Chapter 1: Error 404
The first thing Kaelen saw wasn't the sky.
It was a blue box floating in the darkness.
[ SYSTEM REBOOTING... ]
[ CRITICAL ERROR: WORLD DATA MISSING ]
[ CONNECTING TO LOCAL USER... SUCCESS ]
Kaelen gasped, his body jerking violently as consciousness slammed back into him. His lungs filled with air that tasted wrong—like ozone, static, and dry ancient dust.
He shot up, scrambling backward, his fingernails scraping against rough, cold concrete. He hyperventilated, his heart hammering against his ribs like a trapped bird.
"Where…"
He blinked, rubbing his eyes.
The blue box didn't vanish. It hovered in the center of his vision, translucent and glowing, tracking his gaze like a heads-up display.
He forced himself to look away from the text. He looked around.
He was sitting in the middle of a street. He recognized the layout—4th Avenue, near his apartment. But it wasn't a street anymore. It was a graveyard of geometry.
The skyscrapers were gone—not collapsed, not bombed, but erased.
The building to his left was sheared in half, top to bottom. Inside, there were no desks or furniture. The cross-section was a flat, grey surface. The edges pixelated and flickered, dissolving into white noise like a corrupted video file buffering on a bad connection.
Kaelen looked up.
The sky was a bruising, deep purple.
No clouds.
No sun.
Just a flat, infinite texture that emitted a cold, shadowless light.
The world hadn't ended.
It had glitches.
[ WELCOME, USER: KAELEN ]
[ CLASS: ANOMALY ]
[ AUTHORITY LEVEL: 1 (OBSERVER) ]
"Authority?" Kaelen whispered.
His voice sounded flat, swallowed instantly by the unnatural, heavy silence of the ruins. "Is this... a hallucination?"
He reached for his pocket to find his phone. A reflex.
His fingers brushed against nothing but lint. Phone, wallet, keys—gone. As if they had never existed.
He tried to stand.
Agh!
Pain exploded up his right leg, a blinding spike of agony that dropped him back to the asphalt.
He looked down, and his stomach churned.
A jagged, rusted piece of rebar had torn through his jeans and embedded itself deep into his calf. It wasn't a clean cut. The metal was twisted. Blood soaked the denim, warm and sticky, running down into his sneaker and pooling on the grey road.
The pain was real. The blood was real.
Panic surged, cold and sharp.
"Okay," he breathed, hands trembling. "Okay. Bleeding out. Need a hospital."
He looked down the street.
Empty.
Grey.
Silent.
There were no sirens. No traffic. No wind. Just the sound of his own ragged breathing echoing in a dead world.
SCREE-CH.
Kaelen froze.
The sound tore through the quiet like a knife. It wasn't an animal.
It sounded like metal grinding against bone, overlaid with a distorted electronic hiss.
He turned his head slowly toward the shadows of the glitched building.
Something was crawling out of the missing texture.
It had the shape of a dog, perhaps a Doberman, but it was fundamentally wrong.
Its skin was inside out, exposing wet, glistening muscle that pulsed with dark light. But the terrifying part was how it moved.
It didn't walk. It lagged.
The creature flickered, teleporting six inches forward, then freezing, then snapping forward again. It moved like a stop-motion nightmare.
[ ENTITY: HOLLOW | TIER 0 ]
[ STATUS: CORRUPTED ]
[ THREAT LEVEL: LETHAL ]
The word LETHAL pulsed red in his vision.
The beast locked its empty white eyes on Kaelen.
It lowered its head, sniffing the air. It smelled the copper scent of fresh blood.
A low growl emanated from its throat, sounding like TV static turned up to maximum volume.
Then, it lunged.
Kaelen didn't think. Instinct took over.
He threw himself to the side, rolling across the abrasive asphalt, ignoring the scream of agony from his impaled leg.
CRACK.
The Hollow slammed into the concrete where his head had been a second earlier. The impact shattered the pavement, sending stone chips flying.
Its teeth clicked together.
Snap. Snap.
It turned instantly, its movement jerky and unnatural.
Kaelen scrambled backward, crab-walking away, his hands grasping desperately for a weapon.
A rock.
A pipe.
Anything.
"Stay back!" he yelled, though he knew the thing wouldn't listen.
His fingers curled around something cold and heavy in the rubble. A rusted iron pipe, debris from the erased building.
Come on.
The Hollow gathered its legs, muscles bunching up for a second leap.
Kaelen gripped the pipe with both hands, adrenaline flooding his system so hard his vision blurred.
The monster leaped.
Kaelen swung blindly, a desperate haymaker.
