Chapter 265: GOR
-x-X-x-
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.
Веер- Веер- Веер-
"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 Al'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!
Waaaaaaaaaaah!
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!
-x-X-x-
The vanguard of players closed the distance to the man in black clothes, from twenty paces to ten, in an instant.
And then.
Fsssh!
Whoosh-!
A light shattered.
...Huh?'
Zero's eyes narrowed.
There was no shout, no sound of impact.
Where the melee dealer at the very front had been, white fragments burst forth and scattered.
The death effect.
A light he had seen at least ten thousand times.
But...
"..."
Even Zero, the number one-ranked player, could not discern what had happened in the interval before it appeared.
No damage numbers, no hit confirmations appeared.
They were charging in perfectly fine one frame, and then turned to dust in droves the next.
The man in black clothes stood in the same spot, in the same stance.
Even the tip of his sword, pointing downward, was identical to a moment ago.
"That new boss bastard is crazy strong! Everyone, use your items without holding back!"
"Valhalla, take the lead! Front line, charge in!"
"Tempest! Don't let them steal the last hit, everyone get in there!"
"Knights of the Holy Grail, we'll get the server first!"
The guilds that had made a name for themselves on the server shouted their calls and poured in.
Flag effects soared from all directions, and the light of buffs swept over the front lines.
An even greater number of players pushed into the spot where their comrades had just turned to dust without a sound.
That was the signal.
Since they charged in large numbers, they also died in droves.
Popopopow!
Shwaaaaa-!
Wherever the man walked, people turned into light and vanished.
Not even a slashing motion was visible.
A single brush, and their outlines crumbled into dust and flew away.
On the ground, instead of corpses, only the remnants of half-cast skills rolled about.
Not a single drop of blood splattered.
That was because in this game, you scattered into gray dust when you died.
But that dust was rising too quickly, and too much of it.
...Is this really an event?'
Zero's feet, about to step forward, hesitated.
If it was an event, there had to be a strategy.
There would be patterns, phases, and a correct answer.
Because the company designed it that way.
However, the man in black seemed to show none of that.
The same motion never appeared more than once.
When attacked from the left, sometimes his left hand would respond, other times his right.
When his back was targeted, the tip of his sword would answer erratically without him even turning around.
It wasn't an AI following a behavior tree.
It was reading the enemy on the spot and choosing the best course of action each time...
'...A person?'
But he immediately erased the word 'person' from his mind.
If it was a user, there would definitely be an ID, and it was impossible for him not to know it.
Then...
'A GM?'
But after a moment's thought, it couldn't be a GM either.
If it were a GM, how would they handle the aftermath of doing something like this so openly?
And if they wanted to do it secretly, they would have created a temporary ID like a user and acted that way.
'Then... what in the world are those things?!'
He couldn't understand.
The important thing was whether those things were new users or GMs, whether they could be defeated or not.
That was the immediate problem.
KABOOM!
Pow-pow!
Shwaaaak-!
The front line collapsed again.
A group that had swung wide to the left poured toward the man's flank.
A dozen or so melee dealers focused their firepower on one spot, a coordinated attack to forcibly chip away the health of an unreleased entity.
It was a textbook strategy, one that Zero himself had used hundreds of times.
But the man didn't even turn his head in that direction.
The tip of his foot seemed to drag across the ground once, and in the next moment, the man was standing in the middle of that group.
There was no teleport effect, no afterimage, no movement motion.
A dot that had been on one side was simply moved to the other.
The process in between was completely absent.
A dozen or so people turned gray in an instant.
Shhhhhh—.
'... Blink?'
No. Blink had a cooldown, a range, and most importantly, a casting motion.
This was simply being there, and then being here.
A 'skill' that didn't exist in any skill tree.
The ranged dealers positioned at the back finally opened fire.
Arrows, bullets, and magic projectiles rained down in hundreds of streams toward the lone man.
It was excessive firepower to take down one person, but against a never-before-seen 'new' entity, showering it with attacks was the standard procedure.
That was the basic strategy in this game.
And in response...
The man simply walked.
The projectiles that rained down stopped in front of the man.
They weren't blocked.
They weren't deflected.
No defense effect, no hit confirmation, no nullification message appeared.
The moment they reached the man, they all lost their shape and disintegrated, their trajectories dissolving.
"...?!"
Zero doubted his own eyes.
A judgment where a projectile vanishes with 'O resistance' did not exist in this game.
It had to be hit, blocked, or dodged.
One of the three.
A fourth option did not exist.
No, it shouldn't have existed.
'Is that some kind of... area-of-effect nullification buff?'
Buffs had a duration, and when they ended, a window of opportunity appeared.
Zero waited for that opening.
He counted to three.
Nothing changed.
He counted again.
Nothing changed.
In that time, hundreds, thousands of users had already evaporated.
