Noel didn't run.
The second tutorial mob emerged from the shadows with the same half-rendered wrongness as the first—another goblin-shaped error, its movements jittering, its form occasionally skipping frames. It spotted him and hissed, clutching a crude spear.
Normally, this was where instinct screamed survive.
Noel ignored it.
"Alright," he said under his breath, forcing his breathing to steady. "Let's answer a question."
The goblin charged.
Noel stood still.
The spear thrust forward and this time there was no phasing, no hesitation from reality. The tip struck his chest dead center.
Pain flared—harder than before, deeper—and then everything broke.
Not black.
Not white.
Wrong.
Space folded inward like a sheet being crushed by invisible hands. Noel felt himself pulled apart along directions that didn't exist, his sense of up and down unraveling. The pain vanished instantly, replaced by an overwhelming sensation of being misaligned.
Then—
He was back.
Noel collapsed to one knee on the cracked stone platform, dry-heaving as his stomach lurched violently. The world around him warped, edges bending and snapping back into place like a badly recalibrated lens.
The goblin was gone.
The spear was gone.
So was the place where he'd been standing.
A faint ripple spread outward from Noel's body, distorting the air, the stone, even the dead UI panels as it passed. Runes along the platform flared and dimmed, struggling to reassert themselves.
He pressed a hand to the ground, steadying himself, fighting the nausea clawing up his throat.
"…Respawn," he croaked.
But there had been no death screen.
No fade-out.
No countdown.
No You Have Died message.
Just an instantaneous correction.
As if the world had noticed an impossible state—Noel Simpson: dead—and rejected it outright.
He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and forced himself to stand. His body felt… intact. No pain. No lingering damage. The memory of the spear was already slipping away, like a dream trying to escape waking thought.
But something else lingered.
A pressure.
A loss.
The air in front of him shimmered, and for the first time since the rollback prompt, a system message appeared without red alarms or screaming errors.
It was small.
Muted.
Unsteady.
SYSTEM INTEGRITY: 2.8%
Noel stared at it.
"It was three," he whispered.
The number flickered, then stabilized.
NOTE: Integrity degradation detected.CAUSE: Forced state correction.
His chest tightened.
"So I did die," he said slowly. "You just wouldn't let it stick."
The system didn't deny it.
Fragments of data bled into view around the integrity readout—half-formed lines that looked more like internal comments than player-facing text.
Respawn Method: Non-standardAnchor Point: Last stable coordinateTemporal Offset: 0.00sSpatial Drift: 0.41%
The ground beneath his feet felt subtly wrong now, like he wasn't standing exactly on it, but a fraction of a step to the side of where he should be.
Noel swallowed as the implications sank in.
Every death cost something.
Not HP.
Not lives.
Integrity.
He looked around the chamber. The cracks in the stone had spread slightly. One of the suspended UI panels was gone entirely, leaving behind an empty outline where it had once hovered.
The system was paying the price for keeping him.
Or maybe he was.
Noel flexed his hands, feeling the faint delay between thought and motion. Tiny, but there. Like latency in a bad connection.
"How many times can you do that?" he asked the empty air. "How many times before you decide I'm not worth the resources?"
The darkness beyond the platform stirred again, more clearly now. He could sense it watching, learning, aware that something fundamental had just been proven.
Noel could die.
But he couldn't stay dead.
And whatever mechanism was forcing him back into existence was finite.
He took a slow breath, grounding himself despite the lingering nausea.
"Okay," he said quietly. "No more testing death for fun."
The integrity number hovered at the edge of his vision, a silent reminder.
SYSTEM INTEGRITY: 2.8%
A resource he didn't fully understand.
A bar he couldn't afford to empty.
And the only proof he had that the system—broken as it was—still considered him barely real enough to keep.
The dungeon shifted, reacting to the instability like a wound trying to close.
Noel straightened.
If dying cost integrity…
Then survival wasn't about HP anymore.
It was about not pushing the system past the point where it stopped correcting him—and started deleting him for good.