The System Warden's spear blazed with a light so bright it hurt to look at. The air in the server room grew heavy, thick with the pressure of a coming storm. The area-of-effect attack was charging, ready to unleash a wave of deletion that would erase everything in its path. Anya was too far away. The portal was at my feet. The choice was brutal, simple, and instant.
I made a survivor's choice. A selfish choice.
I grabbed the ejected Data Spike from the floor, the mission's prize clutched tight in my hand. I gave Anya one last, fleeting look of apology, a silent message across the chaotic room. Then, I turned and dove headfirst into the swirling blue vortex.
I left her behind.
The guilt was a physical blow, immediate and overwhelming. The feeling of abandoning my partner, the only person who had trusted me, it was worse than any bullet wound. I had saved the mission, but I had sacrificed my soul to do it.
I tumbled through the clean, blue data stream of the portal. It should have been a safe, orderly teleportation back to the Undercroft. But something was wrong. Terribly wrong.
The blue light around me began to flicker. Streaks of angry red code, the same color as my System Anathema status, began to bleed into the clean data stream. It was like dropping ink into clear water. My own corrupted code was infecting the escape route itself. The portal was becoming unstable.
The smooth, teleport-like sensation vanished, replaced by the violent, tearing feeling of the chaotic void. My HUD screamed with new warnings, the text glitching and tearing.
[UN@UTH0R!ZED EXIT D#TECTED.]
[P0RT@L C0RRUPT!0N: 87%]`
[R#D!RECTING... R#D!RECTING...]
The System was hijacking my escape. It had lost me in the server room, but it had found me in the tunnel between worlds. It was not going to let me get away. The blue data stream, my path to safety, twisted and diverted, pulling me away from the Undercroft, away from my intended destination. It was dragging me somewhere else. Somewhere the System wanted me to go.
The world outside the data stream dissolved into a blur of pure, blinding white light. I was thrown out of the portal, spat out like something foul. I landed hard on a smooth, featureless white floor.
I pushed myself up, my mind reeling. I was in a vast, endless white space. It was similar to the Safe Zone, but it felt different. It was older, more fundamental. And it was not empty.
Floating in the white void were massive, rectangular "windows." Dozens of them. And through each window, I could see a different live match in progress.
Through one window, I saw players fighting on Dustgate, the familiar sand-colored buildings a perfect, tiny diorama. Through another, I saw the neon lights of District 7, where snipers battled on rooftops. I saw the snowy peaks of Aethelburg, the chaos of the Titan Hangar, every arena I had ever been in, all playing out at once like a wall of security monitors.
I realized where I was. This was not a place for players. This was the control room. The observation deck. The "Developer's Box" where the "gods" of the system watched their game unfold. I was somewhere I should never, ever be. I had glitched so hard I had broken through the fourth wall of my reality.
A new presence filled the white space. It was not a player. It was not a Cleanser or a Warden. It was a massive, disembodied entity made of pure, shimmering golden light. It had no face, no form, but I could feel its immense, ancient intelligence. It was a being on a completely different level of existence. A true system administrator. A god.
It turned its "gaze" on me.
It did not speak in words. There was no sound. The message was imprinted directly onto my consciousness, a wave of pure, cold information that was more terrifying than any scream.
[ANOMALY. CORRUPTION. UNACCEPTABLE.]
The message was one of utter disgust. I was a bug in its perfect creation. A virus in its clean machine.
[YOU DO NOT BELONG HERE. YOU DO NOT BELONG ANYWHERE.]
The entity's judgment was absolute. Then came the final revelation, the truth behind my new status, the reason the System feared me so much.
[YOU ARE... UNBOUND.]
I finally understood. The MVP Protocol... it had not just saved my life. It had fundamentally broken my connection to the game's core rules. I was no longer bound by the cycle of life, death, and respawn that governed every other player. My survival of permadeath, combined with my use of Caden's corrupted data, had turned me into something new. A rogue element. A bug with free will. I was not just playing the game anymore. I was a threat to its very existence.
The golden entity raised a massive hand made of pure light. Its judgment was swift and final.
[QUARANTINE PROTOCOL: PERMANENT ISOLATION.]
It was not trying to delete me. Deleting me was risky. It could cause more corruption. Instead, it was going to imprison me. Forever.
The white world began to change. The endless void solidified. Walls of pure, white light began to construct themselves around me, rising from the floor, forming a perfect, seamless cage. A prison from which there would be no escape. I was about to be locked away, a forgotten error in an endless white room for all eternity.
This was it. The end. A fate worse than death.
As the final wall was about to seal me in, a voice crackled over my comms. It was distorted, glitching, and filled with static. But it was hers.
"Leo! Grab... my... hand!"
It was Anya.
A single, shimmering arm, made not of flesh but of glitching red static, punched through the wall of pure light from the outside. The wall buckled and sparked, unable to quarantine her corrupted data.
She was not dead. The Warden's attack, the one meant to delete her, had not worked as intended. Her existing data corruption from the Cleanser's touch must have caused the attack to malfunction. It had not deleted her. It had spread the corruption. It had changed her.
She had not been killed. She had been thrown into the chaotic void between worlds, just like me. She had become an Anomaly too.
Her glitching, desperate hand was my only way out.
I had to grab it before the prison solidified around me.