The Developer Reborn As Archmage

Darya charged forward through the monochrome world as she dodged Sarka’s flesh-seeking lightning bolt. She felt the electricity on her skin as she passed through some of the frozen secondary arcs.

The last half second of Terminate put her about twenty meters away from Sarka. His arm was already moving in her direction when the world caught up with the prediction dots. It seemed he had adapted to predict her location by the direction she was heading before using Terminate.

He’s an archmage supreme. I shouldn’t forget that.

The second bolt of lightning darted towards her in a bent arc following Sarka’s three-clawed hand.

[Skill: Warding of Alta]

-30 SP • 250s Cooldown

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Mana turned blue around her, tightening into a layer from head to toe. She watched the purple arcs of electricity rippling across the ground towards her like a wave. This skill was going to convert some damage to mana, but it hadn’t told her how much. She counted on her mana resistance to dull most of the damage as before. A bolt was worth about seven hundred in Unezilo damage. She was resistant to more than that unless Sarka did something special.

These new bolts of lightning felt a bit more powerful than the last. She didn’t want to find out if he had actually done something special. There were augment spells, skills, or items he could’ve used without showing anything.

[Vainfall: Terminate]

She leapt sideways after activating the command this time to keep Sarka clueless about the direction she wanted to dash towards. Purple arcs riddled the blue mana coating of the Warding of Alta. The prediction dots laid out the consequences, but she wasn’t going to stick around to see them fulfilled. She turned on her heel and dashed perpendicular towards Sarka during the next second.

His hand was aiming directly in her direction, and she was counting on cutting it off in time before he could cast the next lightning bolt. She still had another ten meters to leap.

[Skill: Wind Step]

-20 SP • 8s Cooldown

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The next dash brought her right under Sarka’s hand. She grabbed the Warblade tightly, getting ready for a swing. As she did, she caught a glimpse of Fominel’s blue blade meeting Sarka’s other arm in slow motion as the world caught up. Sparks flew from the first contact.

[Vainfall: Terminate]

She had activated it within the last half-second of Terminate. The monochrome world returned once again, renewing the freeze state. In the brief moment where she strained to activate it, Sarka had already detected her. His glowing purple eyes were set directly on her last known location, and his hand was already moving in her direction again.

Darya rotated the Warblade in an arc above her head with all her strength, making sure the sharp edge of the blade cut across Sarka’s arm below the shoulder.

In the next second, the Warblade passed through his arm as if it didn’t exist. She watched the prediction dots splatter and the dots of the severed arm flying away.

She turned on her heel, continuing the same arc with the built momentum. She managed to rotate a half-circle when the world started catching up with the prediction dots again.

She needed to get the rotation done with. She was now stuck too close to the giant druid who could kick her to death if time unfroze.

[Vainfall: Terminate]

The gray world flickered this time, and she saw visual artifacting again. It was clearer this time. She saw the world rip at the seams by fractions of inches. Terminate still worked, and she counted seconds as she finished rotation under Sarka’s severed arm. This was the third Terminate since she began this movement. His arm was still attached, although the first cut of the Warblade had already appeared on it.

She was only about a meter away from him. Fominel’s blade was fully deflected by his forearm. He had raised his arm to counter it, leaving the lower half of his body open. Darya turned on her heel yet again, continuing the same arc now with the momentum gathered by the circular movement.

The Warblade was inches away from his abdomen when the world started catching up in the last half a second again.

[Vainfall: Terminate]

She activated it the moment she detected it. The gray world flickered harder this time. She saw the artifacting lines widen, opening gaps between them. It was hard to visualize in her head, but these planar cracks were forming in three-dimensional space around her.

She could see them rip open as if the world were made of different-sized cubes. The closest thing she knew was voxels, essentially three-dimensional pixels. It didn’t make sense for RLP to be working on voxels, nor did it make sense to have voxels of different sizes.

This is still chunks of the world, somehow?

The smallest fractures were closer to her, while the larger fractures were far away. They spread across the air, the ground, sky, Sarka, and Fominel. She saw them perfectly sliced into various cubic chunks.

Sarka’s abdomen, where she intended to drive the Warblade, was diced with laser precision. Fominel was slashed in half by a giant block far away. His blue mana blade was in several chunks on the way to Sarka.

Darya counted one second as she brought the Warblade towards Sarka’s stomach. She watched the sharp edge slice across the cubic chunks and the mess of distorted prediction dots splashing away upon contact.

She slashed hard into Sarka’s segmented stomach while rotating in place, driving the Warblade diagonally upwards in the same arc. An unidentifiable mess of prediction dots scattered from him as she put all her effort into pausing the Warblade before it swung out of his body.

The world caught up in the third second, and this time she let the last half a second drag. The Warblade sliced across Sarka’s abdomen as his severed arm flew.

