Gods of Realms.
GOR for short.
It was the hottest MMORPG of the year, with over a million concurrent players.
It was both developed and operated by Pantheon.
A corporate giant that had conquered the global market with a single game, remaining at the top for years.
The company's market cap was said to exceed the budget of a decent mid-sized country, and this GOR was its face and its entirety.
The concept was a single line.
— Hunt the gods.
In every field, every dungeon, every stage, 'gods' wielding different powers appeared as bosses.
Players would cooperate to raid these gods and farm the items they dropped.
One that commanded fire, one that parted the seas, one that cast down lightning…
Hundreds of gods guarded their own respective fields.
At times, the boundaries between these gods would crumble, leading them to cooperate, conspire, and compete amongst themselves.
The core fun of the game was for players to react and adapt to these situations.
Among those countless bosses, there was the Azure Gold Qilin.
The field boss of the Red Arena.
Wielding five-colored powers, it was the pinnacle of the Arena and the only source of the server's most expensive item.
The material that dropped only from the Qilin's horn had held the top price on the exchange for months, which was why the Red Arena was always packed.
That Qilin had been missing for six days.
● ● ●
The lights in the operations team's office had not been turned off for five days.
"Did the respawn fail again?"
The team leader's voice exploded with irritation.
The server manager, glued to his monitor, answered while scrolling his mouse.
"It's not a failure. The respawn table is fine. Spawn coordinates are normal, cooldown is normal. According to the system, it should have appeared by now, but it hasn't."
"That is a failure, damn it!"
"Ah, Team Leader. Don't be like that. I'm already about to lose my mind as it is, you know?"
"So just fix it already, you punk!"
"If it were a bug, there'd at least be a log, but there's nothing. It's just… gone. The entire code for the Azure Gold Qilin has vanished from the server."
They had no idea how many times the same conversation had been repeated over the past few days.
The development team had combed through the server, run backups several times, traced the patch history backwards, forwards, and upside down—they had tried everything imaginable.
They even tried to create a new one and insert it.
But even that failed.
There was no answer anywhere.
When they tried a rollback, something else would break.
When they tried to force a spawn, it would just get rejected.
It was as if the game itself was rejecting the existence of the Azure Gold Qilin.
"How many refund requests have piled up?"
"…Over fifty thousand."
Someone let out a long sigh.
There were more than just a few players camped out in the Red Arena waiting for the Qilin.
These were people who had set up camp for weeks as entire guilds just to get that one material.
With it being missing for six days, the forums were in an uproar.
No management skills, it's a scam, let's do a mass refund… The number of upvotes on those posts grew by the minute.
Every time the market opened, the stock price was sliding in real-time.
Of course, today was no different.
It was already down twelve percent in the morning alone.
The total drop in less than a week was over forty percent.
It was an expected result.
How could anyone trust them when they could not fix such a basic issue for nearly a week?
Neither the players nor the shareholders.
"…We're screwed."
The team leader muttered, sinking back into his chair.
No one could argue.
It really seemed like they were screwed.
Just then, an alarm sounded from the server manager's monitor.
Beep— Beep— Beep—
"What is it now? Did something else break?"
The server manager did not answer.
His eyes just widened as he stared at the monitor.
"…Team Leader."
"What?"
"The Qilin, it appeared."
"…What?"
At that one word, everyone in the office rushed over to the single monitor.
[ERROR] Coordinates: Red Arena
[Entity ID: ▒▒▒_▒▒▒▒]
It had really appeared.
The Azure Gold Qilin, which had vanished for six whole days, was marked right in the middle of the Red Arena again.
But the entity name was corrupted.
It was clearly the Azure Gold Qilin, but the system could not read it as such.
"Is it restored? Did someone touch it?"
"No one did. It came in by itself. And not alone."
"What nonsense is that, 'not alone but by itself'?"
The server manager zoomed in on the screen.
Next to the Qilin were two more dots.
Bright red dots.
They definitely existed coordinate-wise, but not in the system.
Two entities with completely blank IDs.
"What are these? Mobs? Players?"
"…I don't know. They're neither. They can't be classified at all."
Just then, death logs started scrolling up like crazy on one side of the screen.
Fwoosh—
It was not one or two lines.
Dozens of lines at once.
The tens of thousands who had been camped in the Red Arena were graying out simultaneously, hundreds at a time.
"P-Players are dying! They're dying in droves!"