And yet, the opening never appeared.
It wasn't something that ended; it was clearly something that was always on, never having been turned on or off in the first place.
Meanwhile, another slaughter was unfolding next to the man.
The second 'new' entity with no ID.
A Crimson Silhouette with festering skin stirred frantically through the crowd of users.
People crumbled into gray wherever its fingertips touched, just like with the man in black, but the manner of killing was different.
If a line of people was cleanly extinguished when the man in black passed by once, the other one caused those it touched to decay and crumble from the inside out.
The human form collapsed sluggishly before turning gray, and that slowness made it all the more grotesque.
And the strange thing was that the two newly added 'gods' were mutually hostile.
That reddish thing would stop cutting down users and repeatedly reach out toward the man in black.
Whether it was trying to snatch his prey or aiming for the man himself.
The two were undoubtedly enemies.
Even this was unprecedented.
If these two were truly a newly added type of god mob, shouldn't they only target users?
But they were attacking each other?
Zero's judgment was increasingly leaning toward the possibility that they weren't mobs at all.
Shwaaa!
Fssst-!
Even while slaughtering users, they exchanged blows with each other.
Once, the reddish one shot a cluster of blood-red energy into the man in black's blind spot behind him.
The man, without turning, simply flicked his wrist back once, and the cluster dissolved and scattered before it could reach him.
The scattered remnants then swept away dozens of charging users, turning them gray all at once.
'...Crazy.
Amidst the continuous stream of absurd scenes, even as Zero stood completely still, the camp below was growing hotter and hotter.
Despite them dying indiscriminately, the number of people was not decreasing but growing exponentially.
Lured by rumors of an event, people who had set their coordinates were ceaselessly dropping in via teleport, and with each arrival, pillars of light rose and fell in all directions.
The number of people, which had been in the tens of thousands, had multiplied several times over.
Even as hundreds from that multiplied number vanished into gray, the empty spaces were immediately filled by newcomers.
No one was running away.
The reason was all there in the chat window.
-They're fighting each other, sweet lol. Let's get the spoils.
-If there are two unreleased ones, isn't that double the drops?
-Someone just needs to get the last hit.
Just the last hit.
They were watching death and calculating the last hit.
Zero glanced at the chat window and then looked away.
It was nothing new.
This world was always like this.
'Because even if you die, you're not really dead.
As he looked away, a corner of the arena caught his eye.
That place had been in an uproar for a while now, too.
The boss that the Zero-to-Hundred Guild had hunted hundreds of times.
The Azure Gold Qilin.
The true master of this place, the Red Arena.
Having vanished for six days, it had returned looking like it had been chased out, and users were swarming around it like ants.
Even while the two new entities were causing such a ruckus, the players over there were ceaselessly pouring arrows and balls of light onto it.
It was only natural.
Half of its five-colored scales had fallen off, and a blue energy was slowly filling the scraped spots.
The master of the server's most expensive drop item, with less than half its health left.
While there seemed to be no answer for the two new ones, there was an answer for that one.
The players were not about to leave alone a guaranteed reward that had rolled onto a board they had long been striking out on.
But it was strange.
Thud-thud-thud!
Papapak!
Kaboom-!
The massive body staggered each time arrows struck, and balls of light exploded.
That was all.
Despite being unilaterally battered by that firepower, the boss neither died nor turned away.
Only a blue energy slowly circulated over its scraped scales.
It was not the recovery of the Azure Gold Qilin that Zero knew, nor the counterattack of the Azure Gold Qilin that he knew.
Zero focused his vision in that direction.
He knew the next scene by heart.
A battered boss attacks the one with the highest aggro first.
Starting with the one who hit it the hardest, in the assigned order, according to the programmed pattern.
That's how bosses are made.
The Qilin turned its head.
But...
There was no order anymore.
No, it looked as if it had lost the order.
There was no distinction between those who had dealt damage and those who hadn't.
It just started with whatever was in front of its eyes.
Its massive horn swept sideways once, and six or seven players were launched into the air before scattering into gray.
Wherever its hooves landed, users were crushed and scattered into dust.
It didn't discriminate between those who shot arrows, those who were watching, or those who were running away.
Without regard for aggro or threat, it attacked whatever was in front of it.
Zero knew that boss better than anyone.
It was an opponent he had faced hundreds of times, one whose horn's turning direction he had memorized.
That Qilin was now doing something that wasn't in any of the movement patterns he had memorized from hunting it hundreds of times.
'Is that one... broken too?'
The Qilin's head finally turned toward the man in black.
Its horn stood erect.
The Qilin's massive body kicked off the ground and shot forward in a straight line.
A charge-type rushing skill.
The very skill that had pushed back all twenty elites of the Zero-to-Hundred Guild, even when they had set up a barrier.
The man in black did not dodge.