CLANG.
The pipe connected with the creature's skull.
It wasn't a solid hit. It felt like hitting a bag of wet cement.
The monster yelped, its sound looping like a broken audio file—yelp-yelp-yelp.
Grey smoke leaked from the impact point instead of blood.
The creature shook its head. It crouched low.
It wasn't playing anymore. It was going for the throat.
Kaelen's back hit the wall.
He was trapped.
He was bleeding.
He was a junior IT admin, not a fighter. He was going to die here.
[ ALERT: ADRENALINE SPIKE DETECTED ]
[ AUTHORITY INTERFACE: ENGAGED ]
Suddenly, the world slowed.
Not him.
The world.
The purple hue of the sky faded into a grid. Kaelen looked at the monster again.
He didn't just see flesh.
He saw code.
Blue wireframes appeared over the creature's body, showing the geometry of its form. Streams of binary data cascaded down its flanks.
And right in the center of its chest, pulsing beneath the muscle, he saw a glowing red knot.
[ TARGET LOCKED: HOLLOW ]
[ WEAKNESS: CORE KERNEL ]
The System wasn't just watching.
It was guiding him.
The monster sprang, a blur of teeth and corruption.
Kaelen didn't flinch this time. He didn't swing wildly.
He watched the blue trajectory line that appeared in his vision.
He thrust the pipe forward like a spear.
Straight into the red knot.
Thwack.
The sound was wet and final.
The rusted pipe punctured the creature's chest, driving straight into the glowing error.
The Hollow froze mid-air.
Then it shattered.
Like a stained-glass window hit by a sledgehammer, the monster disintegrated. It broke apart into thousands of tiny blue cubes. The cubes hovered for a second, then dissolved into the air, deleting themselves from reality.
No blood.
Nobody.
Just silence.
[ TARGET DELETED ]
[ AUTHORITY +10 ]
[ ACHIEVEMENT: FIRST KILL ]
The pipe clattered to the ground.
Kaelen stared at the empty space where the monster had been, his chest heaving, sweat stinging his eyes.
"I… I deleted it?"
His hands were shaking.
Not from fear.
From the realization that the world could be rewritten. He hadn't just killed it; he had removed it from the program.
The adrenaline began to fade.
Pain returned, roaring back to life with a vengeance.
"Agh..."
He looked down at his leg. The wound was deep. Nasty. The blood was still flowing.
"Infection," he muttered, his mind racing. "Tetanus. Blood loss. If the monsters don't get me, the fever will."
He needed water. He needed to wash the wound.
He looked around the rubble desperately.
A plastic water bottle lay in the dust a few feet away.
He dragged himself over to it, leaving a smear of red on the grey pavement. He grabbed it.
Empty.
Crushed.
The label was faded to white. Useless trash.
"Dammit!"
He slammed the plastic against the ground. "Just one thing! Can I just have one thing go right?"
But as he held the crushed plastic, blue text flashed over the object.
[ ITEM: PLASTIC BOTTLE (DAMAGED) ]
[ ACTION AVAILABLE: RESTORE ]
[ COST: 5 AUTHORITY ]
Kaelen blinked.
Restore?
He looked at the counter in his vision: [10/100].
He focused.
He didn't say it out loud. He willed it.
He needed water.
"Restore."
He felt a pull in his gut—a sensation like a sudden drop in blood sugar, a physical drain of energy leaving his core and flowing into his hand.
VRRRM.
The bottle shimmered with blue light.
The crushed plastic popped back into shape with a sharp crackle.
The dirt vanished. The label regained its color.
And then, miraculously, condensation formed on the outside as clear, cold water materialized inside, filling it to the brim.
It was brand new. As if he had just pulled it from a cooler in a store that didn't exist anymore.
[ RESTORATION COMPLETE ]
[ AUTHORITY: 5 / 10 ]
Kaelen stared at the bottle, his mouth hanging open.
He cracked the seal—click—and drank.
It was cold.
It was clean.
It was real.
He wiped his mouth, a strange, terrifying realization settling over him. He looked at the glitching building, then at the empty spot where the monster had died, and finally at his own glowing hands.
The world was gone.
The rules were dead.
But he... he had the Admin keys.
He looked at his wounded leg.
Then at the silent, flickering city filled with distant, grinding noises.
"Okay," he whispered, gripping the iron pipe until his knuckles turned white.
"New game."
He grabbed a piece of rubble and used it to pull himself up, standing on one leg.
[ NEW QUEST: SURVIVE THE NIGHT ]
[ REWARD: MAP UNLOCK ]