[Spell: Blast Weaver]

-293 MP • Touch • Instant

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Mana burst from her Warblade, rippling in through the massive rift that she had cut through Sarka’s stomach. The visual artifacts eased as the world caught up with the mess of prediction dots.

Sarka’s eyes started rolling towards her. She watched in slow motion as he abandoned countering Fominel’s manablade, readying to grab her with his intact right hand.

[Vainfall: Terminate]

The artifacts that eased remerged and opened wider. Sarka turned into a mess of blocks along with the ground nearby. The gaps exploded large enough for her to see the space beyond the world.

What the? Is that some sort of void?

She had to get away from Sarka, but she had to move through the ripped chunks of the world. It felt odd to pass through gaps between the blocks that made up Sarka. She was walking through a druid collapsed into building blocks.

It took a full second to kill the swing momentum of the Warblade. She used a skill to get out of this situation in the next second.

[Skill: Wind Step]

-20 SP • 8s Cooldown

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She slipped through the gray void gap between blocks through Sarka. As she did, she had the distinct feeling that she was entering a place.

She was somewhere else at the end of that Wind Step. Somewhere empty underneath the layer of reality. All the fractured blocks vanished behind her before she even realized. It was as if she moved through a veil with the world on it. The world was only visible on one surface of this hypothetical veil. Passing through it and glancing back made it fully transparent, or more accurately, non-existent.

She counted the third second, but there were no prediction dots, or a world to catch up to them here. Time wasn’t relevant in this void. Darya stood straight, looking at the emptiness around her.

She poked the ‘ground’ with her feet and the staff of the Warblade. There seemed to be a ground—

There was no ground. There was no Warblade. She didn’t have a body anymore. She was nothing in an empty void.

Alright, what the hell is this now?

It seemed she was outside of the game, though that shouldn’t be a thing in Verse Gear with RLP. She would’ve found this perfectly acceptable in VRMMO, which was a program running on consumer hardware. The same was true if this was Verse Gear that she signed up for, the brain interface that was supposed to put her in a program running on some hardware.

RLP changed those expectations entirely. It had made her believe Vainfall was life, or it may as well have been life. At this level, it could no longer be a program running on some hardware. With a hyper-advanced brain interface in the equation, she expected the world to be laid out in some fundamental way that she couldn’t even perceive, just like it was impossible to see the building blocks of matter with the naked eye.

Yet, here she was in a void with a sky and ground. An ‘empty’ space that still represented a world in the way game engines represented space. In that way, this place wasn’t truly empty at all. A blank canvas without an artwork on it wasn’t a void; it was a blank canvas.

Someone, or something, had made this blank canvas before laying out the world on it.

Darya wanted to test this place.

[Verse]

She used the Verse Gear command to bring up the virtual assistant. There was no indication it worked, but she asked a question to check if it was listening.

“What is this place?”

[Verse: The official name for this island is ‘Island 13’ on the Red Crescent archipelago. It is part of a three-island chain in the middle of the archipelago. This was first discovered by the great explorer Bartholomew Recardeo in the year 8,850…]

She closed the screen without another word.

They couldn’t have made a more unhelpful assistant if they tried.

It confirmed what she suspected. She was still in Verse, and with the assistant blabbering about the history of an island, she was still in a running instance of Vainfall. This wasn’t a crash. She had fallen through a crack in the world.

This was very similar to a speedrunning exploit, which involved tripping the collision boxes to fall through the world with some ridiculous method. Collision detection between objects was always a resource-intensive problem in games. Colliders had to be simplified to reduce resource cost, especially if they were part of moving actors.

She had personally overseen the squashing of many bugs in the VRMMO, where players could easily break through collision detection and fall through the gaps.

She remembered one in a certain underground map, which involved jumping on a cluster of luminous mushrooms at a specific angle to clip through the cliff behind it. It was innocent enough at a glance, but nothing was so simple in an MMO. Players could bypass the whole dungeon, get to the treasure rooms, loot infinite items, sell them to other players, crash the game economy, and sell their loaded accounts on shady websites for real money, which went against the terms and conditions.

This wasn’t like that at all.

RLP didn’t even need collision detection. Things were real enough in physical reality; they were made of atoms, not pixels, voxels, and colliders. She hadn’t gotten here by tripping a collision detection algorithm. She was here because she spammed force quit weirdly.

The world of Vainfall was still out there somewhere, possibly frozen. Considering everything so far, she was in a basic development environment. In that case, there was one command that she wanted to try.

It wasn’t a thought trigger that she practiced with Verse Gear, but she wanted to try it anyway. After all, it was something she had used for eight years. The command was almost second nature to her.

Hm. Let’s see if that still works, why not?

[/dev]