"...I have no idea what the hell is going on."
Blacked-out coordinate grids popped up on every screen covering the wall. Until just a short while ago, GOR's maps had been displayed there, but now half of them were occupied by empty domains beyond the boundaries.
And that wasn't all.
Coordinates that had never been designed, programmed, or deployed multiplied at a speed where turning off one line caused two more to turn on, and unidentified elements flickered right alongside them.
When they blocked a broken spot, the blocked area warped again. Maps with imploded textures appeared, causing the ground to surge upward, and a hundred monsters would clip directly into the exact same coordinates before stretching out into a single line and flowing right off the screen.
It was as if the physics engine had completely broken down; objects that had been standing perfectly straight twisted in place and flipped inside out. In one dungeon, the ceiling and floor swapped places, and on a particular field, the sky poured downward.
And then, there was another massive problem.
The Crimson Arena.
The field boss, the Azure-Gold Kirin, which had disappeared for a while, had suddenly popped back into existence. It was still grinding users to dust right there.
"What's the count on that thing right now?"
".....We can't count it."
"Give me a rough estimate, man!"
"It's to the point where the packets can't even keep up."
Every time the colossal creature swung its head, a crowd caught in its wake crumbled into gray dust and scattered away. Wherever its hooves dropped, human shapes were crushed and ground into powder. Death logs surged continuously up the edge of the screen.
While trying to read a single line, a hundred more piled up.
And it never stopped. It didn't disappear, either.
Originally, when a field boss was defeated, it vanished, and even if it wasn't defeated, it had a cooldown time, which was lore-wise meant to make it return to its lair after a specific duration. In the actual program, of course, it simply disappeared and then regenerated once the cooldown was filled.
However....
That thing simply refused to disappear.
A boss that couldn't even be killed, sitting comfortably in the arena, sweeping away and digesting every single user and GM that walked in?
No such thing existed within the GOR data.
Yet, the stream of users never ended. While hundreds were turned to powder on one side, pillars of teleportation light shot up from all directions. The vacant spaces were immediately filled by newly arriving headcounts.
Spurred by a single rumor that defeating it would yield insane rewards, they crawled back in persistently despite watching everyone die. They pinned the coordinates from where they respawned and crawled back in again. They were ground to pieces as soon as they entered, and more entered right where the others had been ground.
With those two previous anomalies gone, the Kirin was left all alone, continuing its massacre.
"Why the hell isn't that thing turning off...?"
The team leader took one look at that screen and immediately turned his eyes away. There were far too many things he had to look at. There was also nothing he could turn off.
"What did we decide to do about the refund calls?"
The team leader brought his cold coffee to his lips, only to set it back down.
"The customer service blocked the lines entirely. They said they'd only get cursed out if they took them."
The entire server management crew sat glued to their chairs like that, with their headsets merely slung around their necks.
There was still no sign of the emergency being lifted. While the majority of users were just simple-minded people who still believed this was a mere glitch, a significant number of those sitting here watching the servers day and night had already sensed that this was a bizarre phenomenon that absolutely could not be explained by science.
Furthermore, some even believed it was the kind of thing they would have been better off not knowing.
To the point where they worried...
Could this perhaps be a sign of the end of the world?
Because of that, everyone grew quiet.
Except, of course, for the operations team leader and the server supervisor.
"This—no, that thing... no, damn it, where the hell are all these things leaking from?!"
"I don't know. I said I don't know, Team Leader. Stop asking me."
"Is there seriously nothing you know, huh?"
"Yes, yes, I'm sorry I don't know anything. But honestly, I bet there isn't a single person on Earth who knows what's going on right now."
"Then, whether it's a bug... or whatever it is, can't we catch even one of them?"
"No, we can't. Catching them is hard enough to begin with, but it's not like there's just one hole."
The server supervisor slid his headset down off one ear.
"It feels like various parts of the core are being ground away, but I can't tell where... no, I can't tell what the problem is at all, regarding everything. Perhaps... those completely vacant domains are acting like noise, which is probably playing a part in this too."
