Kai winced. "Still not used to that."
His HUD flickered again—a flickering white outline of his vitals flashing random symbols for half a second before stabilizing. The entire UI felt... unstable, like the system was unsure if he even existed.
He took a slow breath and scanned his surroundings.
The cavern was massive, but wrong.
The walls weren't stone—not exactly. They shimmered like corrupted textures in a broken game, surfaces flickering between rock, concrete, and blank developer grids. Sometimes they pulsed, as if the geometry itself was breathing.
Chunks of terrain hovered midair, suspended like forgotten assets. A jagged platform spun lazily in place above him, casting a shadow that didn't align with any light source. He spotted a staircase hanging upside down from the ceiling, cut off halfway—leading nowhere, doing nothing. It twitched every few seconds, as if trying to find its place in a world that had erased its purpose.
The floor beneath him wasn't much better. Some parts were solid. Others were like walking on layered illusions—one moment gravel, the next cold metal, the next something soft and wet that squelched underfoot but left no trace.
And then there was the pit.
Just a few meters ahead, a yawning chasm stretched across the floor. Unlike the rest of the cave, it didn't flicker or pulse. It just was. A solid, motionless hole carved into reality—one that didn't reflect light, didn't echo sound. Even the air around it felt muted.
Kai stepped closer, peering in.
No depth. No bottom. Just black.
He felt a chill that wasn't physical crawl up his spine.
This place...
It's not a dungeon.
It's a bug report with teeth.
He turned slightly and caught something else—glitches crawling like vines across the walls. Lines of corrupted code were burned into the surfaces, red and orange strings of text half-embedded in the geometry. Every now and then, one would blink as if reacting to his presence.
Object Reference Not Set to an Instance of an Object.
Error 404: Dialogue Script Not Found.
RENDER_EXCEPTION: Value "Kai Ardent" Not Recognized.
"...Cool. Real comforting."
Far above, the ceiling pulsed. For a moment, it wasn't a ceiling at all—just raw skybox, a swirling void of untextured blue and purple, flickering like a dev forgot to close a window.
He looked down at his hands.
Even they weren't quite right anymore.
He turned back toward where he fell in.
The entry tunnel was still there—sort of. A jagged wound in the terrain, glitching open and closed like it was trying to seal itself. Like the world couldn't decide if it should be an entrance, a scar, or nothing at all.
Kai raised a hand. His fingers shimmered faintly, Reality Rewrite activating with a soft digital hum.
[Reality Rewrite – ACTIVE]
Target: Exit Path
Command: Restore Stability
Reality bent for a heartbeat—then snapped back, as if the zone itself refused to be fixed.
A wave of data surged toward the tunnel—code fragments, repair attempts, string calls—only to be instantly consumed by the surrounding corruption. A crackling BZZZT echoed through the cave like a denial tone straight from hell.
[ERROR: Zone boundaries cannot be rewritten from within DumpSector-000.]
Kai let his hand drop.
"Of course," he muttered. "Of course it has a name."
Kai stood at the collapsed tunnel for another moment.
No miracle. No patch. No cheat code to force the path back into place. "In for a penny," he muttered, adjusting the flickering weapon in his hand, in for a bloody pound."
He turned from the glitched exit and stepped deeper into the cave.
The terrain shifted underfoot like it resented being walked on. A few meters ahead, the hallway split—then looped. Kai walked straight for six steps, only to find himself right back at the jagged archway where he started.
He blinked. Turned around. Same path. Same floating rock spinning slowly in place, casting the same crooked shadow.
"...Nope," he muttered. "No way."
He tried again. Left path this time. Walked faster. Back at the start. He scratched the side of his head, brow furrowed.
"Okay. Haunted hallway. Not creepy at all."
He marked the wall with a glowing line using Reality Rewrite. Simple command. Just a line. Walked. Turned. Back at the start. Mark gone.
"Okay. That's new."
More tries. He threw a rock. It vanished mid-air. He ran forward. Back to start. He walked backward. Back to start. He crawled, skipped, even closed his eyes.
Back. To. Start.
Kai slumped against the wall, frustration bubbling under his skin.
[Reality Rewrite – ACTIVE]
Target: Terrain
Command: Break the Loop
Nothing. The world pulsed once. Then shrugged him off like a bad patch.
[Rewrite Failed: Target Corruption Level Exceeds User]
[STABILITY: 83%]
His jaw tightened. "Seriously?"
That meant the loop itself—this whole section of the cave—was more broken than he was. His power couldn't override it. He wasn't corrupted enough to mess with it.