Zero waited for the man to disappear from that spot.
Just like before, for the dot on one side to be moved to the other.
But this time, he didn't.
The man sidestepped by just half a pace.
Just enough for the tip of the horn to miss.
Then he raised the sword he held loosely and drew it once across the flank of the massive, passing body of the Azure Gold Qilin.
There wasn't even a clang.
No cut mark was visible.
Just one of the scales covering the Qilin's body simply crumbled and fell off where the man's sword had passed.
The charge, having missed, rammed into empty space.
The massive body, unable to handle its own momentum, slid for a long time across the red ground.
Zero replayed that single move in his mind several times.
No party had ever taken that charge head-on.
Everyone rolled to the side to dodge, and if they dodged, they were trampled by the follow-up hooves.
But the man neither rolled to dodge nor blocked.
He deflected the charge with half a step.
And in the process, he even stripped off a scale.
Damage numbers didn't appear this time either.
That slide itself was an area-of-effect attack.
Hundreds of users in the path of the massive body's sweep were caught before they could even dodge.
Those crushed were pulverized, and those sent flying turned gray in mid-air.
The death log was faster than the shouts to dodge.
At the end of the slide, the Qilin dug its hooves into the ground as if biting it, and jerked its head around.
This time, it was toward the Crimson Silhouette.
The Qilin raised its mane.
A bundle of white fur spread wide and swept over the front of the new reddish boss.
It was a clump twice the width of a person, each strand of fur standing on end like a sword.
The reddish boss did not move aside.
It showed annoyance.
Several blood-red tendrils extended from its fingertips and met the bristling clump of fur head-on.
Wherever they touched, the white fur decayed into an ashen color and fell off, and the blood-red tendrils were also ground apart by the mane and scattered.
Both were repelled without any gain.
The Qilin was pushed one step to the side, and the reddish thing was dragged backward.
Zero stared blankly at the scene.
The two so-called new bosses were trading blows head-on with the field boss.
To be precise, it felt like a stage was being set for the three of them to fight to the death amongst themselves.
That reddish thing was aiming for the man in black, and the Qilin was charging at both of them indiscriminately, whatever got in its way.
No one was on anyone's side.
They were just baring their fangs at each other.
The chat window had once again become noisy and chaotic.
-The bosses are fighting each other lololol
-Hey, the three of them are fighting each other.
As soon as the reddish thing pushed the Qilin back a step, it turned back toward the man in black.
This time, it wasn't aiming for his back.
It was a frontal assault.
Its two festering hands came together, and a blood-red mass condensed between them.
Then it erased the distance.
The space between them simply disappeared, and the reddish thing thrust the mass at the man in black from point-blank range.
The man in black raised his sword to meet it head-on.
The blood-red mass and the black sword locked together.
This time, even the man's sword couldn't unravel it in a single move.
The reddish thing pushed, and the man held his ground.
Where they met, without light or sound, the surrounding red ground caved inward.
For a moment, a very brief moment, the two 'nameless bosses' were evenly matched.
Zero held his breath.
For the first time, the man in black hadn't been able to finish it in one move.
The stalemate was broken not because of a move from either of them, but because a horde of users squeezed in between them.
Those who charged in aiming for the last hit poured between the two, and the engagement was disrupted.
The blood-red mass scattered, sweeping away the intervening group in gray, and the man in black and the reddish thing used the opening to separate from each other and create distance again.
The fight hadn't been decided.
The horde had just separated them.
Now, the three were entangled in the middle of the Red Arena.
The man in black was fending off the reddish boss even with his back to it, and the reddish boss, while reaching for the man, would turn to face the Qilin when it charged.
The Qilin didn't discriminate between the two, trampling even the users who stood between them.
The three repeatedly gathered and scattered, each aiming for the other two.
In the very middle of it all were the users.
A brush from the man in black, and a line was cleanly extinguished.
A touch from the reddish boss, and they decayed and crumbled from within.
Under the Qilin's hooves, they were crushed into dust.
There were three paths to death, and all three were operating simultaneously in one place.
Those who squeezed in, aiming for the last hit, were instead torn apart in three directions, far from getting any last hit.
Zero still couldn't figure out what was what, or how things were unfolding.
However, he could be certain of one thing.
This was not an event.
It couldn't be an event.
If it were a raid designed by the company, the three bosses should have either coordinated to fight the users or taken turns attacking in different phases.
There should have been a set script.
But those three were trying to devour each other.
The users were just scraps caught in the crossfire as the three tore at each other.
'This is just... a complete mess.
Two new bosses and one broken field boss.
What the three of them were creating wasn't a raid to be conquered, but a bloodbath where only those who interfered died.
-Uh, wait, are we not supposed to be fighting this? It's too hard...
-The three of them are killing each other, so we just have to wait, right?