"Who's killing them, the Qilin?!"
"No… those two red dots…"
But there was something even crazier.
Even as they were being killed off, the players were not running away.
Instead, they stubbornly swarmed towards the red dots.
The chat log spewed out the reason in real-time.
— It's a hidden boss, it's unreleased, first one to kill it gets the prize…
"Looks like they think it's a new boss. Maybe they think it's an event and are rushing in…"
"Ah, enough. Just delete those things, quickly."
"I can't. Those things…"
"What!?"
"The system can't even recognize them."
"What kind of bullshit is that?"
Even as the manager kept trying to manipulate the system, the massacre showed no signs of stopping.
"…It's not working. Nothing's affecting them?"
"…Then what are they? Those things?"
The death count had already passed four digits.
At a speed that the packets could not even keep up with.
Everyone swallowed dryly.
"…A bug."
Then, the server manager, staring blankly at the screen, added another word.
"No, maybe a new kind of virus…?"
● ● ●
Zero was looking down on the chaos from a high vantage point in the rear.
A ridge with a panoramic view of the Red Arena.
While others camped in front of the boss, he always took a spot like this.
Not a place where his hands could reach, but where his eyes could.
The conclusion of the one who had delved deepest into this game was that the pinnacle was decided not by the fingertips, but by one's field of view.
His nickname was Zero.
He was Rank 1.
The spot above him was empty, so even the term 'first place' was meaningless; he was a player who was simply designated as 0.
That Zero had been camped out for six days.
Just as he was growing weary with nothing left to hunt and almost nothing left to farm, the only decent prey left, the Qilin, had also vanished.
But just now, the sky had torn open.
Crack—.
The empty air in the middle of the Arena split vertically, and the Qilin that had disappeared returned to this world.
It was the very same final field boss that Zero and the Zero-to-Hundred Guild had hunted hundreds of times.
However, its condition was a mess.
Half of its five-colored scales were ground off, and something like numbers was streaming from its shoulder.
Anyone could see it was the figure of something that had been chased.
'Chased?'
A field boss?
That did not make sense.
Field bosses despawn when killed and respawn when their cooldown is over.
That is all.
There was no such thing as data for a boss that gets chased around in this game.
But that Qilin clearly looked like it had been chased in here by something.
The answer followed immediately.
Two more things flew out from the torn rift.
One was a man in black clothes.
He wore a black robe that reached his feet, and in one hand, he held a jet-black sword without a scabbard, letting it hang loosely.
The man stepped down, treading on the back of a golden wolf that seemed twice a man's height.
His steps were fluid, without any wasted motion.
Zero instinctively looked above its head.
There was no name tag.
No rank, no level, no HP bar.
Nothing appeared.
In this game, nothing has an empty space above its head.
Whether it is a mob, an NPC, or a player, some data is attached.
At the very least, a name should have been labeled.
But that man was completely blank.
The clothes and equipment he wore were skins he had never seen before, and more importantly, his movements had no seams in their motion.
It was not a motion-captured movement, nor one enhanced by the engine.
However, his expression was as blank as an AI's.
The other one was more grotesque.
It had a human silhouette, but only the silhouette was human.
Its skin was festering and boiling red, and a black steam-like substance seeped out from the cracks.
It was a figure one would believe was the design for a final raid boss.
It, too, had nothing above its head.
The camp stirred.
But it was not fear.
It was excitement.
Having no name tag was not something to be feared in the world of this game, but something to be coveted.
An unreleased entity.
In other words, a mob not in the data.
For something like that to appear, it was a hidden boss nine times out of ten, and hidden bosses all dropped insane items or rewards.
The first server kill gets an achievement, and achievements…
'Mean money!'
The six days of waiting were not in vain.
"Wow, those Pantheon guys. They went this far just to release something like this?"
This is why they are the top of the gaming world.
How did they endure while forty percent of their stock price evaporated?
In any case, it was a large-scale event.
One that a world-class game company was willing to bet forty percent of its stock price on and secretly push forward!
Waaaaaaaaaaaaah!
Rumble—
The arena trembled from the vibration of stamping feet.
At the rumor that an event had started, players logged in one after another and set their coordinates for the Red Arena, and teleport effects exploded from all directions.
The head count, which was in the tens of thousands, multiplied several times in an instant.
Without anyone needing to go first, the battle lines poured towards the two.
The new 'God' raid begins