Kael moved.
There was no battle cry. No dramatic charge. The Fallen Angel crossed the chamber in a blur of black armor and dark feathers, his greatsword a whisper of dead air. He didn't aim for the angel's center. He angled his strike low, toward its legs—a tactical feint born of a thousand battles.
Evan's mind, sharpened by sixteen years of parsing threat matrices, understood. He didn't cast a damage spell. He flicked his fingers. "Frost Bind." Chains of glacial blue energy erupted from the floor, not to damage, but to snare, to create a half-second of positional fix.
Their coordination was silent, perfect. Forged in six years of sieges and last stands.
The angel, beautiful and terrible, didn't dodge. It let Kael's sword pass through its leg. The blade met no resistance. It swept through the light and code as if through a hologram. The Frost Bind chains shattered on contact, becoming glittering mist.
The angel's faceless head turned to Kael. Its hand came up.
Evan was already casting. "Arcane Lash." A whip of pure violet energy snapped through the air. It wasn't a physical attack. It was a disruption spell, designed to interrupt casting. It passed through the angel's chest harmlessly.
"Ineffective," Aura reported, her voice a tense hum in his mind. "Entity is adapting. Analyzing our combat pattern."
Kael flowed into a defensive stance, his wings flaring to slow his momentum. He and Evan shared a glance. A fraction of a second. In it was an entire conversation. This isn't working.
The angel didn't press its attack. It hovered, observing them. The silence in the chamber was heavier than the tremors shaking the mountain.
In that terrible lull, memory flooded in.
Four years ago. The "Eternal Winter" expansion was the last major update. After that, the news trickled in: the developers were moving on. Servers would stay up, but that was it. No new content. Just maintenance mode.
The guild hall, once bustling, grew quiet. Player names on the roster turned grey, one by one, and never lit up again.
Evan found Kael sitting on the steps of the Great Hall, staring at the empty courtyard. They drank virtual ale that had no taste.
"They don't understand," Kael had said, his voice quiet. "They think it's just pixels and rewards. They log off and their connection ends." He'd gestured around them, at the towering spires of Ebonreach, at the banners snapping in the digital wind. "This place matters. The history here. The battles we won. The home we built. It matters."
Evan had just nodded, sipping his tasteless drink. He'd stayed for the same reason.
Back in the dissolving present, Kael's eyes narrowed. He saw something—a slight oscillation in the angel's core light, a rhythmic pulse. A tell.
"Now, Evan!" Kael roared.
He planted his feet. Dark energy, the opposite of the angel's holy light, swirled around his greatsword. It was his signature ability, earned after a year-long quest chain. "Heaven-Piercing Spear!"
He thrust. The concentrated beam of anti-light screamed across the chamber, a spear of pure negation meant to unravel divine magic.
It struck the angel dead center.
And passed straight through. The spear of darkness hit the far wall and dissipated. The angel remained untouched, its light undimmed.
"Analysis complete," Aura's voice was urgent. "Target does not exist on our physical interaction layer. It is operating from a higher-order data stratum. Physical and magical attacks that interact with game physics are ineffective. You are trying to stab a shadow on a wall."
Evan's mind raced. Higher data layer. Reality. The angel was deleting reality itself.
He had one spell. A niche, high-tier arcane spell he'd mastered out of sheer obsession with the game's magic theory. It was meant for stabilizing bugged dungeon zones. It consumed a catastrophic amount of mana. He'd never used it in combat.
He had no choice.
He dropped all his defensive barriers, channeling every ounce of his mana pool. The air around him crackled with raw power. He spoke the words, his voice echoing with authority he didn't feel. "Reality Anchor!"
A dome of silver-grey energy exploded from him. It didn't damage. It didn't heal. It insisted. It was a spell that forced local reality to comply with the game's foundational rules.
The angel flickered violently.
For a moment, the beautiful winged form vanished completely, replaced by the terrifying, shifting geometric shape of pure code. The lines of light stuttered. It became less a creature, more a complex equation made visible.
It became… solid.
"Kael, NOW!"
Kael was already in motion. No fancy ability this time. Just raw, powerful momentum. He drove his greatsword forward in a simple, brutal thrust aimed at the core of the flickering code-shape.
The blade connected.
A sound like shattering glass filled the chamber. Cracks of black energy spider-webbed out from the point of impact across the angel's form. It wasn't a damage number. It was a flaw in its existence.
The angel reacted.
Its head snapped toward Kael. A beam of light, thinner and brighter than any before, lanced out. Not a wide purge. A surgical strike.
It took Kael in the chest.
Kael didn't cry out. He stiffened. His greatsword clattered to the floor. The dark wings behind him froze, then began to tremble.
He didn't dissolve into pixels.
He… unraveled.
It started at the edges. The tips of his feathers began to separate into strands of dark and light code, not vanishing, but coming apart slowly, like a tapestry being unpicked by an invisible hand. The corruption crept up his wings, towards his armored back. The plates of his armor didn't vanish; they displayed their texture files, their mesh grids, their underlying code strings, before glitching into static.
"Kael!" Evan tried to move, but the mana drain from Reality Anchor had left him staggering, his vision swimming.
Kael looked down at the light in his chest, then back at Evan. His face, usually so stern, was calm. There was no pain in his eyes. Only understanding. And urgency.
"Evan," his voice was a static-riddled whisper. "It's not just logging me out. It's… deleting my core code. My memories. My… me."
The unraveling reached his shoulders. His left arm glitched, its solid form fragmenting into a cloud of black and grey data fragments.
Kael used his last moment of coherence to lurch forward. His remaining hand, still solid, grabbed Evan's shoulder. The grip was fierce.
"Save them," Kael hissed, his eyes locking onto Evan's. The data corruption was in his voice now, breaking it into digital noise. "The guild. However you can. You're… the last one. You have to… preserve…"
The word cut off.
Kael's form dissolved not into light, but into a silent explosion of ones and zeroes, of broken texture files and orphaned dialogue strings. They swirled in the air for a heartbeattoo long—a ghost of a fallen friend—and then collapsed into nothing.
The Grand Marshall's throne stood empty.
The greatsword on the floor glitched once, and was gone.
00:08:41.
The angel, its form stabilizing back into the beautiful winged being, turned its full, silent attention to Evan. The cracks from Kael's strike were already healing in its luminous skin.
Evan stood alone before the Guild Core, his mana gone, his friend erased from existence. Not dead.
Deleted.
The angel's voice was a soft, final chime.
"CONSCIOUSNESS IS A BURDEN. LET ME LIFT IT."