-But if we leave, what about the drops?
Two of them are new and final-boss level.
Even in that pandemonium, Zero's eyes kept turning to one side.
Zero looked at the man again.
To be precise, he was trying to 'read' the man.
Wasn't he the world's number one ranker in the world's top game?
Every boss had a pattern.
It had a pre-delay, a post-delay, a blind spot, and a cooldown.
Reading those was the job of someone at the top.
There must be some fixed pattern, form, or skill order within that erratic behavior!
...But even after watching for a long time, there was nothing to read from the man.
Whether they charged from the left or aimed for his back, the answer always came first.
When a group swarmed him, sometimes he would be in their midst, other times he would teleport far away.
When arrows rained down, sometimes he would walk into them and scatter them, and when facing magic, he would sometimes dissolve it all on the spot.
When the Qilin charged, sometimes he would deflect it with half a step, and other times he would blast it away with a massive laser-like beam from his sword.
When the reddish boss collided with him head-on, he would meet it, dodge it, or deal with it in whatever way he pleased.
The same solution never appeared twice.
His move was different for every situation, and it was always the correct one.
He wasn't following a set decision tree; he was choosing anew on the spot every time.
It wasn't that there was no pre-delay; there was no pattern from which to read a pre-delay.
'That thing...'
That person... whether a user, a new boss, or anything else, there was no answer to him within the world of GOR.
Just then.
"...Hey, he's here! A GM is here!"
A scream-like cheer erupted from one side of the camp.
-x-X-x-
Zero turned his gaze that way.
Rumble rumble rumble-
Above the Red Arena, several pillars of light crashed down all at once.
Above the heads of those who descended, the same thing floated.
A yellow star.
It was a mark attached only to Admins.
Not just one or two, but more than ten.
The atmosphere of the camp flipped once again.
This time, it was towards relief.
— If the GMs are here, this will be sorted out.
— As expected of Pantheon. They are taking control of the event.
— Let's not fight over who gets the Last Hit and just watch the GMs handle it.
The GMs reached out their hands toward the two intruders.
Zero knew very well what that hand gesture meant.
'Forced Despawn!'
It was the final card that specified coordinates and completely deleted the entity on the spot.
Whether it was a boss or a monster, it would erase anything as long as the coordinates were locked.
Actually, it was an obvious measure for the Admins.
If this mess wasn't intended by the operation team, it was right to sort it out immediately, even in that way.
And so, the hand gesture fell.
However...
Neither the black-clothed man nor the crimson guy disappeared.
Red letters appeared above the GMs' heads.
Up to that point, it could be read by Zero's eyes as well.
[Cannot specify the target.]
[Cannot specify the target.]
[Cannot specify the target.]
The coordinates were definitely marked there.
Those two were definitely standing there.
But the System replied that there was nothing in that spot.
It wasn't that it couldn't find the coordinates to erase...
'The target to erase itself is not in the data!?'
It was confirmed by the situation just now.
That those two did not belong to this System.
Therefore, they couldn't even become the 'targets' of the System.
Naturally, you cannot erase what does not exist.
'What is this?'
Why is there something like that inside the game?
How could something like that exist?
And.
The intervention of the Admins seemed to have instead shaken the board one more time.
Throughout the Red Arena, perfectly fine textures began to shatter.
The pattern of the ground shifted out of place once and returned, and several tents in the distance lost their coordinates and flickered.
One corner of the sky folded and unfolded like a poorly drawn picture.
A mountain ridge in the distance completely lost its coordinates and belatedly snapped back into place.
The shadows cast at their feet lost their owners, stretched out in the wrong direction, and came back.
Perfectly fine colors smeared and mashed together in one spot.
Every time the Admin's authority was used recklessly, the world distorted once instead.
Step, step.
The black-clothed man lightly scanned a few of those phenomena and then moved his steps toward the GMs.
The GMs were not users.
They wrapped their bodies in invincible buffs and wore the Admin's mark above their heads.
They were the only beings in this game who did not die.
To the users, they were gods beyond the screen, and to the mobs, they were creators.
It would be the most accurate expression to say that GMs were the laws of this world walking around in the shape of humans.
"The removal isn't working! Target designation isn't catching them at all?"
"Put in more authority, start with isolation!"
"The coordinates keep appearing and disappearing. What is this?"
"Don't ask and just tie them down, damn it. We can report it to the higher-ups later!"
Those laws, those gods raised their hands all at once.
Red chains surged from beneath the man's feet, aiming for his ankles.
Immobilization.
Above his head, a gray veil fell down.
Action sealed.
From the left and right, transparent walls closed in.
Forced isolation.
Three, four Admin authorities were stacked layer upon layer on one person.
Even so, the number and intensity of those authorities continued to be added and slammed into him.
It was a full set of powers that would prevent a user from moving even a single finger, no, even a boss would freeze on the spot.
