Chapter 5 Corrupted Ground
The grey swallowed him whole. One step past the boundary and the world broke. The ground cycled under his feet, grass to stone to grass, unable to decide. The tree ahead rendered twice, two copies of itself slightly off from each other, both wrong. The ambient sound looped every four seconds, a bird call that never finished before it started again.
Caius stood still and breathed. Any player would be losing their mind right now. He read it like an error log.
Memory leak. The System was holding old data it couldn't release, two versions of the zone bleeding into each other. He knew how to move through it. Follow the newest textures. Step where the geometry was most recently rendered. Treat everything else as ghost data.
He walked. Sixty meters of broken world. The ruins of a minor landmark he half-remembered from early level design sessions sat collapsed at the zone's center, stones textured from three different biomes, one wall partially transparent. Underneath the collapsed geometry, something pulsed.
He crouched. Pushed through two layers of ghost terrain with his hands. Found it.
A fragment. Dense, dark, wrong in the specific way of data that had been compressed for decades. It pulsed with a slow irregular rhythm.
He knew this structure immediately.
"There you are," he said quietly.
He reached for it. The moment his fingers closed around it, the data hit him like a wave. Skills, Broken ones. A class architecture split down the middle. A power set built around negation, around the spaces the System ignored.
The Nullwalker.
He had written that name himself. Four years into development, two in the morning. He had fought for this class longer than he should have and then cut it because a class that negated System rules made the entire game meaningless. His vision filled with a prompt.
CLASS FRAGMENT DETECTED: NULLWALKER \[CORRUPTED — 11% INTACT\]. INTEGRATE? WARNING: INTEGRATION MAY ACCELERATE SYSTEM PURGE SEQUENCE.
He looked at the warning for exactly two seconds, he pressed integrate. The pain dropped him instantly. Every nerve in his body accessed at once by something with the right to access them but not the right tools, forcing data into an architecture it wasn't designed for. He heard himself make a sound he didn't choose. Then the ground hit him.
He was on his back staring at the flickering sky. Hands and everything shaking. He had no idea how long he'd been down. A face appeared above him.
Renne. She was crouched over him, both hands on his shoulders, and her face was doing something he suspected it didn't do often. The control she wore like armor had slipped. Just enough to show what was underneath it. Fear.
"You're an idiot," she said.
"You came in," he managed.
"Obviously I came in." Her hands moved over his shoulders, checking for something she could categorize as damage. "What did you touch? What did you do?"
"A fragment. Deleted class, from before launch."
"You touched something buried in a corrupted zone." Her voice went flat. "After I told you people don't come back from these zones."
"I'm not people." He got himself onto one elbow. The shaking was easing. "And I came back."
"You're on the floor."
"Temporarily."
She sat back on her heels. The fear was folding back behind the armor now, replaced by something sharper. "What did it do?"
"Gave me a class. Broken, incomplete, but functional." He pushed himself to sitting. His vision swam once and held. "Eleven percent of the original data. Better than nothing."
"You integrated corrupted data into yourself on purpose." She said it like she was reading a charge sheet.
"Yes."
"And you think that was a good idea."
"I think it was the only idea." He looked at his hands. The Nullwalker's architecture sat in him like a new room in a house, unfurnished, badly lit, but real. "I can't fight this world with nothing. Eleven percent of something broken is still eleven percent more than I had."
She looked at him for a long moment. Then she stood and offered her hand, he took it. She pulled him up with the practiced ease of someone who had been pulling people off the ground for years and had stopped thinking about it.
"Walk," she said. "If you can walk you're probably not dying."
He walked. Unsteady for the first two steps, then better.
"The class," she said, moving beside him toward the zone's edge. "What does it do?"
"Lets me operate in spaces the System ignores. Move through barriers. Read the world's architecture directly." He paused. "At eleven percent it's mostly broken. What I have is one skill that works maybe sixty percent of the time and a passive that might do something useful."
"Might."
She glanced at him sideways. "So you went through all of that for a skill that works sixty percent of the time."
"And the forty percent failure rate is genuinely exciting." He said it dry and she made a sound that was almost a laugh and then clearly decided against it.
They reached the zone's edge. The grey fell away behind them and the normal world came back, too bright, too rendered, the colors aggressive after the corrupted zone's muted wrongness.
Renne stopped walking. She turned to face him fully.
"The class fragment," she said. "It was buried in there. Hidden." She crossed her arms. "Someone put it there."
"Or it survived from a deleted build and the corrupted zone preserved it."
"Is that what you think happened?"
He looked back at the grey patch behind them. At the boundary where the world stopped making sense. "No," he admitted. "It was too clean. Too findable. Something that old and that compressed should have been unreadable." He paused. "Someone preserved it."
"For who?"
"I don't know yet."
She watched him. "You're not scared."
"I'm very scared." He looked at her. "I'm just used to being scared while working."
She opened her mouth.
His vision flooded. Not a System message, Something underneath that, deeper. Written directly into his perception in the base language, the foundational code he had built the System on top of, never meant to be visible from inside the world.
No sender or header. Just his name, and four words below it that turned the temperature of the air around him into something cold.
“Hello, Caius. I wondered when you'd start digging.”