The world had no answers.
Ashen Vale stood beneath trees that whispered in tongues, roots shifting slightly as if trying to breathe. The ravine behind him shimmered with faint digital static, a tear in the earth's code. Wind howled through leaves that didn't rustle. Every few minutes, the sky flickered like a blinking cursor.
He had run until his legs gave out. Now, crouched against a stone that hummed with quiet, corrupted energy, he tried to make sense of what had just happened.
None of it did.
[ERROR: YOU ARE OUT OF BOUNDS]
[Rollback attempt failed.]
The words echoed in his mind, over and over, even though the screen had vanished. No answers. Just commands. Just warnings.
"What is this place…?" he whispered, voice cracked. "What am I?"
He remembered flashes—glass against skin, the scream of brakes, a woman's voice crying his name. Then nothing. Not even death. Just silence.
And then—this.
A world that seemed... incomplete.
The birds overhead repeated the same call, looping it twice before resetting. One of them flew backward for a second, then corrected mid-air. Every few steps he took, the dirt seemed to unwrite his footprints and then rewrite them crookedly.
He wasn't dreaming.
He was inside something. A world too perfect in its imperfection. Like a simulation with missing pieces.
And he wasn't meant to be here.
[Title: THE ANOMALY]
[Passive Effect: System instability triggered within 10 meters.]
That was what it said. And it hadn't lied.
He didn't understand this "System." But it was scared of him. That much was obvious.
He looked down at his hands—shaking slightly. There was no divine glow. No weapon in hand. No armor. No stats. And yet, he'd made a soldier glitch into oblivion just by existing.
"What the hell am I?"
He didn't get an answer.
But something else did.
A scream—sharp, human, and close—ripped through the corrupted stillness of Zone 3-V.
Ashen jolted upright. It wasn't one of the glitched sounds this world spat out. No, this was real. Alive.
And in danger.
Without thinking, he ran.
---
The scream led him into a shallow forest, where the trees drooped with black leaves that glitched every few seconds, flickering between types—oak, ash, maple—like the system couldn't decide what assets to load.
A clearing opened up—and that's where he saw her.
A young woman, maybe his age or slightly older, stood back-to-back with a large, glowing stone. She was panting, holding a broken staff in her hand. Her robes were tattered, stained with blood, her hair wild and dirty-blonde, clinging to her face. Her left arm hung limp, likely broken.
But her eyes—sharp, furious, alive.
And charging toward her was a creature pulled straight from a broken nightmare.
A quadruped beast, skinless, muscles twitching with electric pulses. Its jaw split down the middle vertically, revealing rows of grinding teeth. Code lines ran through its back like veins, and every time it stepped, the world flickered beneath its paws.
It was a glitched spawn.
And it was fast.
Ashen didn't think.
His legs moved before his brain did. His feet tore through the unstable ground, his body racing toward the thing as it pounced—
[GLITCH STEP Activated.]
His body vanished—no dramatic effect, no trail of light—just pure absence.
The world screamed in his ears.
And then—impact.
He reappeared directly above the monster, gravity twisted, his body falling sideways through the air. He landed hard on its back. The beast shrieked—code lines flashing red—and twisted wildly to throw him off.
Ashen had no weapon. No skill but instinct.
He wrapped his arms around its neck, trying to hold it in place. It slammed him against a tree—then another—then rolled.
Pain exploded through his side. But Ashen didn't let go.
[Instability Field triggered.]
[Glitch Pulse overload: 41%]
The creature convulsed violently. Sparks danced across its skin. Its code began to unravel.
And then—boom.
A flash of static burst outward from Ashen's body. A glitch ripple—raw, unshaped system failure.
The monster's form cracked like glass. Its head twisted the wrong way. Its teeth fragmented into jagged polygons. And then, like the Cleanup Unit before it—it turned to ash and vanished into the air.
[Glitched Spawn Deleted.]
[Your presence has destabilized Zone 3-V further.]
[System integrity dropping…]
Ashen collapsed beside it, gasping, arms trembling.
The girl stared at him, chest heaving.
"...What the hell was that?" she asked.
Ashen looked up at her. He didn't have an answer.
She didn't seem to care. She dropped the staff and leaned against the stone, sliding to the ground with a pained grunt.
For a long moment, they just sat there in silence. Two broken strangers in a broken world.
Then, finally, she spoke again.
"I've seen monsters glitch before," she muttered, wiping blood from her cheek. "But not like that. That thing—it was breaking just by being near you."
Ashen nodded slowly. "Yeah. That's been happening a lot lately."
She gave him a long, suspicious look. "You're not registered, are you?"
He blinked. "What?"
"Your class. Your ID. Your stat sheet. You aren't an adventurer, are you?"
"…No."
She sighed and leaned her head back. "Well, damn. You're worse off than I thought."
Ashen watched her carefully. "Who are you?"
"Name's Seris," she said. "Ex-Healer. Ex-Adventurer."
She turned to him, eyes narrowing.
"And you…?"
He hesitated.
Then: "Ashen. Ashen Vale."
Seris raised a brow. "Never heard of you. But you clearly are different. You have some weird abilities"
She pointed at the spot where the monster had vanished.
"You're like an error."
---
To Be Continued…