However...
The man did not even slow his steps.
The chains broke before they touched his ankles, the veil tore before it finished falling, and the walls got their coordinates crossed and scattered before they closed.
Everywhere the Admin's powers struck, the worldview warped, rendering everything useless.
— Hey, why isn't the bind working?
— What about invincibility? GMs are invincible, right??
— That's crazy, he's just walking over!!??
— What the hell is it? Those things?
Finally, he walked and reached them.
Slice.
"...!"
Those who wore the yellow stars on their heads turned gray, stars and all.
There was no trace of the invincible buff blocking it, nor any trace of authority resisting it.
The Admins faded out with the exact same light as when a user faded out.
However, this time, the spot where the light faded did not just become empty.
The System could not handle the coordinates where the Admin disappeared.
Centered on that spot, the floor collapsed like missing teeth, and below it, a pitch-black hole with nothing drawn on it was revealed.
Even if there was a code to handle death, there was no code to handle when something that shouldn't die, died.
The System vomited out the absence of its manager as an error.
A red log poured endlessly on one side of Zero's vision.
The remaining GMs stepped back all at once and thrust their hands out.
Removal.
Removal.
Removal.
Red letters plastered over each of their heads.
[Cannot find the target.]
[Cannot find the target.]
[Cannot find the target.]
[Cannot find the target.]
That which could not be erased walked among those who erase.
One star, then another.
The undying ones turned to dust exactly like the dying ones.
Slice.
"As expected, although it's been a while since I've seen it."
The last star went out.
The law of this world was erased from within this world.
"Places like this, things like this, have a terribly dull feel to them."
The chat window paused for a moment.
...
Slice.
Even when cut, blood did not spurt.
"..."
When the sword sliced through a person, gray dust loosened and scattered from the severed spot instead of something red.
There was no resistance of cutting through flesh, nor the heavy feeling of catching on bone.
The sword swung through the empty air once and stopped, and a few pieces of equipment tumbled to the ground where a person had stood.
Even the screams rang out at the exact same pitch, as if they were recorded.
There was no weight to the death.
Swish, Dong Bongsu lowered his sword.
He knew this sensation.
A long time ago, the day he first logged in inside the capsule.
When he cut down the trash mobs named Neighborhood Thugs, the heavy feeling that should have come to his hand didn't come.
Their blood merely mimicked the color; it was neither hot nor sticky.
On that day, Dong Bongsu sheathed his weapon and turned away without any lingering attachment.
Because the place he thought was a hunting ground was nothing more than a playground.
He didn't know exactly through what mechanism he had returned to this kind of virtual reality world, but he reached the same conclusion as back then.
A world like this is worthless.
If he could capture the System as a tool, it might be a different story, but if not, it didn't even have a single point of value.
The things wearing yellow stars on their heads reached out their hands once again.
Slice.
As the sword was drawn once, they scattered into gray dust while still wearing the stars.
He looked around.
He could see the fragments of souls that had connected to this virtual world, called players or users.
He could see them clamoring in panic.
— Is it a bug? A bug is erasing people lol
— Hey, a bug materialized like that and is just walking around? Isn't this an error?
— Looking at the message boards, word is going around that it's a new kind of virus?
— Haha, does a virus walk around holding a sword? It's just unreleased content.
— But what do we get if we kill that? It looks freaking strong.
— The rewards for the first kill of unreleased content would be insane lol. Achievements, titles, and even drops.
— Whether it's a bug or whatever, if I get the Last Hit, isn't it mine?
— Whether it's an error or a god, as long as it drops items, I'm good.
— Good my ass, it's go time, you idiot.
Right, those things were not humans.
Therefore, they were not hunting targets either.
They were a sort of air-like existence.
No matter how much you breathe, it does not quench your hunger.
Things that calculate the Last Hit and drops even in the face of death.
In a place like this, there wasn't a single beast that would bite back.
Only the numbers steadily increased.
The System diligently counted these things that left no corpses as people.
[Chain Attack] Count 1000.
The number had stopped there.
Because 1000 was the ceiling.
No matter how much he cut and cut again, the count remained stuck at 1000 and did not go up any further.
[1000 Chain Attack maintained. Duration is renewed.]
All stats increased by 100%.
That pinnacle endlessly reverted to the beginning, along with the two-hour time limit after the last Chain Attack.
He wasn't getting stronger.
He was just holding the end he had already reached, at the end.
That was all.
— Wow, this is a live viewing lol. Clip it, let's go.
— How many people got shredded? Look at the count going up, crazy.
— They respawn anyway, whatever lol. We're getting our money's worth for the view.
— Hey, who's going to eat his full drop pool? I'm already jealous of the bastard who gets it.
— The chance to be certified as the supreme of the first kill is looking sharp.
