Chapter 100: [100]: Archive 001, The First Glitch
Sebastian woke up with a sharp gasp even though he didn’t actually have lungs to fill.
He wasn’t lying in the cramped interior of the escape pod. He wasn’t choking on his own blood, and his chest didn’t feel like it was harboring a heavy bowling ball.
He was standing on a perfectly smooth and transparent surface that looked like solid glass.
"What the hell?" Sebastian muttered as he looked down at his hands.
His black leather coat and the metallic visor covering his face were pristine.
The creeping black sludge of the Void Toxicity that had been ravaging his veins was completely gone. He felt light, perfectly healthy, and entirely disconnected from his physical body.
He was pure data.
He looked up and his breath caught in his throat.
He was standing in the middle of a massive battlefield, but everything was perfectly frozen in time. It was a three-dimensional holographic recording.
Above him, millions of humanoid figures clad in glowing white armor were locked in a desperate clash against an endless ocean of purple geometry.
The white-armored figures wielded weapons of pure light. They were being torn apart by the purple masses of shifting blocks of code that looked eerily similar to the Void Crawlers and Titans Sebastian had fought back on Earth.
"It’s a war." Sebastian whispered while walking slowly through the frozen tableau.
He stepped right through a suspended explosion of white plasma. It didn’t burn. It was just an echo.
"It was the final war." A voice spoke from behind him.
Sebastian spun around and his hand instinctively dropped to the hilt of his Earth Sword.
But his inventory wouldn’t open. He was completely unarmed.
Standing a few feet away was one of the white-armored figures from the battle above.
The armor was heavily cracked and leaking streams of golden light instead of blood. The figure’s helmet was missing. This revealed a face composed entirely of shifting blue code.
It wasn’t an NPC. It lacked the rigid programmed posture of the game characters. It moved with a heavy exhaustion.
"Relax, Anomaly." The glowing figure said while holding up its empty hands. "I am just a memory. An echo left behind in the drive of the pod you just bled all over."
"Who are you?" Sebastian asked and narrowed his eyes. "And what is this place?"
"This is Archive 001." The figure replied and looked up at the frozen sky. "A snapshot of Sector Alpha, exactly one hundred thousand server-cycles ago. And I suppose you would call me an original Administrator."
Sebastian crossed his arms. "You don’t look like the Apostle. You don’t have that whole I want to eat your soul vibe going on."
The Admin let out a soft digital chuckle that sounded like chiming bells.
"The Apostle is a parasite. A corrupted meat-suit piloted by the Void. We were the architects."
The glowing figure turned its serene blue face toward Sebastian.
"The System was never meant to be a game, Sebastian." The Admin explained reading his core data effortlessly. "It was designed as a multiversal defense grid. A localized firewall meant to protect primitive realities from the cosmic chaos outside their borders."
"Yeah, well, your firewall sucks." Sebastian said deadpan. "It literally drops monsters onto civilian populations and turns them into zombies. You guys basically coded a meat grinder."
"We didn’t code the game." The Admin said softly with deep sorrow in its voice. "The Void did."
The Admin pointed up at the massive shifting purple geometry crushing the white-armored angels.
"The Void is a cancer." The Admin continued. "It doesn’t just consume matter. It consumes logic. Millennia ago, the Void breached our core servers. It hijacked the System. It rewrote our protective protocols into an aggressive farming algorithm."
Sebastian frowned. The pieces of the grand puzzle finally locked into place. "The Ethereal Plane."
"Exactly." The Admin nodded. "The Void couldn’t just eat planets. The baseline reality was too dense. So, it used our System to create the Merge. It overlays the rules of an RPG onto a planet. It forces the native population to fight, to level up, and to condense their raw life force into highly concentrated Experience Points and Soul Shards."
"It’s fattening the pigs before the slaughter." Sebastian summarized feeling a cold wave of absolute disgust. "It uses the game to process human souls into bite-sized snacks."
"Yes." The Admin said. "And we fought to stop it. We fought to purge the virus from our own network. But we failed. The Void consumed the original Admins and twisted the survivors into the Wardens and the Saints you see today."
The glowing figure took a step toward Sebastian.
"But before I died, I managed to isolate a single fragment of the original uncorrupted source code. I hid it in this drive. I locked it behind a biometric scanner that only accepts the dead to ensure the Void’s living parasites could never access it."
The Admin reached into its own glowing chest.
"I have waited a very long time for someone crazy enough to kill themselves just to open a door."
The Admin pulled its hand free. Resting in its palm was a single perfectly spherical orb of pure blindingly bright green light.
It didn’t radiate heat or cold. It radiated absolute fundamental order.
"You carry the 10,000x multiplier glitch." The Admin noted looking at Sebastian with a mix of awe and pity. "You are an accident of the corrupted math. But you are strong enough to carry this."
"What is it?" Sebastian asked staring at the green orb.
"It is the Legacy Code." The Admin replied. "It is the root access to the System’s original antivirus protocols. With this, you won’t just bend the rules of the Void’s game. You will be able to break the game itself."
The Admin extended its hand and offered the orb.
"Take it, Anomaly. Become the cure."
Sebastian didn’t hesitate. He didn’t offer a grand speech. He just reached out and grabbed the green orb.
The moment his fingers touched the light, Archive 001 violently shattered!
The frozen battlefield, the glass floor, and the glowing Admin all dissolved into a massive roaring hurricane of green data.
The code aggressively rushed up Sebastian’s arm and plunged directly into his chest.
[Legacy Code Acquired.]
[Integrating with Anomaly Root Protocol...]
[System Administrator Status: CONFIRMED.]
His digital consciousness felt like it was expanding to the size of a galaxy.
He suddenly understood the exact fundamental architecture of the Ethereal Plane. He wasn’t just a player anymore. He wasn’t even just a Sovereign.
He was the System’s immune response.
Before he could process the sheer magnitude of the data, a violent physical shock ripped through his existence.
THUMP!
His vision went entirely black as he was forcefully yanked back into his physical meat-suit.