The angel's gathered light was a miniature sun, casting sharp, black shadows of the thrones against the wall. The heat of pure deletion washed over Evan's skin. He didn't have a plan. He had a mindset.
Identify the problem. Inventory the resources. Find the solution.
Problem: The Preservation Protocol required 70% Core Stability.
Resources: A critically damaged Guild Core (Stability 48% and falling). A trickle of regenerating mana. One Guild Master avatar. One possibly-sentient system spirit.
Solution: Unknown.
No. Not unknown. Improvise.
His eyes flew over the admin interface. Warnings screamed in red. One line of system code caught his eye:
A forbidden, insane idea clicked into place.
The angel's light pulsed, ready to fire.
"Aura! Redirect all incoming damage mitigation to the Core! Route it through my player link!"
"That pathway is not designed for energy transfer. It is a neural feedback channel. The strain will—"
"DO IT!"
He didn't wait for confirmation. He reached into the interface with his will and yanked. He created a bridge between his avatar's essence and the dying Core, a direct line that bypassed every safety protocol.
The angel released its light.
A river of annihilating force slammed into the Guild Core. The crystal screamed. The cracks widened.
But a fraction of that force—diverted, siphoned—flooded into Evan first.
It wasn't pain. It was unmaking. A sensation of his very code being scoured, simplified, erased. His vision whited out. His senses shredded into static. He felt his health bar, his mana pool, his skill lists—the foundational data of his character—begin to fray at the edges.
But he held the bridge open.
The Core, shielded by absorbing the destruction through the filter of his own existence, didn't shatter. The stability meter, which had been plummeting, jerked violently.
48%... 52%... 58%... 61%.
It wasn't 70. But it was close. So close.
The attack ceased. The angel observed, its head tilting as if puzzled by the resistance.
Evan collapsed to one knee. His body flickered. Glitches—visual artifacts of a corrupted texture—skipped across his hands. He felt hollow, like a file that had been partially overwritten.
The angel, methodical, raised a hand again. A simpler beam this time. Direct. Efficient.
It struck the Core.
CRACK.
A large chunk of the crystal sheared away, dissolving into mist. The stability meter shuddered.
61%... 57%... 55%.
They were losing. He was killing himself for nothing.
The pain from the connection was a white-hot nail driven into his mind. But within that pain, something else flooded in. Not memories as stories. Memories as data.
A torrent of information, raw and unprocessed, roared through the link from the Core into his flickering consciousness.
Not: "The time we fought the ice dragon."
*But: Battle logs. Damage values. Positioning coordinates of every guild member. Kael's flanking maneuver (vector 34.7 by 12.1). Glimmer's illusion spell (mana signature: oscillating arcane frequency). Bone's shield-wall formation (optimal spacing: 1.5 meters).*
Not: "The quiet conversations in the tavern."
But: Text logs. Dialogue strings. Emotional inflection markers in their coded voices. Thorne's slow, patient cadence. Ember's proud, clipped tones. The unique laughter subroutine of a pixie cook named Flick.
Sixteen years. Not as a story. As a database. A vast, intricate library of every interaction, every pattern, every quirk that made his guild unique. He hadn't just remembered them. He had, on some deep, obsessive level, memorized them.
The epiphany was a lightning strike.
He didn't need to save the world. The Twilight Woods, the Sunken Spires, Ebonreach Keep itself—they were just containers. Beautiful, meaningful containers, but containers all the same.
He needed to save the contents.
"Aura," he gasped, his voice glitching with static. "The protocol… it saves everything. The territory data, the building models, the terrain. What if we don't save all of that?"
"Clarify."
"Compression. Extreme lossy compression. We don't save the castle. We save the blueprint. We don't save the forest. We save the concept of the forest. We strip it down to the essential data patterns—the consciousness templates, the core relationships, the memory logs."
"Theoretical," Aura responded immediately. Her voice was different—faster, more analytical, yet beneath it thrummed the same tension as before. "Such compression would require an anchoring template. A stable, complex pattern to prevent the degraded data from collapsing into noise during transit. A… soul template."
Evan looked at his flickering hands. He looked at the vast, painful, beautiful database of his guild that was now etched into his fraying consciousness. He understood what he was. Not just a player. Not just a Guild Master.
He was a living, breathing backup. A archive of their souls.
"You have one," he said.
"Query?"
"Use me. My connection. My memories. My… pattern. Anchor the compression to me. Pour everything into the template of Evan Black, Guild Master of Monster's Haven."
There was a silence. Not a system lag. A profound, terrible silence.
When Aura's voice returned, it held no trace of the system. It was quiet, intimate, and filled with a sorrow that no program should ever know.
"Evan."
She said his name. Not 'Guild Master'. His name.
"This will not preserve your player avatar. The template will be consumed in the process. It will overwrite your character's core data with the compressed guild matrix. Your existence here—your memories, your connection, your very identity in this world—will be the framework that holds them together. And then it will be… gone."
She paused, the weight of finality in the air.
"There is no respawn from this."
Evan looked past the angel, past the cracking Core, to the empty throne of the Fallen Angel. He heard Leo's voice. Keep the lights on.
He saw Kael's unraveling form. Save them.
He looked at the stability meter.
00:03:11.
He smiled, a tired, glitching smile.
"Sounds like a fair trade," Evan Black said. "Do it."