— Lolll let's just consider it the entrance fee and watch the live viewing.
Fakes were fakes.
Even that clamor was all too fake.
Fake madness.
Over there, in the Murim, it wasn't like this.
It couldn't be like this.
Because in that world, death was real.
A place where being cut once meant the end.
So, everyone dressed their greed in clothes.
Righteousness, justice, the great cause-they added a layer of plausible justification to hide their inner hunger.
And hiding it wasn't something you could take a break from; you had to cling to it every waking moment just to barely pass off as human.
Because the moment you looked away, the face of a beast would protrude out.
Martial Artists were, in essence, all hypocrites who had taken on that exhausting task for life.
A profession that barely functioned only if you dedicated your entire life to it.
Here, there was no such effort.
Since you didn't die even when killed, there was no reason to hide.
There was no reason to squeeze out a justification, nor any reason to smack your lips while pretending to be decent.
A place where even hypocrisy was cumbersome.
That was why their true nature threw off all its clothes and rolled around naked.
Husks left with only desires.
Well, it was nice that they were human-like, but in any case, they were air.
They couldn't be chewed even if put in the mouth, and they didn't make you full even if swallowed.
A taste that didn't even qualify as prey.
In this board, there was only one thing that bled real blood.
Swish, Dong Bongsu's gaze turned to one side.
Rumble, rumble-
Over there, the guy called the World-Ending Divine Lord, who had followed him in, was tearing through the crowd of users.
The prey that had been tracking Dong Bongsu's back from the real world over there, the Murim.
It was the only dish that had a weight to it when struck, and something boiling over when cut.
Once this cleanup was done, it would be its turn to be placed on the dining table.
Dong Bongsu turned his body toward him without sheathing his sword.
The crowd swarming the World-Ending Divine Lord, mixed together with the Admins wearing yellow stars, sank mushily as they were submerged in a dark red fog.
It was a method that rotted and collapsed whatever it touched.
It only differed in form from this side, which shattered them into gray dust without a single drop of blood, but emptying the board was the same.
The fakes were being cleared away at the same speed in both places.
That guy stopped his hand.
He tossed the half-melted user into the muck and turned his head exactly this way.
The corners of his mouth pulled up to the base of his ears.
"Hey. Everything here is bland, but you're the only one properly seasoned."
It was a light remark, as if spitting out something half-chewed.
His step, boiling the muck as he took a pace forward, carried excitement.
"I slashed, smashed, and ground everything up to drink, but I only got hungrier. You don't look like that, do you? Right?"
From Dong Bongsu's standpoint, it was the same.
The weight of cutting him would be different.
Unlike his light mouth, his killing intent was not light in the slightest.
Just that alone made it an inevitable delicacy.
Kekeke-.
Inside a different world, two predators began to growl.
The two, who had written each other down on their menus, stood facing each other with the same dining table between them.
-x-X-x-
The chat window, which had paused for a moment, began to boil over again.
— A GM died??? They said they were invincible though, invincible?? lol;;
— Lol This ain't no joke, a dozen or so actual operators just got wiped in one shot
— What's Pantheon doing? The game's about to explode
— Hey look at the map, the ground's breaking, the sky's folding, a mountain disappeared and came back, is this normal?
— I just pressed exit, but it won't let me out, is it just me?
— No no, everyone's getting kicked; logout is blocked.
— More than that, the black guy and the red guy are staring like they're gonna kill each other, what's that about?
— You guys watching for the last hit angle lol, still watching now?
— You saw a GM go down in one shot too, you idiot, how the hell you gonna catch that?
— True, they didn't put that out for us to catch; they locked us in and are making us watch
Even on a screen plastered with death where even the operators got shredded, some still aimed for the last hit, while others laughed at those fools.
The screams of people unable to log out only grew.
Zero quietly scanned those messages from the high ground.
He too had initially thought those two were a bug.
Entities not on the coordinates, like errors with no ID.
But after watching for a long time, he knew that wasn't it.
Does a bug pick its opponent and fight?
Does it erase an operator, who supposedly can't die, with a single skill?
Is it just corrupted data?
Can you still say that after seeing this mess?
The chat window was still clamoring over whether it was a bug or a virus, but Zero had long since dismissed all three notions.
It wasn't a bug, a boss, or a GM.
'...Things like that shouldn't exist within this game.'
Hadn't he just seen it with his own two eyes?
The operators, said to be unkillable, vanished in an instant.
Consequently, real errors the system couldn't handle, and empty spots were occurring simultaneously.
Red logs were still streaming down one side of his vision.
Users above bosses, GMs above bosses.
That was the hierarchy of this game.
But the sword that mercilessly erased those GMs didn't fit into any category, any list, in this GOR worldview.
It wasn't just a reversal of the hierarchy.
'Couldn't they have rolled in from somewhere entirely different?'
