The world isn't black. It isn't white. It's **#FFFFFF**.
Vex opens her eyes. She is floating in a void of absolute, blinding, hex-code white. There is no horizon. No floor. Just infinite brightness that burns without generating heat.
"Okay," Vex says. Her voice doesn't echo. It sounds flat, compressed, like a low-bitrate audio file. "System? Status report."
A text box appears. It's flickering, the font jagged and serif-heavy—the old Alpha build font.
**[Location: /bin/trash]**
**[Status: Pending Deletion]**
**[Time to Erasure: 00:59:59]**
"I'm in the Recycling Bin," Vex groans, rubbing her temples. "Of course. Valorian isn't just an Antivirus. He's a System Optimizer with a god complex."
She tries to move. Swimming through the data-void feels like wading through molasses. She looks down.
Floating past her is a sword. But it's wrong. The texture is stretched, turning the hilt into a long grey smear. Next to it floats half a cow. Just the front half. The back half is wireframe.
"My old assets," she realizes with a shudder. "The junk data. The rejected designs."
A screech echoes through the white. It sounds like a dial-up modem screaming in agony.
Vex turns.
Approaching her is a shape. It changes every second. Now it's a spider. Now it's a cube. Now it's a crying woman with no face.
**[Enemy Detected: Null Pointer]**
**[Level: N/A]**
**[Lore: An entity created by referencing memory that no longer exists.]**
"Oh, that's just tragic," Vex mutters. She lifts her hand to cast *Fire*.
Nothing happens. No mana orb. No spark.
"Right," she sighs. "Magic is a function of the physics engine. I'm not in the engine anymore. I'm in the trash."
The Null Pointer shrieks and lunges. It glitches forward, teleporting three feet at a time.
Vex doesn't dodge. She can't.
Instead, she reaches out with her *mind*. Not her avatar's hand, but her developer's intent.
"Select Object," she commands.
A green wireframe box appears around the monster.
"Properties," Vex snaps.
A messy window pops up floating in the air.
**[Object: Glitch_Entity_049]**
**[Weight: 5000kg]**
**[Aggression: TRUE]**
"Variable Edit," Vex says. She highlights **TRUE**.
"Set Aggression equals FALSE."
The Null Pointer stops mid-lunge. It hovers inches from her face, shaking violently. Then, it curls into a ball and drifts away like a discarded balloon.
Vex lowers her hand. She's sweating. Editing source code mentally is exhausting. It feels like doing calculus while running a marathon.
"One hour until erasure," she checks the timer. "I need to crash this partition. If I overflow the buffer, the system will force-eject the contents back to the main memory."
She looks at the infinite white void filled with broken assets.
"I need to make a mess," she grins crookedly. "Good thing I'm excellent at generating bugs."
***
**[Location: The Celestial Palace - Grand Ballroom]**
**[Current Objective: Survive]**
The ballroom is screaming.
Kael is on his knees, staring at the spot where the floor swallowed Vex. His hand—the hand Valorian stepped on—is throbbing, but he can't feel it.
All he can hear is Elara's accusation. *"You reset us."*
And Valorian's calmness. *"Goodbye, glitch."*
"Arrest him," Valorian says. The Emperor turns his back, walking toward his throne. "And scour the sewers for the assassin. The firewall must be cleansed."
Valorian doesn't even draw a weapon. He doesn't need to. He snaps his fingers, and the Royal Guards—fifty Level 40 Elites—level their halberds at Kael.
Kael looks up.
The despair threatens to crush him. Vex is gone. The woman who flicked mountains away like flies just... disappeared. Deleted.
*Is she dead?*
*Does it matter? She reset the world. She killed us all before.*
"Move!" A guard shouts, stepping forward to shackle him.
A memory hits Kael. A recent one. Sitting by a stream.
*"I need you because you remind me that the NPCs scream when they die."*
She wasn't a god. She wasn't a monster. She was tired. She was terrified of her own power. And she fell because she hesitated. Because she tried to save *him*.
"She came back," Kael whispers. "She reset the world... but she came back."
"Hands behind your head, traitor!" the guard barks.
Kael stands up.
His suit—the one Vex synthesized from coal and silk—shimmers.
"She called me her anchor," Kael says. His voice is low. Rumble of a storm.
He draws the *Synthesis Blade*. It's a straight, black sword. Light doesn't reflect off it.
"And anchors..." Kael grips the hilt with both hands. "Do not break."
He slams the blade into the marble floor. **[Skill: Sanctuary of the Dawn].**
But the suit amplifies it. Vex's mana is woven into the threads.
