Ji-Hoon sprinted toward the first floor as the tower trembled behind him. Lights overhead flickered between system white and dev-mode violet, casting everything in fractured shadows. The obsidian glass warped underfoot like it was melting around his boots.
The system wasn't trying to contain the anomaly.
It was preparing to delete the floor.
["The NULL HYBRID is stabilizing. It's not a monster—it's a protocol. They stitched together leftover AI fragments, abandoned player code, and old failed Admin routines to build something that can counter you."]
He slid down the final corridor, momentum controlled by force pulses from his heels. The room ahead opened like an exposed hard drive—raw data veins stretching like cables across the walls. In the center, the entity landed.
Its feet didn't touch the ground.
Instead, it hovered—strings of corrupted syntax forming a jagged halo behind it. Its body glitched between shapes: a half-rendered knight, a floating moderator, a fragment of the old CEO's face stitched across its chest like a broken screen.
It stared directly at Ji-Hoon.
✦ [NULL HYBRID – LV. ???]
✦ Classification: System Erasure Response
✦ Threat Level: Extermination Class
✦ Weakness: Unstable Runtime Field – fluctuates every 9 seconds
He didn't wait.
✦ Skill: Command Injection→ Rewrite Behavior Protocols
He activated it mid-sprint. Code surged down his fingers and stabbed into the air itself. The room shivered. For a moment, gravity inverted—and the NULL entity twitched. Its tracking subroutine lost alignment.
That was enough.
Ji-Hoon ducked left and drove forward, striking the glitched membrane near its hip—a point where admin code didn't fully stabilize. Sparks erupted. Lines of forbidden language curled into the air like smoke.
The Hybrid retaliated instantly.
A barrage of anti-skill fields slammed outward. They weren't attacks—they were cancellations. Everything within five meters lost function. Skills turned off. Inventory vanished. Even the air stilled.
["It just blanked your runtime! Ji-Hoon, you're flying blind!"]
He dropped low, body sliding under a corrupted blade made from a severed report file. His hood tore. A cut traced across his shoulder. Blood and data spilled together.
✦ Emergency Trigger: Dual-Layer Runtime – Defensive Cross-Sync Initiated→ Incoming skill nullification resisted: 34%→ Systems partially reinitialized
["You're syncing between two broken class trees now. That instability is your only defense. You're fighting with bugs. That's... kind of brilliant."]
He used the reinitialized seconds to activate an echo.
✦ Skill: False Echo (Forked Variant)→ Output: Dual Reflection
Two clones appeared—one made of stable light, the other stitched from corrupted packets. They moved in opposite patterns, baiting the Hybrid's sensors.
Ji-Hoon vaulted off the wall, midair, and slammed both fists into the entity's head.
✦ Injecting Payload: Black Thread – Unauthorized Access Vector→ Root Access Attempt... Denied→ Kernel-Level Conflict Initiated
The Hybrid screamed—not in voice, but in broken notification tones. Its body buckled, collapsing through frames, as if it couldn't exist under current physics.
["Ji-Hoon, you're forcing a crash. It's going to drag you with it—!"]
He didn't care.
✦ System Trace – Override Mode→ Manual Injection: "WHO AUTHORIZED THIS BUILD?"
The command didn't make sense.
But the Hybrid stopped moving.
Its halo shattered. Fragments of admin code cracked in midair.
Then—
✦ ERROR: Unhandled Exception Detected
✦ SYSTEM CORE WARNING
✦ Reverting to Backup Layer: PROTOTYPE RUNTIME
The floor exploded into pure data.
Ji-Hoon fell.
He landed in silence.
No lights. No interface. Just white space, infinite, like an empty hard drive.
A figure stood across from him.
Not a monster.
Not a Hybrid.
A boy.
Black hoodie. White shoes. A faded name tag that flickered between [intern], [dev], and [nobody].
"…You shouldn't be here," the boy said quietly.
Ji-Hoon stepped forward. "You sent the signal."
The boy looked up. Eyes glowing—not with power, but exhaustion.
"I didn't. He did."
He pointed upward.
The white space bent. A familiar portrait appeared.
[RYU JAE-HWAN – CREATOR]
Only this time, the status read:
[ONLINE]
And then the world blinked—
—and Ji-Hoon was gone.