Woooooong-!
Just then, the arena floor began to howl madly.
Azure Gold Qilin, which had been thrown back and silent, raised its head straight up.
Five-colored light surged back over its shredded scales.
It was the enrage phase Zero-to-Hundred had seen hundreds of times.
But this light was a shade darker than what they usually saw.
The Qilin charged at whatever that light hit.
It didn't distinguish between the one who hit it the hardest and the one standing far away.
The entire order of aggro and threat level had vanished.
It was a pattern not found in the optimal route Zero-to-Hundred had memorized.
Originally, the Azure Gold Qilin was a pattern-type boss that chose its first target perfectly.
But now, it wasn't picking.
The Qilin charged straight in between the black-clad man and the red one.
'Did that thing break too, for real?'
The black-clad man sidestepped the horn aimed at his nose, deflecting it by half a foot.
The red one raised his forearm and swatted away the charging mane.
Neither so much as glanced at the Qilin.
It was a gesture of brushing away something bothersome.
Yet even so, their eyes did not leave each other.
The tens of thousands of users packed in here, even the Qilin intervening, seemed beneath their notice.
As if they were itching to fight each other as soon as possible.
The two approached each other.
A low growl from the red one rose all the way to the high ground.
From the high ground, the two silhouettes were too close.
One black-clad man, one red one.
There was almost no distance left between them.
Zero knew they were about to clash.
He just didn't know how.
Neither of their movements matched any entity he knew.
A sound came from the red one.
It wasn't a sound from a human throat.
A guttural noise that scraped deep in a beast's throat, making your spine crawl just hearing it.
It crawled up the ridge.
Then his mouth moved.
Not a single word he said could be heard.
It wasn't a matter of distance.
It was the same when he heard it up close a moment ago.
Mixed with tones, it sounded vaguely like Chinese, but it wasn't Chinese.
Words he had never heard in his life.
No subtitles appeared, and nothing got caught in chat.
Only his lips twitched.
Except, you could see how the corner of his mouth twisted upwards.
And frankly, from Zero's perspective, the content wasn't really important anyway.
"Keukeukeukeuk."
The World-Ending Demonic Lord was simply enjoying this situation.
Things he hadn't yet fully crushed lay at his feet, but they were meaningless.
Things that were a thousand or ten thousand, all the same.
Cut them, and only imitation colors smeared; break them, and screams rang out at the same pitch.
Things so utterly tasteless that his stomach felt hollow no matter how many he consumed.
Well, it didn't matter anyway.
Whether this was the Heavenly Realm or Hell, falling into some unheard-of other world was no big deal.
Even treading this new ground for the first time hadn't stirred any particular feeling.
Was it some formation intruder, or beyond some other barrier of the Windshear Cliffs, what did he care?
Wherever he tumbled to, he only had one thing to do.
Tear, break, and crush everything in sight.
That was it.
If he kept at it, everywhere eventually became the same slaughterhouse.
Just one thing was regrettable: even this new place he'd fallen to was all completely tasteless.
A rare new hunting ground, and there was nothing to chew on.
There was, after all, just one.
The other thing.
"Hey."
He took a step forward, the mire bubbling.
Black smoke rose from wherever he stepped.
"..."
Dong Bongsu had no answer.
Not even a pretense of listening, just finishing off the things in front of him.
The World-Ending Demonic Lord liked that too.
He didn't need someone to chat with.
He needed someone worth crossing swords with.
His tongue slowly traced his fangs.
"Keukeukeukeukeuk. Well, fine. Good."
The better it was, the more he wanted to split it open.
So he wanted to tear into it quickly.
He wanted to confirm right away what was inside, what sound it made when it broke.
"So please, try to last a bit."
Blood-red light beaded at his five fingertips.
Spot-.
The black-clad man, Dong Bongsu, moved.
Zero's eyes snapped to him.
The very instant the red one began a terrifying offensive, the black one was already stepping inside.
There was no pre-cast delay.
More accurately, there was no animation to read any pre-cast delay from.
Five strands of red light shot out from the red one's fingertips.
One line per finger.
They snaked in to wrap around the black-clad man's limbs and neck separately.
The black-clad man did not draw his sword.
Instead, he took one more step forward.
The five strands shot out, aiming for their targets, but the man was no longer in those spots.
By a single step.
The strands clutched empty air, and the man flowed past their missed grasp with his shoulder, burrowing inside.
"..."
Zero carved that one move into his mind.
It wasn't an evasion skill.
It wasn't a counter.
It was simply 'not being there' where the hit was meant to land.
As if he knew in advance where the opponent would aim.
He couldn't understand how such a thing was possible... but one thing was definitely certain.
It absolutely wasn't a standardized technique like a skill.
A sword was suddenly in the black-clad man's hand.
That sword slashed once across the red one's flank.