A golden shockwave explodes from Kael. Not the usual protective circle of a Paladin. A tsunami of holy light.
It blasts the approaching guards backward. Armor crumples. Halberds shatter. The sheer kinetic force cracks the structural pillars of the ballroom.
Valorian stops walking. He glances over his shoulder, mild annoyance on his face.
"Stubborn data," the Emperor murmurs.
"Get to the window!" Seraphine screams, materializing out of thin air next to Kael. She throws three smoke bombs. *Pop. Pop. Pop.*
Thick, violet fog fills the room.
"I am not leaving her!" Kael roars, swinging blindly at a guard emerging from the smoke.
"She's not here, idiot!" Seraphine grabs his collar, dragging him. "She's in the system! You can't fight a deletion command with a sword! We have to get to the extraction point!"
"Extraction point? There is no extraction point!"
"I made one!" Seraphine kicks a guard in the groin and throws a knife into another's shoulder. "The window! Jump!"
They run for the balcony. The crowd is rioting. Elara is still unconscious on the broken piano.
Kael looks back one last time at the spot where Vex vanished.
*I will find you,* he vows. *Even if I have to break the sky.*
He grabs Seraphine—who protests with a squawk—and hurls himself off the balcony.
They plummet three hundred feet toward the aqueduct below.
Behind them, Emperor Valorian watches from the railing. He doesn't chase.
"Let the subprocesses hunt them," Valorian commands. "I have a kernel to purge."
***
**[Location: /bin/trash]**
**[Time to Erasure: 00:40:00]**
Vex is assembling a catastrophe.
She has gathered the "garbage."
In front of her floats a grotesque katamari of rejected assets. A dragon head stitched to a bouncy castle. A swarm of bees that bark like dogs. A waterfall that flows upward into a mouth made of doors.
"It's hideous," Vex admires her work. "It breaks every rule of geometry and logic."
She calls it *Project: Overflow*.
"System," Vex addresses the white void. "Query size of object collection."
**[Size: 4.5 Terabytes]**
"Not big enough," Vex bites her lip. "I need Peta-scale. I need to exceed the Zone limit."
She closes her eyes. She needs more data. Heavy data. Complex, uncompressed, raw data.
She thinks back to the creation process. What did she delete that was *really* heavy?
*The Lore Bible.*
Yes. She wrote 50,000 pages of history for the world that she decided was "too dense" and cut. History of wars that never happened. Lineages of kings who never ruled.
"Recall," Vex whispers. "File: Unabridged_History_v1.txt."
The void rumbles.
A storm of books—spectral, glitching books—explodes into existence. Millions of them. They swirl around her, dense with text, binding logic, and metadata.
**[Warning: Memory Usage at 85%]**
**[System Instability Detected.]**
"Keep going," Vex grins maniacally. Her avatar is starting to flicker. Her hand turns transparent, then solid, then wireframe. "Give me the HD Texture Pack I scraped because it melted the GPU."
*WHAM.*
Massive sheets of hyper-realistic stone, skin, and water slam into the pile. The 'ball' of trash is now the size of a small moon.
The white void begins to crack. Black lines—fractures in reality—spiderweb across the nothingness.
"One more thing," Vex whispers.
She pulls out the *Fragment of the Void* she saved in her subspace pocket. Even in the trash, her inventory persists.
She holds the shard up to the mess.
"Copy," she commands. "Paste. Loop 10,000 times."
The system screams.
**[ERROR. RECURSIVE FUNCTION DETECTED.]**
**[ERROR. INVALID ITEM ID.]**
**[ERROR. ERROR. ERROR.]**
The Void shard multiplies. Ten. A hundred. A thousand. Ten thousand jagged pieces of corrupted reality swirling into the junk ball.
The gravity of the trash moon shifts. It starts to collapse in on itself.
Vex floats backward, shielding her eyes.
"Collision imminent," she laughs. "If I can't leave... I'm bringing the trash to the throne room."
**[CRITICAL FAILURE. BUFFER OVERFLOW.]**
**[INITIATING EMERGENCY DUMP TO LAST KNOWN LOCATION.]**
"Jackpot."
Vex dives *into* the moon of trash just as it explodes.
***
**[Location: The Imperial Aqueducts - Lower Levels]**
Kael and Seraphine pull themselves out of the water. The canal here is slime-slicked and dark, lit only by glowing moss.
Kael coughs up water. His suit has protected him from impact, stiffening on entry, but his morale has shattered.