The development team had thrown up their hands long ago. This wasn't the kind of thing that could be blocked with a patch. That Void where not even coordinate values could be grabbed, that space beyond the map edge that had never been laid out or filled.
Deep within that Void, those two unidentified anomalies had been clashing for hours.
It didn't display directly on the screen. Since there were no coordinates, it couldn't be displayed. However, they could faintly glean the combat situation itself through the various holes rent across the server. Still, they could only witness movements that were too vast, fast, and fragmented, leaving them with no way to know everything accurately. But every single time those two collided, the aftermath tore through the interior of the server, rippling out into the surrounding maps.
The entire server shook every time they clashed.
Dungeons that had been perfectly fine were squashed inside out, and dozens of fields warped simultaneously. A massive amount of noise from untraceable data flooded in, effectively plunging the server into intermittent lag.
The most absurd part was that the server itself wouldn't close down at all.
Even though the CEO's approval had come through earlier and they had cut the power... the server didn't turn off.
In other words, the GOR server was currently running without power.
That was the root of it.
The very reason they considered this situation closer to a type of 'server Armageddon' rather than a simple glitch.
Now, all the operations team could do was wait.
But as the saying goes, waiting really was the best medicine when you didn't know anything.
The server anomalies, which felt like they would never end, suddenly stopped dead.
"OH!?"
The server supervisor let out a short exclamation of alarm, his eyes remaining glued to the monitor.
At that moment, a corner of the screen flared white.
Biiiiiiiiii—
"...What is it this time? What is that?"
"I don't know… Just a moment."
The server supervisor's hands moved frantically across the keyboard, but no change occurred that could actually counter the current bizarre phenomenon.
Something simply surged out from beyond the boundary, from that unreleased domain.
Flash!
It was a pure white light source. A light, as if the sun itself had risen from a space completely devoid of coordinates, bloomed and traveled upstream toward the server.
Up until now, what had flown in were broken codes, leaking resources, or at the very least, data fragments resembling half-read characters.
This time, it wasn't data at all; it was just light.
Flash. Flash. Flash.
The same light erupted about ten times in succession. Every time it went off, warnings blanketed the monitors.
The traffic graph hit the ceiling, and ping spiked everywhere. Values never seen before filled the logs.
"Haa… Is this finally the end?"
"Of what?"
"I think the server might actually blow. Judging by the way everything is bursting apart."
"Team Leader."
"What?"
"That thing, the load didn't originate from inside the server. It's coming from the outside. Something keeps crossing over to our side from that vacant, unknown space over there. In the form of light."
"Light is ultimately data anyway, isn't it?"
"Yes, it is, but… this is highly unusual."
"Is there really anything left to be unusual here?"
"Do you see that pattern over there?"
What the supervisor pointed to was a section packed tightly with numbers within the log.
"What about it?"
The server supervisor pointed out several coordinates where the light source had surged.
"There is only one kind of action that creates a pattern like that."
Windows kept popping up and breaking repeatedly, but it did seem to maintain a constant form.
It just wasn't in the GOR format.
"What kind of pattern?"
"Level up."
"...Huh? What does that mean?"
"...I don't know either. I just mentioned it because it's a familiar pattern."
"....."
The team leader pressed his temples. A curse rose to his throat, but he didn't even have the energy left to spit it out.
"Is this happening only to us right now?"
The server supervisor's gaze shifted and locked onto the industry channel window always kept open at the edge of his monitor.
"Ah... Team Leader. That light, it's not just happening to us. Just like those anomalies earlier."
The server supervisor dragged the channel window and maximized it.
Emergency announcements from competing operators were lining up one after another.
Earlier, they had been complaining about broken codes, but now, everyone was collectively speaking of an 'unidentified light.'
The external news sites were also flooded with breaking news.
Screenshots of the exact same light source blanketing screens across various games accumulated in real-time. All sorts of online servers were currently being covered—earlier by anomalies, and now by an inexplicable light.
"What the... First, all these bugs hit at the exact same time, and now they're all seeing the same light?"
