The breach hadn't stopped whispering since the message.
Root stood at the edge of the compound's inner chamber, holding the signal stone in one hand like it might bite. It pulsed faintly now, as if mocking his silence. For hours, he'd let it sit there—untouched, untraced—while the war room shifted into something resembling a movement. More players had joined, more defectors leaving behind their Class Trees and preset destinies to follow a guy with no stats, no questline, and a sarcastic summon who insulted everything in sight.
Veyr hovered behind him, arms folded like always, mask unreadable except for the faint blue glow behind its eye slots. "You're stalling," he said flatly.
Root didn't bother denying it. "I know what tracing it means."
"Yeah," Veyr said. "But you also know what not tracing it means."
Root turned the stone over in his hand. Ever since he declined the System's "Regent Node" offer—the one that came with world-shaping privileges in exchange for deleting Veyr—everything had gotten louder. Messages. Drones. Threats wrapped in diplomacy. Half the zones they controlled had been labeled "unstable" by the global framework. System-seeded agents were popping up in player parties. And every time he tried to push forward, the world gave him a thousand reasons to stop.
He tapped the stone.
A thin trail of static symbols flickered into view. No sound. No interface. Just raw Hollow code. It curled through the air like ghostwriting, carving a narrow map across his vision. No coordinates. No context. Just a blinking word at the bottom:
[ TRACE? ]
Root clenched his jaw. "I don't want to chase shadows."
Veyr floated closer. "Maybe it's not a shadow. Maybe it's a mirror."
Against better judgment, Root accepted the prompt. The air around him pulsed once, violently. The code vanished.
Nothing happened.
Until the sky changed.
Above the compound, reality bent inward. A localized breach shimmered across the sky dome—like someone had scribbled over it with a burnt pen. A tear, not in space, but in narrative stability. And out of that tear came a name.
A voice. A phrase.
Not spoken, but written into the world.
"ASH PROTOCOL ENGAGED.
TRACEPATH ACKNOWLEDGED.
WELCOME, LOST SCRIPT."
Root felt the Hollow interface vibrate inside him like a second heartbeat. It wasn't just a message. It was a summon.
But it wasn't calling Veyr.
It was calling him.
The world didn't shift. It unraveled.
Root stood at the breachpoint where the Hollow trace had led him, surrounded by a hazy expanse of terrain that flickered in and out of definition. One moment it looked like a forest, the next like scorched stone halls. Shapes twisted mid-air, textures failing to settle—like the rendering engine itself had given up trying to define this place. There was no quest marker. No music. No ambient sound. Just the hum of static at the edge of his perception, like he was walking through a broken cutscene.
This was an Ash Zone.
Veyr drifted beside him, unusually quiet, his mask's light dimmed to a soft silver. "It's one of the places they deleted," he said after a while. "Not just from the map. From memory. Class trees that failed testing. Summons too dangerous to balance. Stories that didn't align with the System's message."
Root stepped forward. The ground beneath his feet crunched—not with dirt, but with corrupted code fragments that shattered like glass. His Hollow interface flickered every few seconds, trying to adapt. Trying to understand.
"So this is where forgotten power goes," he muttered.
"No," Veyr replied. "This is where it waits."
A figure stood in the distance. Alone. Wrapped in a robe made of flickering sigils, their face blurred by censorship, their presence glitching like a half-rendered idea. They didn't attack. They didn't move.
Root approached cautiously. His hand hovered over a Hollow rewrite trigger, just in case. When he was close enough, the figure spoke—without sound, their words appearing directly across Root's vision in black-on-white text.
"You are not the first to arrive.
You are the first to arrive intact.
You may call me a Sentinel."
Root stared. "Are you Hollow?"
The words appeared again:
"I was. Before they rewrote me.
Now I am something less—and more.
I am a checkpoint. A wound. A warning."
Veyr narrowed his eyes behind the mask. "He's not alive. He's code scaffolding."
Root looked at the Sentinel again. "Then why bring me here?"
There was a pause. Then three new words filled the space between them:
"Because it's starting."
The world flickered again.
A pulse of heat ripped across the zone—followed by howling. Not from beasts. Not from players.
From scripts.
From quests that had never been assigned. From broken abilities never coded to function. From pieces of the story the System had thrown away… and now wanted back.
Root didn't flinch. He stepped forward, eyes set on the core of the Ash Zone.
"If this is what they buried," he said, "then I want to see everything."
The Sentinel didn't move.
It simply dissolved—its robe of flickering code unraveling strand by strand, carried off by unseen wind. As the last thread vanished, the zone trembled. The sky above buckled like glass under pressure, and the terrain convulsed, snapping into a singular form.
The Ash Zone had chosen its shape: a forgotten arena from an unreleased raid. Geometry broken. Walls floating. Obelisks suspended by invisible threads. And at the center, kneeling in silence, was the Entity.
It didn't rise.
It expanded.
Like a memory being remembered too fast.
Its body was composed of three overlapping summons, stitched together with glitch-coded chains. One arm was plated like a knight, but melted at the elbow into flame. The other resembled a corrupted beast's limb, jagged and twitching with fragments of class tags. Its face was nothing but a spinning cube of unreadable class IDs—dozens of them, all rejected.
Its name floated above in unstable script:
[ RECOMPILE_DRAFT_7_ASHED ]
Veyr made a sound that could've been a laugh or a curse. "They really didn't want this thing to live."
The Entity pulsed once—and the Hollow System screamed.
Root dropped to one knee, his interface lurching out of sync. Red lines of error cut across his vision. The air thickened. His sigils tried to rewrite—but failed. This thing wasn't just powerful. It was unreadable.
The System hadn't just erased it. It had refused to give it rules.
That made it pure narrative chaos.
Veyr didn't wait. His hand snapped upward, summoning twin gravity wells that distorted the Entity's footing. The obelisks around the arena shattered inward, pulled into the swirl. But the Entity didn't resist.
It moved with the collapse, contorting like liquid. Its knight arm struck the ground, creating a ripple that erased Veyr's pressure like it was never cast.
Then it turned its cube-face toward Root.
And it spoke.
"WRONG TAG DETECTED.
NON-STORY ELEMENT IN ZONE.
TERMINATE OR CONSUME."
Root stood.
Breathing hard. Hollow Points burning his chest.
This was different. Not like the battles he'd faced before. This wasn't a boss with mechanics. This was the story itself trying to delete the paragraph that didn't belong.
He activated his only working sigil: Override: Reject Rewrite.
Reality buckled.
And the Entity lunged.
The arena collapsed into a void of null lines. And in the center of it all, Root didn't run.
He rewrote.