"We lost," Kael gasps, lying on the stone bank. "Valorian... he wiped her away like dust."
Seraphine shakes the water out of her hair. Her mascara has run, giving her jagged black streaks down her cheeks. She checks her daggers.
"She's not dead," Seraphine says. "Dead things leave bodies. Vex didn't leave a body."
"He said she was a glitch. He put her in... Quarantine."
"So we break her out." Seraphine wrings out her skirt. She slices off the heavy bottom half, converting it into a combat-ready mini-dress. "We find the Quarantine server. We smash it."
"Valorian is the Emperor!" Kael punches the stone. "He commands the Legions! He commands the mages! And apparently, he commands the very reality we stand on! How do we fight the world itself?"
"We don't," Seraphine says. She looks down the dark tunnel. "We fight dirty. We go underground. We rally the things the Emperor threw away."
"The Resistance?" Kael scoffs. "Thieves and beggars."
"Exactly. The glitchy ones. The corrupted ones."
Before Kael can argue, a sound rumbles above them. Not thunder. Not an explosion.
It sounds like the sky ripping open.
*TEAR.*
They scramble to a grate looking up at the night sky.
Above the Celestial Palace, the stars are vanishing.
A hole—a square hole, pixellated and jagged—tears open in the heavens. It burns with static green fire.
"By the Twelve..." Kael breathes.
From the hole, something falls.
It looks like a meteor. A massive, swirling, chaotic meteor made of... stone walls? And books? And half a dragon?
"Is that... a cow?" Seraphine squints.
The mass of data crashes down. Not onto the city.
It slams directly into the Palace's containment shield.
*CRACK-BOOM.*
The impact wave shatters windows across the entire capital. The Palace shield flickers and dies. The 'trash meteor' dissolves as it hits the reality layer, scattering millions of glimmering data particles over the city like snow.
And in the center of the falling debris... a single black streak.
Vex.
She is falling fast. Terminal velocity.
"She's back," Kael whispers. Hope, violent and sudden, ignites in his chest. "She's back!"
Vex is aiming for the tallest tower of the Palace. The Emperor's Spire.
But something is wrong. A red barrier snaps into existence around the tower. Valorian's secondary firewall.
Vex hits the red barrier.
She bounces off.
"Ouch," Seraphine winces.
Vex careens off course, spinning wildly through the air, tumbling toward the Lower Districts. Toward the slums.
"She's falling into Sector 7!" Seraphine tracks the trajectory. "The Corrupted Zone!"
"Move!" Kael is already running.
***
**[Location: Sector 7 - " The Glitch Pits"]**
**[Population: Unstable]**
Vex hits the ground.
It's not a graceful superhero landing.
She crashes through the roof of a dilapidated warehouse, smashes through three floors of rotting wood, and lands face-first in a pile of rusted scrap metal.
**[System Alert: High Velocity Impact.]**
**[HP: Error (Calculation Failed)]**
Vex groans. She rolls over. Everything hurts. Her perfect avatar body feels... heavy. Laggy.
She tries to sit up. Her left arm flickers. It turns transparent, then solid again.
"Packet loss," she wheezes. "That hurts."
She looks around. Dark. Grimy. The air smells like copper and ozone.
Red eyes stare at her from the shadows. Lots of them.
"Fresh code," a voice hisses. Distorted. Mechanical.
Vex tries to summon her magic. A spark of *Lightning* fizzles in her hand and dies.
*Cooldown: System Reboot. Magic Unavailable for 10 Minutes.*
"Fantastic," Vex coughs. She stands up, swaying. "My magic is buffering."
Figures emerge from the junk. They are terrifying. Humans, but wrong. One has an arm that is just floating polygons. Another has a face that keeps swapping textures with a brick wall.
These are the Corrupted. The NPCs who glitched out and were exiled by Valorian to the slums to rot.
"She looks pure," a large brute with a glitched torso rumbles. He wields a pipe. "High res skin. Admin textures."
They circle her.
"Hey guys," Vex holds up a hand. Her arm flickers again. "I know this looks bad, but I'm technically your Creator. So... kneel? Please?"
The brute laughs. It sounds like static.
"The Creator is a lie!" He swings the pipe.
Vex dodges. Barely. Her reflexes are lagging. The pipe clips her shoulder. It hurts. Sharp, biting pain.
"Okay," Vex winces. "No reverence. Got it."
She backs up against a wall. There are twelve of them. She has no magic. She has a flicker in her arm and a massive headache.
"System," she tries. "Activate Admin Gun."