"Great," he muttered, bitter amusement curling his lip. "I'm not broken enough to break the broken thing."
The thought tasted like rust and ash in his mouth. He let it hang there. Absurd. Accurate. And then—
Something whispered.
A voice. Hollow, unfinished, leaking from the stone like water through cracks.
"...user access level insufficient…"
"Subsystem override available… experimental vision tools…"
"Manual activation requires bypass… not recommended..."
Kai's head snapped up. The voice was gone.
"What was that?" he whispered.
Nothing answered. Just that floating rock spinning in its endless cycle. But he felt it now. Some buried piece of code thrumming under his skin. Calling to him. A message flickered in the corner of his vision:
[AUGMENT AVAILABLE: Corruption Perception]
[WARNING: Manual activation will reduce STABILITY]
[Proceed? Y/N]
He hesitated. He could turn back. Wait for something to change. Sit here. Stuck. Alone.
But then he remembered the way the ground tried to glitch him out of existence. The [ASSET_MISSING] bear-thing. The voice that said he shouldn't exist.
"...In for a penny," Kai muttered. "In for a bloody meltdown."
He hit [Y]. The world lurched.
Pain spiked behind his eyes like a needle through glass.
[STABILITY: 82%]
Then everything changed.
His vision blurred, fractured—and when it cleared, the cave was no longer just stone. The walls glowed with ghostly veins of red and black, like the cave itself was infected. Most of it pulsed hot, unstable, corrupted beyond repair.
But just behind one twisted pillar… A faint line of pale blue. Stable. Fragile, but intact. He stared at it. "There you are."
He moved forward carefully. Ignoring the red paths. Ignoring the shifting geometry. One step. Another. The hallway didn't reset. The floating rock disappeared.
The loop broke.
Kai emerged on the other side, gasping slightly.
His hands trembled. His vision flickered with afterimages. The augmented sight didn't turn off—it stayed, always humming at the edge of focus.
And worst of all, another number flashed in the corner of his HUD:
[STABILITY: 82%]
Threshold Approaching
He didn't know what happened at the threshold. He didn't want to. "Next time," he said, "I try knocking first."
He moved on. Deeper. The cave pulsed behind him. And the eye… kept watching.
The walls pulsed faintly.
Not with light, but with… data. Chunks of geometry bled in and out of reality like broken teeth in a digital mouth. One section to his left flickered violently—stone, then placeholder checkerboard, then a splash of garbled pixels—before stabilizing just long enough to display something far worse.
Text.
Not a message. Not a system prompt.
Dialogue.
"Welcome… adventurer… inventory full… the—mission… accepted…"
"H-h-h-have you seen my daughter? Error. Error. ERROR—"
The voices weren't coming from the wall. They were in it. Layered on top of each other. Snippets of sound from a dozen forgotten scripts, jammed together into a whispering chorus that made his skin crawl.
Then the whole thing cut off, mid-echo, like someone pulled the plug. "This place," Kai muttered, "wasn't just thrown away. It was buried alive."
He kept walking.
Each footstep echoed too long—like the cave couldn't decide how sound was supposed to work. Sometimes there was no echo at all. Sometimes his own footsteps sounded delayed, like they arrived before he did.
Then he saw it. A treasure chest. Or the ghost of one.
It sat crooked on a tile that wasn't fully attached to the floor—its bottom corner floated two inches off the ground, clipping through empty air. The chest shimmered, fuzzed out, and then blinked back into existence like a faulty animation frame.
"Loot box in a nightmare. Sure. Let's do this."
He approached slowly. His augmented vision flared for a moment—briefly highlighting the object in dull yellow.
Partially stable. Not hostile. Not safe.
He didn't trust it. Kai extended one foot, tapping the chest gently with the edge of his boot. The moment contact was made—
BOOM.
It burst into a cloud of light particles. No sound. No reward. No satisfying jingle. Just vapor. And something else. For a heartbeat—maybe less—he saw it:
Faces. Not human ones. Not complete.
Textures stretched into smiling mouths with no eyes. A vendor's apron with no body attached. Dialogue boxes suspended in the fog, displaying nothing but underscores and flickering emotes.
Then gone.
The fog faded like it had never been there at all. Kai backed away. Slowly. Quietly.
"...Right. No looting glowing chests in hell's garbage bin. Lesson learned."
He turned his attention back to the path ahead, but something in him was shifting. The eye augment still flickered in his vision. And for the first time…
He felt like something was watching back.