The collapsed column behind me still thrummed, low and rhythmic, like a speaker left humming after the music had ended. I didn’t linger. The system might not have punished me directly for the override, but I had no illusions about leniency. It had registered me, adapted to my presence, and now whatever thread I’d pulled was unravelling something far larger than I was ready for.

  The path ahead had changed in the aftermath. These walls were different, older in design, but somehow more stable. Gone were the sinewed tubes and bone-welded joints of earlier. The corridors here were narrow and smooth, mechanical in design and emotionally neutral, tiled in flat greys that occasionally lost all texture, as if this section of the system had been constructed but never finalised. Not glitched. Just... forgotten.

  As I moved forward, my footsteps sounded different. The acoustics were softer, more contained. This place had structure. Deliberate design. Even if it had been buried under layers of biomechanical entropy, the original purpose still echoed through the geometry.

  The corridor began to curve, then narrowed, guiding me deeper into a space that felt set apart, not merely a new area, but one placed deliberately outside the normal path. I passed a series of alcoves carved into the structure. Each was recessed, just a few feet wide, and half-rendered as though awaiting content that had never arrived. They reminded me of developer rooms, staging bays for player onboarding, maybe. Places not meant for players to see, but that still had to exist.

  The first held a table formed from floating strands of code, visibly shifting and mutating, as if someone had opened the source file and left it half-edited. Strings of logic flickered red, some commented out, others still active, but the resolution was too degraded to read clearly. The second alcove contained a mannequin, humanoid in proportion, but missing both arms and any facial features. It rotated slowly on a corrupted axis, twitching every few seconds in just the right way to suggest awareness, as though at any moment it might look directly at me.

  The third alcove stopped me cold.

  It held a CRT screen.

  It sat on a plinth of hardened mesh, static flickering across its surface. The casing was cracked and dust-coated, but it was powered. A faint hum leaked from the exposed speaker grille, broken only by occasional sharp clicks, the kind an old VCR would make while adjusting tape tension. As I stepped closer, the display clarified. Four blocks of colour. A blinking pixel cursor. Oversized UI text, built with early-era game logic. Then the voice crackled in, distorted but unmistakably artificial.

  “Welcome... to your first steps as a Hero.”

  The tone was that generic cheerfulness reserved for onboarding sequences. Scripted. Reassuring. Hollow. Something designed to comfort children and newcomers. But even as it played, the screen twitched, and the final syllable glitched half a beat behind, like a smile that arrived just a moment too late. The system was lagging its own joy.

  Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.

  “Please select a weapon to begin.”

  A sharp beep followed. The cursor shifted across the options and stopped, hovering over one.

  I hadn’t touched it.

  Then the overlay flickered again, half-visible in my vision, half hovering in the air beside the screen:

  [DEBUG TRACE ACTIVE]

  [ATTEMPTING: GHOST THREAD ALIGNMENT]

  [FAILURE // UNCLASSIFIED USER]

  Before I could move, another signal cut through, not a system message, not code.

  A voice.

  Feminine. Light. Not urgent. Just present.

  “Don’t pick a weapon.”

  The whisper reached me not through sound, but through memory. Not loud. Not invasive. Just placed inside me, like it belonged there. Like it always had.

  I stepped back.

  The CRT flickered again. In the top corner, a shape began to form. It wasn’t fully rendered, more an impression, as though the pixels were trying to remember how to arrange themselves. Round ears. A tail. Eyes like shards of amber, cut from something old and holy. The image glitched halfway through, failed to finish rendering, but it didn’t disappear.

  It lingered.

  I stared, breath caught. I didn’t speak. The word hovered behind my lips, a name, maybe, or the idea of one, but nothing came. The screen blinked once more and then powered down. The hum faded into silence.

  In the alcove beside it, the mannequin jerked, a subtle twitch, just enough to draw my eye, and fell still again. Back in the first bay, the lines of code turned crimson and began to erase themselves in a cascade of vanishing syntax. Everything dimmed. Not darker in light, but quieter in presence. As if someone had closed the file.

  There was something here.

  Not the system. Not the Nullspace.

  Something smaller. Not yet formed.

  But aware.

  I followed the corridor as it sloped deeper. The structure continued to evolve, away from raw, unrendered code, and into something older, something intentional. Stone met metal. Surfaces smoothed into uncertain symmetry. And then, without warning, the hallway opened into a wider chamber.

  This space was not glitched. Not broken. Built.

  Benches lined the walls, cracked and ancient, but not destroyed. At the centre, a wide basin had been carved into the floor, ringed with data seams. It might once have been a fire pit. Or a calibration zone. Now it held only stillness.

  The air didn’t hum. The lighting didn’t flicker. No ambient loops. No UI. No threat.

  Just quiet.

  I sat heavily on one of the benches. My hoodie pulled tight where it had stuck to dried blood and grime on my back. My hand throbbed from the cut. My ribs ached. My legs trembled from hours of tension. For the first time since the world had torn itself open, I let my weight settle. I didn’t speak. I didn’t cry.

  And for a time, nothing followed.

  But something was watching.

  Not like a monitor.

  Not like the system.

  It felt different.

  Not from above. Not from beyond.

  From beside.

  I turned my head slowly, eyes drifting toward the far corner of the chamber. Nothing there. But if I didn’t focus, if I let my eyes go soft, I could sense it. A curl of absence where light didn’t want to bend. A gap in the rendering logic. A memory that hadn’t been finalised yet.

  No sound. No threat. No animation.

  Just... potential.

  The whisper returned, softer now. No words. Just the sense of a voice. Not code. Not a command.

  Intention.

  [ECHO FRAGMENT SYNC PENDING...]

  [ANCHOR DETECTED: NULLPOINTER]

  [ENTITY INITIALISING...]

  A shimmer traced the air near the ground. Low. Silent.

  But undeniably alive.

  The edge of a tail. A flicker of light. A shape forming from the folds of unclaimed logic.

  Not rendered yet.

  Not ready.

  But present.

  And waiting.

  Thanks for reading! If this part hit hard (emotionally or mechanically), I’d love to hear what you think in the comments.

  Tuesday and Saturday

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