mechanical keyboard.
> QUERY: MAP
The screen refreshed. A wireframe map of the entire Slums sector appeared. It showed every tunnel, every building, every power line.
And it showed the dots.
Thousands of red dots moving on the surface. People. But deep below, in the sewers, there were other dots. Yellow ones.
[Entity: Scrap Golem (Dormant)] [Entity: Waste Processor (Automated)]
Ren's eyes widened. The sewers weren't just a drain. They were a factory.
He typed another command.
> QUERY: CORRUPTION
The screen flashed red.
> DATA REDACTED. > WARNING: USER CORRUPTION DETECTED AT 9.4%. > SUGGESTED ACTION: STABILIZATION.
A drawer in the desk clicked and popped open.
Ren looked down. Inside the velvet-lined drawer was a single glass vial. It contained a silvery liquid that swirled on its own, like liquid mercury mixed with light.
[Item: Stabilization Serum (Tier 1)] [Effect: Reduces Corruption by 15%] [Side Effect: Extreme Pain]
Ren didn't hesitate. He grabbed the vial.
He uncorked it. It smelled like batteries.
"Bottoms up," Ren said.
He downed the silver liquid.
He dropped the vial. It shattered on the floor.
For a second, nothing happened.
Then, Ren screamed.
It felt like he had swallowed molten lead. His veins caught fire. He fell to his knees, clutching his chest, gasping for air that wouldn't come. His vision went white. The black ink oozing from his eye burned as it evaporated.
He thrashed on the floor, knocking over the chair and the skeleton. The bones scattered across the white tiles.
[System Alert: Code Repair in Progress...] [Optimizing...]
Ren curled into a ball, his fingernails scratching against the ceramic. The pain was absolute. It was his body being rewritten, error by error.
And then, as quickly as it started, it stopped.
Ren lay on the floor, panting. His sweat pooled around him.
He opened his eyes. The vision was clear. The static was gone. The headache was gone.
He sat up, checking the blue box.
[Corruption: 0.0%]
Ren laughed. It was a weak, shaky sound, but it was real.
He looked at the scattered bones of the previous admin.
"Thanks for the drink," Ren rasped.
He stood up. He grabbed the Access Key. He grabbed his Logic Drive.
He looked at the map on the screen one last time. He memorized the location of the nearest "Yellow Dot", a dormant Waste Processor.
"Time to upgrade," Ren said.
He typed one final command into the terminal: > SHUTDOWN.
The screen went black.
Ren walked out of the clean room, back into the filth of the sewers. But he walked straighter now. The pain was gone. And he knew exactly where he was going.