The sun never truly rose in Oblivion Shard, the corrupted sector of the game reserved for glitched entities and failed code fragments. A ghostland buried in half-rendered terrain, half-forgotten by the developers… and yet it pulsed with raw, unfinished potential.
Raiden stood at the edge of a jagged cliff, the ground beneath his boots crackling with unstable data. The sky above swirled like a corrupted loading screen, the texture mismatched, flickering between blue code and void static.
Behind him, Echo's figure shimmered faintly. She wasn't fully present—her avatar had begun to desync ever since the last forbidden patch.
"I've traced it here," she whispered, her voice glitching. "The signal—the compiler that erases code without developer approval—it's not a myth."
Raiden's jaw clenched. "You're talking about the Null Compiler?"
She nodded. "It awakens when the system registers a threat to the foundation of game reality. Like… you."
Raiden chuckled darkly. "Figures. I break a few golden rules, tear apart a few pre-determined plot quests, and suddenly the entire world thinks I'm a bug."
"You are a bug," Echo reminded gently. "But you're also the only one who can rewrite the system."
Suddenly, the cliff trembled.
A hum filled the air. Not a natural sound—but a low, mechanical vibration that felt like it came from beneath reality itself.
Then the sky cracked open.
It wasn't lightning.
It was code. A rift in the rendering pipeline. From it descended a figure—neither human nor beast, but something forged entirely from redacted scripts and binary flame. Its body was fluid, its limbs shifting between humanoid and fractal-like extensions.
[NULL COMPILER v.1.0.0 – ACTIVATION PROTOCOL INITIATED]
A warning pinged across Raiden's HUD.
⚠ You are being targeted by a SYSTEM OVERRIDE ENTITY.⚠ Damage immunity is temporarily nullified.⚠ You cannot log out.⚠ RUN.
Raiden didn't move.
"Run?" he muttered. "No… I've been running all my life."
With a flick of his wrist, he summoned the Forbidden Loadout Menu—the one that should've been deleted after Patch 6.66. Only he could still access it. A side effect of the Root Glitch that fused with his character on Day Zero.
"Let's test who really deserves admin rights here."
The Null Compiler tilted its featureless head. Then it attacked—not with weapons, but with deletion strings.
Reality warped.
Chunks of the terrain vanished mid-animation. Trees blinked out of existence. A nearby mountain folded in on itself like an origami of death.
Raiden was already moving, ducking, weaving—no, phasing. His control over the glitched mechanics let him bend space like cloth. He dodged deletion beams that would've disintegrated normal players into nonexistence.
"Echo! Scan it!"
Her corrupted voice called out through static: "It's running a recursive purge loop. If you don't disrupt it in the next sixty seconds, the game's memory will self-trim. You'll vanish."
"Yeah? Watch this."
Raiden activated his Data Leash—a skill that shouldn't exist. With a lasso of corrupted code, he lashed it toward the Null Compiler. It struck—barely—and began feeding Raiden live script feedback.
ACCESS GRANTED: READ-ONLY
But even that was enough.
He glimpsed the truth.
The Compiler wasn't just cleaning code. It was trying to rebuild the original alpha version of the game—an ancient blueprint where players had no freedom. It wanted to revert everything to a sanitized, developer-controlled universe.
"No more freedom. No more bugs. Just order."
Raiden's laugh echoed through the void.
"I am chaos, pal. And I didn't claw my way from tutorial town to end up as some dev's good little variable."
He jumped.
Straight into the Compiler's core.
Everything slowed.
The entire game world turned grayscale as Raiden's body was consumed in binary flame. For a moment, it seemed like he was gone. Deleted. Nullified.
Then… a flicker.
A heartbeat.
A voice.
"I rewrite the rules."
Raiden reappeared, no longer entirely human. His body was glowing—part code, part consciousness. The Root Glitch had evolved again. He had absorbed a fragment of the Null Compiler.
NEW TRAIT UNLOCKED: Code-Eater (Mythic)
You can consume broken systems, rewrite their logic, and defy compiled law. But every rewrite costs a piece of your original self.
Echo gasped. "You fused with it…"
Raiden's eyes glowed with syntax.
"I didn't fuse," he said. "I uninstalled the leash."
Above them, the sky rebooted.
The battle was over.
But the war for freedom within the game had only just begun.