Chapter 7 Bounty
They came fast. Three of them, moving through the eastern terrain with the specific efficiency of people who did this for a living. High level gear, coordinated spacing, no wasted movement. These were not players who stumbled into bounty work.
These were players who had built careers around it. Caius saw them coming before Renne did.
"Company," he said.
She turned. Her blade was out before she finished turning. "How many?"
"Three. Coming from the north."
She looked at him quickly. "Get back. They can't see you. Stay out of the engagement zone."
He moved left, putting a collapsed wall between himself and the approaching hunters. Three feet from Renne, close enough to see everything. Invisible to all of them.
The hunters spread into a triangle formation as they closed the distance, textbook bounty positioning, one forward and two flanking. The lead hunter was big, broad, carrying a two-handed weapon that had clearly been upgraded past its base design multiple times. His level tag read 67. The two flanking him were 61 and 58.
Renne's level tag read 54. She was outnumbered and outleveled, she stood her ground anyway, blade up, weight forward, with the stillness of someone who had already run the numbers and decided that running was worse.
"Renne Oskar," the lead hunter said. He stopped ten feet from her. Not a question, an identification. "Bounty's been placed. You know how this goes."
"I know how it goes," she said. Her voice was steady. "I also know you need all three of you to come for one person, which tells me something about your confidence level."
The lead hunter smiled. It wasn't a nice smile. "Just being thorough."
"Who placed it?"
"Anonymous." He shrugged. "Credits cleared. That's all we need."
Caius watched from three feet away and thought fast.
He had no attack skills. No weapon he could use properly. His stats were essentially nonexistent, an ERROR entity with eleven percent of a deleted class and one skill that worked sixty percent of the time. In any direct engagement he was useless.
But he could see things the hunters couldn't. The System connections were visible to him, the threads of game logic running between a player's intent and their skill execution, the invisible infrastructure that made abilities function. He had built that infrastructure. He knew exactly how it worked, and he could see the gaps in it.
The lead hunter was already cycling into his opening combo, the muscle memory of someone who had run this sequence hundreds of times. Caius watched the skill activation thread begin to load and found what he was looking for almost immediately.
A half-frame gap. A tiny window between the first and second hit of the combo where the System briefly dropped its targeting confirmation before reacquiring. Standard in high-damage skills, a necessary lag to prevent server overload. He had built that lag himself.
He reached for it.
The push was easier than the first time. Less like forcing something and more like redirecting it, catching the skill's momentum at the gap and nudging it sideways. The lead hunter's weapon swung, Into his left flanker.
The impact was enormous. Full damage, point blank, skill-enhanced, hitting a player who was standing completely still because he had not been expecting to be the target. The flanker went down hard, health bar gutted, and lay there making the specific sound of someone who had just been hit by a friend and hadn't processed it yet.
The lead hunter stared at his own weapon. At his fallen ally. At the space between them where nothing was.
"What the…"
Renne moved. She was already inside the right flanker's guard, blade working fast, and the flanker was good but not good enough for someone who had six years of surviving in a world that wanted to erase her. He lasted four seconds. His health bar hit zero and he blinked out, respawning elsewhere.
The lead hunter turned back to Renne. Caius pushed again, finding the thread of his movement skill this time, the one that let him close distance fast. Same gap.
The hunter lunged sideways instead of forward, into a wall. He hit it at full speed and staggered, the momentum system carrying him where his skill misfired. Renne was already running.
"Now," she said, without looking back.
Caius ran.
Behind them, the lead hunter's voice rose, confused and angry, calling to his downed ally. Neither of them looked back. They ran for three minutes straight, cutting east, then south, then east again, Renne navigating by memory through terrain that all looked the same to Caius. She finally stopped behind a dense cluster of terrain geometry that blocked sightlines from three directions. She bent forward, hands on her knees, breathing hard.
Not from the running. He could tell the difference. Her fitness was not the problem. Something else was moving through her, working itself out, and it was using her breath to do it. He waited. She straightened and looked at him.
"You did something back there," she said. "To their skills."
He didn't deny it. "The System has gaps in its skill activation sequence. I found them."
"You broke their abilities from three feet away." She said it quietly, like she was still deciding what it meant. "Without touching them. Without a skill of your own."
"I introduced errors into their execution threads. It's the same principle as the glitch absorption, just applied differently."
She was quiet for a moment. Her eyes were doing the calculation thing again, that focused inward look she got when she was reassessing something.
"Do you understand," she said slowly, "what you are? What you could be used for?"
He looked at her. "I'm starting to."
"No." She shook her head. "I don't think you are. Not fully." She took one more breath and stood straight. "A player who can interfere with System skill execution without being detected. Without being targetable. Without leaving any trace the System can track." She paused. "Do you know what guilds would do to have something like that? What certain people in this world would pay? Or take, if paying didn't work?"
He thought about the three hunters. About how fast they had arrived, about a bounty placed within minutes of them entering the corrupted zone together.
"Someone was watching us," he said. "From before the corrupted zone."
"Yes."
"The bounty. You said you know who placed it."
She looked at him. Something shifted in her face, something that had been sitting behind the practical exterior since the hunters arrived, something personal.
"I know the signature," she said. "The way it was placed, the channel it went through. I've seen it before." She paused. "His name is Padrin Holt. He's an information broker. Works the surface and mid tiers, sells what he sees to whoever pays." She crossed her arms. "I've crossed paths with him twice. Both times something went wrong for me shortly after."
"And he works for someone."
"Yes." She looked at him steadily. "Someone who has been looking for a way to control the System's error states for a very long time." She let that sit for a second. "Someone who has resources, patience, and absolutely no interest in what happens to the people who get in their way." She glanced back in the direction they had come from. "And as of about thirty minutes ago, when we walked into that corrupted zone together, that someone knows you exist."
The gold sky sat above them, perfectly designed, exactly the shade he had argued about for three weeks.
He looked at it and thought about error states. About someone who had been searching for a way to control them. About an ERROR entity who had just demonstrated, in front of a paid informant, that he could manipulate the System's core execution threads from the outside.
"How long have they been looking?" Cauis asked.
"Long enough to be ready for you.” Renna said.