The countdown reached zero.
The sky didn't explode.
It compiled.
Data storms poured from the clouds like liquid lightning, reshaping the battlefield second by second. Streets unzipped. Billboards flickered into boss menus. Buildings lost textures, then regained them as giant tiles from Edenfall's PvP zones. This wasn't a city anymore—it was a dynamic patch conflict. A real-time overwrite between Earth's physical layer and the codebase of a dying game.
Ji-Hoon ducked as a slab of sidewalk flipped into a high-level raid platform.
The construct approached—massive, fluid, its form rewriting as it walked. One moment it had a humanoid shape. The next, it had wings of unreadable text and a spine made of load bars. Its head was a mess of admin console prompts and redacted names.
✦ [SYSTEM OVERRIDE BEAST – VERSION PATCH: NULL.01]
✦ LV. ???
✦ THREAT LEVEL: DEV GRADE
Ji-Hoon's system flared to life.
✦ New Objective: SURVIVE
["I've never seen anything like this. It's not a monster—it's a rollback manifest. It's trying to revert you."]
He moved. Fast.
The moment he stepped onto a new tile, it shifted beneath him—becoming a terrain asset from a zone that didn't exist in the live game. An unreleased arena, maybe. A dead build. The environment couldn't decide what to be.
The woman from earlier—Reclaimer—landed beside him on a skater's rail that had materialized midair. She launched off it with a spin-kick that erupted into glyphs, striking the construct's knee.
It barely moved.
"I thought you had power," she snapped. "Was all that ghost sector stuff just luck?"
Ji-Hoon didn't answer.
He was already calculating.
This thing wasn't a boss in the traditional sense. It wasn't reading his skills as attacks. It was interpreting his existence as a patch conflict. Every skill he used triggered a rollback pulse trying to delete him from the runtime.
["We need a new angle. You can't beat this with raw stats. It's fighting you like you're a bug. So act like one."]
Ji-Hoon activated System Trace—not on the beast, but on the terrain itself.
✦ Skill: System Trace
✦ Target: Map Assets [Conflict Layer]
✦ Accessing Architecture…
Lines of unstable data lit up beneath him—old zone tags, abandoned dev test folders, permission discrepancies.
There.
A segment of the city that still believed it was real.
He moved, drawing the rollback with him.
The construct stepped forward—its foot hitting the stable tile—and glitched.
The city pushed back.
Reality rebelled.
A chunk of physical memory detonated under the rollback creature, forcing it to shift its form again. Ji-Hoon didn't stop.
✦ Injecting Exploit Code…
✦ Payload: Ghost Sector Residue
✦ Result: Contaminate Admin Thread
The beast reeled as a swirl of unstable code leaked from Ji-Hoon's palm and struck its midsection. For the first time, it staggered—not from damage, but from contradiction.
["Yes! You're making it hold two realities at once. Keep injecting. Force it to calculate both runtime layers."]
Reclaimer threw a glowing knife made of patch notes into its back.
"Nice of you to join in," she muttered.
The construct lashed out. A dozen crash logs coalesced into blades and cut through the air. Ji-Hoon's new cloak shimmered, absorbing the first hit, then shorting under the second.
Armor warning flared. He rolled, boots sparking on corrupted tile.
✦ Backup Skill Chain Detected
✦ Activating: Phantom Thread – Rapid Cast Mode
Black threads surged from his fingertips, latching onto floating code markers above the construct's head. The threads weaved downward—not to attack, but to tether. They pulled conflicting lines of its identity together, stacking user permissions until the system couldn't reconcile them.
It spasmed.
Then screamed.
Its voice shattered the air into tiles of old loading screens. Reclaimer winced beside him.
"You broke its version integrity. That's going to trigger—"
The sky split.
A second being dropped from above.
Smaller. Sleeker. A humanoid wrapped in white code, its hands glowing with admin override rings.
✦ [GATEKEEPER – ADMIN TOOLSET: CLEANSE LINE]
It reached for Ji-Hoon.
✦ Skill: Cleanse Invocation
✦ Target: Ji-Hoon Kwon – Status: Illegal Instance
He didn't have time to dodge.
The Reclaimer stepped between them, slamming her own override token into the attack. It shorted the Gatekeeper's skill—barely.
"I just saved your life," she said. "You owe me now."
Ji-Hoon stared at her.
"Then help me kill it."
She grinned.
"That's the first smart thing you've said all day."
Together, they turned.
The rollback beast surged back to its feet.
This wasn't a raid anymore.
It was a war between versions.
And Ji-Hoon had just become the bug that refused deletion.