The corridors of the Mirror Crypt stank of false hope.
Yuto skittered across the polished obsidian floor, silent as shadows. His threads unfurled behind him like the limbs of a deep-sea predator, reaching, sensing, calculating.
Ahead, the heartbeat of something familiar echoed through the walls. Not a monster. Not a dungeon beast.
A human.
"Another Reincarnator," Nyx said, her voice sharp and uneasy. "But something's wrong. I'm detecting… admin subroutines embedded in his soulcore. That shouldn't be possible unless—"
The chamber doors creaked open before her words finished.
And there he stood.
A young man clad in pristine silver armor, face lit by the glow of system glyphs floating around him. His eyes were glassy, his mouth twisted into a serene, empty smile.
Above his head:
[Hero Designate: Idris Thorne]
[Soul Bonded: Orpheus Protocol - Override Mode]
Yuto froze. This wasn't a Reincarnator.
This was a puppet.
"He's fully overridden," Nyx said in a hush. "The system turned him into a meat-suit for itself."
Idris spoke—but the voice was not his.
"Glitch Entity Yuto. Your anomaly has persisted long enough. You are hereby sentenced to deletion."
Magic flared in rings around Idris. Holy fire, compressed starlight, divine judgment—admin-enhanced spellwork beyond mortal reach.
Yuto reacted instinctively. Threads lanced out, snapping taut to intercept.
The chamber erupted into chaos.
Clash after clash.
Yuto dodged divine spears, unraveled illusions mid-flight, and blinked through spatial locks. But Idris moved like he wasn't bound by physics, guided by a mind that understood this world's very fabric.
"He's not fighting to kill you," Nyx realized, voice shaking. "He's fighting to format you. To overwrite your code."
Something cracked in Yuto's core.
His mind flashed to the dream—a memory of Earth. A half-finished game. The cruel comments. The loneliness. The part of him the world had always tried to delete.
"No," he growled, anchoring all his threads at once.
He surged forward.
Thread Execution: Memory Severance.
The strike didn't hit Idris' body. It hit the soul string tethering him to the admin network.
There was a scream—not from Idris—but from deep within the system.
And suddenly… the hero fell, like a puppet whose strings had been cut.
[Admin Connection Severed]
[You have damaged a Hero Core Thread]
[Admin Retaliation Pending]
Yuto stood over the unconscious Reincarnator, chest heaving, threads twitching.
"Come at me, Orpheus," he muttered.
"I just killed your hero."