For the first time since entering [EXISTENCE], Zeke felt hunted.
It wasn't the usual pressure of elite mobs, territorial bosses, or AI enforcers. No. This was calculated. Human. Vicious.
The system had gone quiet—too quiet.
No notifications, no whispers, no warnings.
Just a persistent ping on his minimap. Red. Tagged. Tracked.
He crouched behind a rusted grav-tank, its ancient frame half-sunken into the cracked asphalt of a forgotten warzone in Sector V-Zeta. His eyes flicked to the sky. The clouds looked corrupted—pixelated and blinking as if reality were trying to render a forgotten file.
Then he heard it.
Boots. Cloaked in silence but too perfectly synchronized to be random.
"He's here. Root Level 3 confirmed. Coordinates locked," a voice whispered over encrypted comms. Not system audio. Real-world bandwidth, embedded into the game's illicit backend.
Zeke didn't need a pop-up to tell him what this was.
The Kill-Switch Guild.
A rogue PvP faction infamous on dark forums. Not recognized by the system, not listed in the leaderboard. Every member played under erased profiles. Unregistered. Invisible. Some said they were ex-devs. Others swore they were black-market hackers. But everyone agreed on one thing—
They existed to kill anomalies.
And Zeke? He was the biggest anomaly of all.
He moved.
A double blink-dash forward, his avatar twisting mid-air to somersault over the barricade. He landed silently and pulled up his corrupted blade, Nullfang, its edge humming with unstable code.
The first attacker emerged—a woman cloaked in static, her eyes glowing red beneath a stitched mask. Her name didn't even render.
She lunged, twin blades shimmering with reverse code—designed to delete pixels, not HP.
Zeke parried, but as their blades clashed, a strange lag hit him—not latency. A code choke. His UI flickered.
They were using DevTools-level hacks. Forbidden builds.
Two more dropped in behind him. No login animation. Just existence.
One held a black cube for a face. The other, a skinned model of an ancient NPC—only… corrupted, mouthless, genderless, eerily still.
Zeke activated Synthetic Root Drive. His skin cracked with light. Veins of pure data glowed underneath, forming a lattice of unknown language across his arms.
Suddenly the code choke reversed.
Now they were lagging.
"I'm not your usual glitch," he muttered, then surged forward.
He slashed diagonally. The blade phased through the cube-faced attacker—and deleted the line of their arm code. The player screamed, and glitched out, crashing to static.
"ONE DOWN!" Zeke called out, not for ego, but to remind himself—he could win this.
But then the masked woman hissed, "Initiate Protocol Delta-17. Firewall Desync!"
A grid of light exploded around him—forming an anti-root field.
His abilities dropped to zero.
A jarring silence filled his screen.
For the first time, Zeke felt what it was like to be just… a player again.
No anomalies. No bugs. Just sword, body, and instincts.
And they outnumbered him.
He ran. But not aimlessly.
He'd studied the terrain of every corrupted sector. This zone had a forgotten server bridge—a data fracture that looped an area into temporal instability. Time stuttered there. Movements repeated. And code weakened.
He dived into the glitched underpass, dodging fire from the Kill-Switch operatives. One bolt grazed his shoulder—realistic pain, the kind you couldn't toggle off.
Inside the glitch field, his screen fractured. Images overlapped. His footsteps echoed three times. But so did theirs.
Perfect.
He activated his Root Mirror—a passive skill unlocked during the Synthetic Root evolution.
A second Zeke shimmered beside him.
Then a third.
And then a fourth.
All code-clones, imperfect, unstable, but real enough in the glitch-field.
The Kill-Switch trio paused at the entrance. The woman cursed.
"He's using fractured layers! Back out. WAIT FOR ADMIN OVERRIDE!"
Too late.
Zeke's clones converged.
From the chaos, he saw the second attacker—glitch-NPC model—stab a clone, only to get swarmed by two more. The masked woman activated a script to escape, but Zeke himself was already in front of her.
His eyes were glowing pure white now. Not even pupil data remained.
"You hunted the wrong bug," he whispered, then rammed Nullfang into her midsection.
[ERROR: ENTITY DELETED]
Her body vanished in a burst of black petals.
Just one left.
The NPC-looking one, whose mouth finally opened… and whispered:
"We were sent… by the Core Dev."
Then vanished—force logged out.
Zeke's world slowed.
Core Dev.
The forbidden term.
The system had no "core dev" listed. Admins were masked. The original creators were gone. But… if someone from the old design team was sending rogue kill squads into a live game…
It meant Zeke's existence wasn't just a bug. It was a threat to something bigger.
Zeke collapsed against the wall, panting. His health bar was blinking red.
His Root Drive flickered.
A soft message blinked into his UI, almost shy.
[NEW ROOT FILE UNLOCKED: "Echoes of Dev-Level Access"]
His hands trembled.
What the hell was this game turning into?
And more importantly—why was it waking up now?