The dungeon opened up beyond the platform.
Not smoothly—nothing here did—but in broken segments, like a map stitched together from unfinished rooms. Corridors ended abruptly, then resumed a few steps later. Doors led to chambers that duplicated themselves with minor variations, as if someone had copied and pasted assets without bothering to clean up the seams.
Noel moved carefully, testing each step, half-expecting the floor to forget he existed again.
It held.
That alone felt like progress.
The first NPC stood at the end of a narrow hall lit by flickering wall sconces. He was human, or close enough—tall, broad-shouldered, dressed in battered leather armor with a wooden training sword strapped to his back.
A tutorial instructor.
He faced forward, one hand raised mid-gesture, mouth open as if about to speak.
And he stayed that way.
No blinking. No breathing. No idle animation.
Noel waved a hand in front of the man's face. Nothing. He stepped closer, close enough to see the fine cracks running through the NPC's model, like stress fractures in porcelain.
Then the man spoke.
"Welcome, adventurer! This dungeon will teach you the basics of combat—"
The voice cut off abruptly.
The NPC snapped back to his starting pose, arm raised, mouth open.
A half-second pause.
"Welcome, adventurer! This dungeon will teach you the basics of combat—"
Reset.
Noel's skin crawled.
"…Hey," he said. "Do you see me?"
The NPC didn't react. He simply looped again, voice identical down to the inflection, down to the breath he never took.
Noel stepped to the side.
The NPC's head didn't track him.
Another reset.
"Welcome, adventurer! This dungeon will teach you the basics of combat—"
Noel backed away slowly.
Further in, he found more of them.
A healer NPC frozen with glowing hands hovering inches above a wounded soldier who never healed and never died.
A merchant locked mid-bow behind a half-stocked stall, his inventory crates flickering between full and empty.
A quest giver pointing dramatically toward a corridor that no longer existed.
Each one repeated exactly one line. No branching dialogue. No conditional checks. No awareness of Noel—or anything else.
Some of them stuttered, their animations snapping back every few seconds. Others ran longer loops, repeating after half a minute, or a full minute, as if the system couldn't agree on how long the scene was supposed to be.
Noel tried touching one.
His fingers passed through the healer's arm. For a moment, the glow around her hands flared brighter, then dimmed, like a candle reacting to a draft.
She reset.
A chill settled in his chest.
"They're not broken," he murmured. "They're… paused."
He moved deeper, piecing it together as he went. Missing trigger zones. Incomplete geometry. Tutorial prompts that flickered and vanished before finishing a sentence.
A glowing arrow on the floor pointed toward a wall.
A floating message blinked in and out of existence:
PRESS [ ] TO CONTINUE
No key was listed.
Noel stopped in the middle of a wide chamber, surrounded by NPCs stuck in their endless loops, monsters spawning erratically at the edges and sometimes failing to spawn at all.
This wasn't just a failed tutorial.
This was an abandoned one.
Mid-development. Mid-test. Mid-beta.
He could almost see it now: developers walking away from the instance, shelving it for later, never expecting a live entity to wake up inside it.
The realization made his stomach twist.
"These aren't people," he said quietly. "They're recordings."
Scripts running without an audience.
Actors on a stage after the theater had burned down.
A healer repeated her line again, voice bright and hollow. "Don't worry! I'll have you back on your feet in no time!"
She never looked at the man she was healing.
She never noticed Noel.
She never noticed that time itself had stopped caring.
Noel rubbed at his face, exhaustion seeping in despite the fact that his body didn't seem to tire the way it should.
"If this zone was abandoned," he said slowly, "then the system maintaining it is on life support."
And he was an error it couldn't afford.
He glanced at the integrity readout hovering faintly at the edge of his vision.
SYSTEM INTEGRITY: 2.8%
No change.
The NPCs continued their loops, oblivious.
That was worse, somehow, than hostility.
"Okay," Noel muttered, forcing himself to focus. "If this is beta content…"
Then there were rules that hadn't been finalized.
Safeties that hadn't been locked in.
And exploits no one had bothered to patch.
The dungeon shuddered faintly, like something deep in its structure had just noticed him thinking along those lines.
Noel straightened.
An abandoned tutorial meant no oversight.
No active moderation.
And no one coming to clean up the anomaly walking around inside it.
For the first time since waking up, he felt something like grim relief.
If the world didn't know what to do with him…
Then maybe he could survive by learning how this broken place actually worked—before the system decided the easiest fix was to finally, permanently, remove him.
The NPCs repeated their lines again, endlessly welcoming adventurers who would never arrive.
And Noel Simpson walked past them, the only moving thing in a dungeon frozen in a beta that had never been meant to go live.