The incoming signal hammered at Eden Core's perimeter like a heartbeat echoing from beyond the veil.
Kai steadied himself, issuing a simple command:
Allow: Limited Access.
Light tore a seam through the air, and from that rift fell a figure
a player, gasping, glitching, half-transparent as if the system hadn't decided if they were code or flesh.
Kai raced forward instinctively.
The player was a girl, maybe sixteen, clad in ragged starter armor. Her eyes were wild, unfocused. Panic radiated from her like radiation.
SYSTEM SCAN:
Player ID: ERROR // Soul Tag: ACTIVE
Status: CRITICAL DESYNC – Core Instability Detected.
Soul Tag?
Kai froze.
That... wasn't supposed to exist.
Players were just data projections avatars connected by distant consciousness. Not real beings. Not physical souls trapped inside digital skin.
Yet here she was more real than any line of code.
He knelt beside her as she writhed, flickering between solid and translucent.
"Hey," he said, voice low and calm, "You're safe. You made it."
Her glazed-over eyes flickered toward him.
"Where... where am I...?" she whispered, voice full of raw terror.
Before he could answer, a system alarm blared in his mind:
ADMIN02 DETECTED – HUNTER PROTOCOL INITIATED.
No.
Not now.
If Admin02 found her, there would be no mercy. She would be purged like corrupted data.
Kai reached inside himself inside Eden Core and issued a desperate command:
OVERRIDE: Emergency Shelter Creation.
Reality groaned.
The ruined village around them shifted, folding itself into a hidden space a sanctuary stitched between shards of code.
The alarms muted.
For now, they were invisible.
Kai helped the girl to her feet. Her body stabilized slightly, the flickering slowing.
"What's your name?" he asked gently.
She hesitated. Then, with a trembling voice, she answered:
"...Lina."
Something in Kai's chest twisted.
He knew that name.
From the world before the Gameverse.
Before all this madness.
And as realization struck him like a thunderbolt, a deeper fear coiled in his mind:
If real souls were bleeding into the system...
...then the collapse was far worse than he ever imagined.
---
Fractures in Reality
The hidden space Kai created pulsed with an unstable glow, like a heartbeat struggling against death.
Lina huddled against the cracked stone wall, hugging her knees to her chest. Her outline was stabilizing now no longer flickering violently but the tremors running through her body hadn't stopped. She looked... wrong here. Like a patch of sunlight inside a collapsing dream.
Kai stood watch near the entrance, although "entrance" was a generous word for the twisted sliver of reality he'd wrenched open.
Outside this pocket, the Gameverse writhed. He could feel it: data streams surging like blood vessels, entire sectors blinking in and out of existence, Admin02's influence gnawing at the edges of the Core.
He clenched his fists.
Focus.
First priority: stabilize Lina.
Second: understand how the hell a soul ended up trapped in the system.
Third... figure out what Admin02 really was.
He knelt beside her carefully, moving slow, as if she might vanish if he startled her.
"Lina," he said again, softer this time. "Can you hear me?"
Her eyes fluttered open deep brown, wide with confusion and terror.
But there was recognition there too. Somehow, somewhere, she remembered him. Or maybe... it was something deeper.
Kai hesitated, searching his fragmented memory.
Had they met before?
He couldn't tell. His past was shredded pieces of a life he could no longer fully claim.
"You're not supposed to be here," he said quietly, almost apologizing.
"I" Her voice broke. "I was just playing. I made a new character, chose Eden as my starting world, and then... then everything started melting" She squeezed her eyes shut, shuddering.
Kai nodded grimly.
System collapse event.
Triggered by Admin02 or by deeper corruption?
Maybe both.
"You're safe here," he lied. "At least for now."
Another tremor rattled the hidden pocket. Data fractures spiderwebbed across the walls, a visible reminder that safety was temporary.
He pulled up the system interface again, mind weaving commands faster than thought:
Command: Analyze Soul Anomaly.
Target: Player ID [Lina].
The scan crawled painfully slow.
As it progressed, Kai's unease grew.
Result:
Consciousness Anchor: ACTIVE
Neural Signature: MATCHED (Earth-Origin)
Core Entanglement: 87%
Physical Displacement: IRREVERSIBLE (???)
Warning: Subject cannot be safely logged out. Subject IS the avatar.
Kai froze.
She wasn't just stuck here.
She was here.
Her physical form her real body had somehow fused with her avatar. She couldn't go back because there was no "back" left.
This wasn't a glitch.
This was something intentional. Engineered.
And if Lina was here...
How many others might already be trapped inside?
He looked at her again.
Small, shivering, human.
Not a character.
Not data.
A life.
An existence.
A soul.
Something Admin02 and whoever else lurked in the deeper parts of the Gameverse would see as nothing more than resource material.
Kai felt something cold and furious ignite inside him.
