The coffee tasted like burnt motor oil.
Leo took a slow sip, the acidic heat scouring his tongue. A physical reaction. He registered the sensation, cataloged it under flavor_profile:abysmal, and set the chipped ceramic mug down on a coaster made from a fossilized floppy disk. His keyboard clicked, a steady, rhythmic sound against the low hum of the server room fans on the other side of the wall. The air in the IT department always had an electrical tang, mixed with the scent of dust bunnies. The smell of stasis.
Another ticket popped into his queue. Subject: Can't connect to printer.
He didn't even have to read the body of the email. He knew Carol from Accounting hadn't checked if the printer was plugged in. She never did. His fingers moved on autopilot as he typed out the template response. Have you tried turning it off and on again? The sentence was a mantra, a prayer to the gods of user error. His job wasn't to solve complex problems; it was to be the human equivalent of a loading screen, a brief, annoying pause before someone else figured out the real issue.
And then a blue box flickered in the top-right corner of his vision.
Welcome, User! Initializing System Interface...
Leo stopped typing. He blinked. The box remained. Clean, sans-serif font. A gentle, pulsating glow. He rubbed his eyes. When had it gotten so bright in here? The light from the box seemed to bleed into the world, making the gray cubicle walls feel even more drab. This was new. And unscheduled.
Oh, great, he thought, the cynicism a comfortable, worn-in jacket. Unannounced AR software rollout. Marketing's latest genius idea, probably. Figures they wouldn't tell IT.
He tried to look away, but the box stayed fixed in his vision, an unwelcome heads-up display. Instinctively, he tried to alt+f4 it out of existence. Nothing. He tried to mentally swipe it away. The box remained, mocking him. He leaned back in his squeaky chair—the sound grating in the sudden quiet—and searched for a settings menu. A gear icon. Anything. There was nothing. Just the text, and a slowly filling progress bar beneath it.
System Integration: 2%
A low thud echoed from outside, followed by a sound that made the hairs on his arms stand up. A scream. Not a playful shriek, but a ragged, tearing sound of genuine terror. He froze, fingers hovering over the keyboard. Was that... part of this stupid AR game? A "real-world immersion" feature? It sounded a little too real. Another scream, closer this time, and then the unmistakable blare of a car alarm, which was abruptly cut short with a wet, crunching sound.
His heart kicked into overdrive, a frantic, painful hammering against his ribs. He pushed his chair back, the plastic wheels skittering on the linoleum, and walked to the window. The cold of the glass seeped into his forehead as he pressed against it. Down below, on the street he walked every day, chaos was blossoming. People were running. Fleeing from something he couldn't see. A car was flipped on its side, smoke whispering from its undercarriage.
And then he saw it.
It shambled out from behind a dumpster, a creature that broke the rules of the world. It was short, green, and held a rusty piece of pipe like a club. But it wasn't the monster that held his attention. It was the movement—the janky, unnatural gait of a badly rigged 3D model. Its textures were muddy, low-res, the blurry pixels suggesting the world hadn't quite finished loading it in. Floating above its head, in the same blue font as the box in his vision, were the words:
[Gutter Goblin Lv. 1]
Leo's breath hitched. He stumbled back from the window, a cold sweat slicking his palms. This wasn't a game. This wasn't AR. This was a critical, system-wide error. The office's electrical tang was suddenly thick with something else, something acrid and metallic. He could taste it on the back of his tongue.
He scrambled under his desk, curling into a ball. The rough, scratchy texture of the industrial carpet pressed against his cheek. He could smell years of dust and spilled coffee. His mind raced, desperately trying to find a solution, a protocol for when reality itself had apparently been hacked. This can't be real. A glitch. A server somewhere is having a meltdown.
System Integration: 98%
The box in his vision pulsed. He squeezed his eyes shut, but the interface was still there, burned onto the inside of his eyelids. Close. Just close the damn program!
He fumbled blindly through the interface in his mind, his panic making his thoughts clumsy. He wasn't thinking, just reacting, his IT instincts from a decade of troubleshooting taking over. A menu flashed open, then another. It was all gibberish, lines of code that shimmered and writhed like snakes, written in a language he couldn't comprehend. But he kept digging, searching for a kill command, an exit process, anything.
A high-pitched screech from the doorway of the office ripped him from his frantic search. He cracked an eye open. The goblin stood there, its beady, black eyes scanning the room. It sniffed the air, its head twitching. And its gaze locked onto his desk.
Time seemed to slow down. The hum of the servers became a deafening roar in his ears. The goblin took a step, then another, its filthy claws clicking on the linoleum. Leo's internal error log went haywire. His body executed PANIC.EXE. Not recommended. As the goblin raised its pipe, his focus snagged on it, and he acted on instinct. He tried to "inspect element."
A window snapped open in his vision, layered over the goblin. More alien code. But this time, amidst the chaos, a few lines were horribly, inexplicably familiar.
class="monster_entity_standard" ID="gutter_goblin_07B4" ... [HP: 50/50] [STR: 3] [AGI: 5]
He didn't understand. He didn't have time to understand. The goblin lunged, its mouth open in a snarl, revealing rows of needle-like teeth. The smell hit him—a reek of wet garbage and decay. His mind, screaming, reverted to its deepest programming. It tried to kill the corrupted process.
His focus snapped to a single line of code. [HP: 50/50]. A thought, not even a word, just a pure, reflexive impulse born of sheer terror. Delete.
The goblin froze mid-lunge.
Its snarl was locked on its face. The rusty pipe hung in the air. For a half-second, it just stayed there, a frozen frame in a crashed program. Then, its edges began to flicker. Its colors corrupted, shifting through hues of neon green and magenta. A low hum vibrated through the floor, and with a sound like shattering glass, the goblin dissolved into a shower of shimmering, nonsensical data fragments. The particles winked out of existence before they even hit the ground.
The rusty pipe clattered to the floor. Then nothing.
Leo stayed curled under his desk, shaking. His breath came in ragged, painful gasps. He could taste blood where he'd bitten his tongue. He slowly uncurled, his limbs feeling weak and disconnected. He stared at the spot where the goblin had been. Nothing. Just a pipe.
What… what did I just do?
And as the question echoed in the silent ruin of his mind, the progress bar in his vision finally hit 100%. The welcome text dissolved, replaced by a single, terrifying notification.
[Class Granted: Administrator]