Rain streaked down the windows of Fynn's cramped apartment, making the neon city outside blur into streaks of pink and green. He sat hunched over his desk, one hand gripping a cheap game controller, the other lazily scrolling his phone.
At twenty-two, Fynn had little to show for life. His part-time delivery job barely paid for rent and instant noodles, and most of his college classes had turned into "watch recordings later" —which he never did. But he had one small comfort: his VRMMO, Ethereal Code.
The game wasn't just pixels and quests. In this city, magic was real—sort of. Wizards didn't wave wands; they wrote code. A spell was a script, a summoning required compiling a "mana program," and the best mages were basically top-tier programmers who could rewrite reality itself.
Fynn, unfortunately, was not one of them.
"Level 8… again," he muttered, staring at his avatar, a small knight with a dented helmet and an even dentier sword. I've been stuck on this quest for weeks.
His current mission? "Clear 20 street goblins." The monsters were laughably weak, but his attacks barely scratched them. His skills were underpowered, his equipment secondhand, and his friends—well, most of them were already level 30+.
He sighed, leaning back. The real world felt just as punishing. Rent was due, his boss hated late deliveries, and his mom kept texting him about "getting a real job."
Then, something odd happened.
A tiny notification blinked in the corner of his VR HUD:
"Error: Rogue spell detected in sector 7G. /debug_mode_init/"
Fynn blinked. "Huh? That's… weird. I didn't touch anything new."
Curiosity overrode his better judgment. He typed the command, half-expecting it to be a glitch or prank from another player.
The screen flickered, lines of code spinning like liquid fire. His cheap monitor emitted a soft hum, then a tiny flame popped into existence above the desk.
Fynn jerked back. "No… no way…"
The flame grew into a small, floating creature—no bigger than a toaster—wobbling in the air like it had just learned to hover. It squeaked, leaving a faint trail of sparks, and looked at him like it was expecting instructions.
"I… I didn't… summon you," Fynn stammered.
Yet somehow, he had. Somehow, a level 8 nobody had triggered a spell that was supposed to be locked behind level 50+ and advanced coding permissions.
Outside, the city buzzed with drones and neon lights, oblivious to the tiny magical anomaly forming in Fynn's apartment. He rubbed his eyes, trying to convince himself it was a hallucination.
But it wasn't.
And in that instant, Fynn realized that being weak didn't make him safe. Being low-level didn't make him invisible. It just meant he had no idea what he'd just unleashed.