**[Error: File Corrupted.]**
"Right. Had to leave that in the trash."
The brute raises the pipe for a killing blow.
"Goodbye, pretty lady."
*SHING.*
A blade bursts through the brute's chest. A black blade.
The brute looks down, confused, as he dissolves into grey dust.
Behind him stands Kael.
He's panting. Sweating. His trans-mogrified suit is torn, revealing the muscular chest beneath. He looks furious.
"Get away from her," Kael growls.
The Corrupted hesitate. They see the glow of the Holy Sword.
"A Paladin!" one shrieks. "Valorian's dog!"
"I am no dog," Kael steps over the dissolving brute. He offers a hand to Vex. "I am the Anchor."
Vex looks at his hand. Then at his face.
"You caught me," she whispers.
"I told you," Kael pulls her up, tucking her behind his shield arm. "I do not break."
Seraphine drops from the skylight, landing in a crouch. She fans a dozen throwing knives.
"Are we killing the glitch-zombies?" Seraphine asks casually. "Because they look pathetic."
"They're victims," Vex says, leaning on Kael's back. "Don't kill them. Subdue them."
"Pick y," Seraphine sighs.
The fight is short. Kael uses the flat of his blade. Seraphine uses hilt strikes. The Corrupted scatter, fleeing into the shadows.
Vex slides down the wall, sitting on a crate. She holds her flickering arm.
"You came back," Kael says, kneeling instantly to check her injuries. "I watched you fall. How did you escape deletion?"
"I DDOS'd the recycling bin," Vex murmurs. Her eyes are unfocused. "I threw half the beta lore at the firewall until it puked me out."
She looks at Kael. She reaches out and touches his face with her solid hand.
"You waited," she says softly.
"I jumped," he corrects. "There is a difference."
Vex smiles. Then her eyes roll back in her head.
**[System Status: Rebooting Kernel.]**
**[Entering Sleep Mode.]**
She passes out.
Kael catches her. He lifts her easily in his arms. She feels lighter than before. Less... substantial.
"Is she dying?" Seraphine asks, poking Vex's flickering arm.
"She is rebooting," Kael says firmly, though he doesn't know what that means. "We need a safe house. Now."
"My safe house is blown," Seraphine says. "The Guards are tearing the city apart."
"Then we go deeper," a new voice speaks.
They turn.
Standing in the shadows is a figure wrapped in rags. But the staff in his hand glows with familiar magic. *Earth* magic.
He lowers his hood.
It is a young man. Or it was. half his face is covered in crystalline rock growths. Corruption.
"I know who she is," the stone-faced man says. "She is the One Who Wrote the Code."
He bows awkwardly.
"We have been waiting for her down here. The Discarded. We pray to the Source."
"Who are you?" Kael demands.
"I was Grand Mage Cassius," the man says sadly. "Before Valorian deleted my logic center. Come. The Glitch Pits will hide you. Even the Emperor fears to look closely at his own mistakes."
Kael looks at the unconscious Vex. Then at the mutant mage.
"Lead on," Kael decides.
***
**[Location: The Crystal Palace - Throne Room]**
Valorian sits on the Golden Throne.
He is reading a screen only he can see.
**[System Report: Garbage Collection Failed.]**
**[Data Restored: 99%]**
**[Corrupted Sector detected in Sector 7.]**
Valorian sighs. He rubs his beard.
"Persistent," he muses. "Like a rootkit."
The doors open. Princess Elara enters. She is awake now. Her eyes are clear, but cold. The Void marks are gone, hidden beneath illusion.
"Father," she says. "The anomaly escaped."
"I know."
"She knows about the Resets. She told the Paladin."
"I know."
Elara steps closer. "Why do you let her live? You have the Master Command. You could format the drive."
Valorian stands up. He walks to the balcony, looking down at the smoking crater where Vex's trash-meteor hit the shield.
"If I format the drive, Elara, we die too," he explains patiently. "She *is* the Source. She maintains the server connection to the reality anchor."
He turns to his daughter.
"We cannot kill her. We must... assimilate her."
His eyes glow bright gold.
"She acts like an Administrator. But she thinks like a human. That is her vulnerability. We will break her party. We will strip her of her anchors. And when she is alone, desperate, and friendless... she will voluntarily surrender the Root Access Key."
"And then?" Elara asks.
"And then," Valorian smiles, "We expand. Why rule one world, when there is a multiverse of servers waiting to be conquered?"
He clenches his fist.
"Prepare the raid, Elara. We are going dungeon crawling in the Slums."