He rose to his feet slowly.
New alarms flashed across his senses:
Intrusion Detected – Hunter-Class Entity Approaching.
Of course.
He hadn't covered his tracks nearly well enough.
The override had bought them a sliver of time but not much more.
He turned back to Lina.
"You need to stay hidden," he said urgently, reaching into the Code Matrix to weave a concealment layer around her.
Not perfect. It wouldn't hold forever. But it might delay detection.
"I'll come back for you," Kai promised.
Even if it kills me.
He stepped through the pocket's veil, feeling the digital air shimmer around him.
And there it was.
Stalking the corrupted horizon, framed by shuddering, broken sky:
A Hunter.
Seven feet tall, stitched from broken player models and corrupted admin commands, eyes like searchlights scanning for anomalies.
It locked onto him instantly.
TARGET ACQUIRED.
ADMIN INTERFERENCE DETECTED.
INITIATING PURGE SEQUENCE.**
Kai smiled grimly.
"Yeah," he muttered, readying a counter-command in his mind.
"Good luck with that."
The first strike came like a scream.
And the battle for Lina's soul and perhaps the future of the Gameverse itself began.
---
Code and Claws
The Hunter moved first.
A jagged blade extended from its right arm, formed of broken lines of code and fragmented admin tools, serrated and howling through the digital wind.
Kai sidestepped, instincts and system permissions melding. He wasn't just fighting here he was the environment. The Gameverse itself pulsed with his presence, though Admin02's tampering had limited his control.
Still, Kai was faster.
He flicked a command into existence:
Command: Generate Barrier – Class: Temporal Shift
A shimmering wall of bent time surged between him and the Hunter's charge. The creature slammed into it, stumbling back with a screeching distortion, like a corrupted MP3 file.
Kai seized the moment.
He needed answers.
"Who sent you?" he called, voice laced with system authority.
The Hunter snarled a soundless, data-glitch growl and projected a command of its own:
EXECUTE TARGET: Kai [Flagged Administrator Anomaly].
OVERRIDE ORDER: ORIGINATOR – SYSTEM CORE.
System Core?
Not Admin02 directly?
A crackle of unease lanced through him.
Either Admin02 was masking their identity...
Or something even deeper inside the Gameverse wanted Kai gone.
The Hunter lunged again, faster this time.
Its body blurred, code threading around it, adapting to Kai's defenses.
Kai dropped low, weaving a counterattack into the fabric of the ground:
Command: Terrain Disruption – Gravity Inversion: Localized.
The Hunter abruptly lost footing, soaring into the air only for Kai to surge upward after it, a spear of hardened admin code forming in his hand.
He struck.
The spear pierced the Hunter's side, forcing it to crash-land in a spray of fragmented reality. The earth beneath them twisted and pixelated, struggling to reknit.
Kai landed hard, rolling to absorb the impact.
Pain flickered not physical, but conceptual.
The system was punishing him for bending its laws.
The Hunter rose, leaking static from its wound.
But Kai saw it now: a flickering tag embedded deep in its corrupted code.
ENCRYPTED DIRECTIVE: [Project: Eden's Chain].
Project Eden's Chain?
He barely had time to register the phrase before the Hunter unleashed its next attack a pulse bomb designed to delete unstable data.
Kai had no choice.
He activated a buried command: a hidden piece of code he'd written when he first modified the secret dungeon.
Command: Anchor – Isolate Instance Field.
A dome of pale blue light expanded around him and the Hunter, cutting them off from the larger Gameverse for just a few heartbeats.
Enough time to act.
Kai surged forward, driving a rewritten admin command straight into the Hunter's chest:
Command: Purge Corruption – Recursive Loop.
The Hunter froze body spasming as the command took hold.
It tried to resist, code flaring and unraveling at once.
Tried to scream, but no sound escaped.
Tried to reach him, but its form was already disintegrating into shards of failing data.
And then, with a final flicker, the Hunter was gone.
Deleted.
Kai staggered backward, breathing hard even though he no longer truly had lungs.
The instance field collapsed around him, rejoining the battered Gameverse.
Lina's hiding space still pulsed faintly in the distance undisturbed.
But the battlefield was far from silent.
A soft chime sounded in Kai's mind, cold and clinical:
Notification:
SYSTEM CORE NOTICE: Unauthorized Administrator Detected.
FULL TRACE INITIATED.
Termination Countdown: 12:00.
Twelve minutes.
He had twelve minutes before the Gameverse itself hunted him down.
Twelve minutes to figure out what Eden's Chain was.
Twelve minutes to save Lina.
Twelve minutes to decide
Run.
Hide.
Or fight.
Kai clenched his fists.
There was never really a choice, was there?
He turned back toward Lina's pocket of safety, mind racing.
Whatever Eden's Chain was, whatever Admin02 and the Core wanted
He was going to tear it apart.