The team leader pulled his chair closer. Blood vessels stood out in his eyes as he traced the screen.
The word coincidence had long since been discarded. If it was this identical, it couldn't possibly be a coincidence.
However, as the server supervisor stared into the maximized screen, his expression stiffened in a completely different manner.
"But... there's something strange."
"What is it now?"
"That light. It's coming right now."
"What nonsense are you talking about this time? It's coming? Where to?"
The server supervisor wetted his dry lips.
".....Right here."
Within the screen, a white radiance filled up once more over the vacant coordinate grids before subsiding.
However, a single hole through which that light leaked was unmistakably drilled toward this side.
* * *
At the absolute edge of the Crimson Arena, that rift which had torn open and failed to mend rippled once more.
Until now, the space beyond the wall had merely settled in pitch blackness. Half-finished debris simply drifted weightlessly, detonating and shattering mercilessly whenever those two collided.
The slash mark into which the black man had been sucked also remained intact.
Flash! Flash! Flash!
The darkness and the scenery peering through the rift rippled violently along with a dozen bursts of light, and the drifting, unfinished fragments were completely swept to one side and scattered by that surging motion.
A mountain ridge that had been floating sideways lost its rugged posture and spun around. A piece of a half-built fortress wall split in two, pushed toward either side. Receiving that impact, the torn gap ripped several spans longer. In the end, what was colliding and grinding against what could not be properly seen. However, the rays of light spewed out at the end of that collision leaked all the way to this side of the wall, causing the perfectly normal coordinate grids to warp once before snapping back.
"...."
Zero stared at that trembling for a long time.
He wanted to go beyond that wall just once. It wasn't to clear it, nor was it to destroy it.
It was pure curiosity. Unlike the users or the announcement guides who still couldn't snap out of it and babbled about bugs or viruses, he instinctively felt the truth. This was some sort of sign or omen, a fundamental aspect or law of this universe leaking out.
Therefore, he wanted to simply follow through that torn space and verify it properly with his own eyes just once.
Yet, strangely, unlike those two earlier, Zero could not cross over. Because he was still nothing more than a 'piece of data.'
The sensation of things in this side, the game world, becoming trivial. At a certain moment when a corner of his chest tilted violently toward that dark rift.
From within that gap, something abruptly popped out.
At first, he thought the darkness had merely grown a layer thicker. Since a black silhouette emerged from a black place, there was no boundary.
Though it was impossible to fathom how such a thing was achievable, the figure pried the wide-open rift even larger with both arms and crossed his upper body back over to this side.
It was that unidentified black man from earlier.
Of course, he was Dong Bong-su.
"....."
Dong Bong-su cast a brief glance around at Zero and his surroundings before rotating his arm.
Weight had returned. In other words, he confirmed that he was once again placed under specific physical laws. Furthermore, it was within a physics engine almost identical to Earth's.
The crimson soil was also just as it was.
Step.
One foot touched the ground first, and the other foot followed down. His knee bent once under his own weight before straightening back up.
It was a leg that had sprouted anew after swallowing the World-Eradicating Demon Lord. The same went for his hand.
"I've arrived properly."
This place was no different from when he had left it.
Users were still being crushed and laid out as gray powder, and the cooling crowds were stacking on top of them.
A space that was a corpse but not a corpse, a ruin but not a ruin, an arena but not an arena—just a space like that.
However, the ground at the dead center fractured every now and then. It wasn't that the textures were breaking, but rather that something else buried underneath was surging up.
The cause of that warping that had sent him beyond the wall.
And the master of that warping resided right in the middle of that arena.
The Azure-Gold Kirin.
The colossal creature turned its head. A deep brilliance was currently intensifying across its five-colored scales. The areas that had been ground away were covered, and their colors deepened. The mane of a lion, the whiskers of a dragon, and a one-kil horn upon its crest. Its eyes, which blended five colors, happened to lock onto Dong Bong-su at that exact moment.
Dong Bong-su met those eyes straight on.
And then–
Grin.
"As expected, you're the key."
He smiled with pure enjoyment.