Gray light scattered from the cut.
It was the light that typically burst out when you cut a person.
But the red one did not go out.
Dark red smoke leaked more fiercely from the torn flank, then filled the wound back up.
The recovery phase of a boss that doesn't die.
Yet there was no recovery motion, no recovery gauge.
The damaged part simply swelled back up.
The red one stepped back a pace.
Then he opened his mouth wider.
It was a face of pure, delighted joy.
Even though his own flesh had been ripped open.
Among the thousands of bosses Zero had seen, not a single one enjoyed having its health chipped away.
— Hey, that red guy just smiled, right?
— lol yeah he's actually enjoying it, the perverted bastard
— Is the black guy winning? He landed a solid hit
Chat started buzzing again.
Zero didn't look away.
Talk of winning and losing only mattered when there were health bars.
The space above those two's heads was empty.
There's no bar to chip; how can you know how the fight's going?
Idiots.
Meanwhile, the red one came back in.
This time, it wasn't five strands.
As he brought both hands together, a mass of blood-red light coalesced between them.
Then the distance between them simply vanished.
The one who had been over there was right under the black-clad man's nose the next moment.
He thrust that mass straight forward.
The black-clad man raised his sword and blocked it.
The blood-red mass and the black sword locked in place.
He couldn't unravel it in one stroke like when he slashed the flank moments ago.
The red one pushed, and the black-clad man held firm.
Around the meeting point, the crimson floor silently caved inward.
"..."
Zero held his breath.
Those guys called users-though he himself essentially belonged to them-wouldn't know, but Zero did.
The fact that the battle between these two would determine the fate of GOR.
In the eyes of others, it's just a commotion within a game.
But... he didn't know.
Those user bastards probably just found this situation novel and fun, but the inability to log out was quite a serious situation.
And.
Watching those two, something like that momentarily came to mind.
'If such things were to descend upon Earth, upon the real world...
What exactly would happen?
Amidst it all, the black-clad man and the red one faced each other in a brief lull.
Glaring at each other.
At the nearly nose-to-nose distance, the blood-red light and the black sword trembled violently, still locked.
Right into the middle of that, the boss who had been shoved into a corner slowly raised its body again.
It wasn't one of those 'scraps of data' Zero had known until now.
The Qilin's eyes, eyes swirling with five colors, were saying it.
I am no longer such an entity.
Grrrrr...
The beast swelled its throat, growling low.
The ground shook from the reverberation alone.
Kwooooh-!
Its eyes twisted toward the center where they were locked.
From two, now back to three.
They were about to tangle in one spot.
It wasn't about who would win.
He couldn't gauge what would be left of this world after those things clashed.
Isn't it just a game?
Those people chattering about advantage and disadvantage in the chat window still didn't know.
Even what the blocked logout meant.
Zero didn't know exactly either, but he, at least he, felt fear and a shudder.
As if somehow foretold...
"...Please."
He was praying his thoughts and instincts were wrong.
-x-X-x-
Chapter 269: GOR (5)
-x-X-x-
The Kirin moved.
The direction of the light seemed somehow off.
Even with the sequence of its head turning askew, its aim was clear.
It was exactly where those eyes had shifted.
The spot where the man in black and the crimson creature were tangled together.
The massive body kicked off the ground and shot forward in a single line.
That same weight which had been pushing back twenty Zero-to-Hundred boss squads now aimed squarely at the flanks of the two who seemed locked together, unable to budge.
With each step its hooves took, the ground beneath was savagely torn and distorted.
Kwa-deu-deu-deuk-!
— Huh? Huh? The Kirin is butting in
— WTF did you see? Seems like the Kirin's gotten weird too??
— Whoa, this is clip-worthy, total clip.
In Zero's eyes, the picture was drawn.
The two were holding each other, so neither could dodge.
Both would be swept away.
At least, according to Zero-to-Hundred's movement chart, that's how it should be.
But then the man in black, in the midst of it all, subtly twitched the hand that wasn't holding his sword.
Seu-euhk-.
It was such a bizarre change that you couldn't tell exactly what he did.
Something unraveled and scattered from his fingertips, and the charging massive body stumbled over that scattered spot.
The horn that had been driving in a straight line twisted to the side.
From the spot where it should have struck dead center, by about two knuckles of a finger.
That was exactly the distance it fell short.
Ku-woong-!
Instead of sweeping both of them up together, the Kirin grazed past that tangled spot.
Its horn, having missed by that much, scraped between the two without striking head-on.
As the colossal frame scraped past their side, the weight carried in its flank lashed the man in black.
Had he taken it head-on, he would have been sent flying, but the glancing weight only shoved one of his shoulders.
Away from the direction the massive creature had come from, meaning outward from his stance facing the crimson creature.
The upper body of the man, who had been blocking the blood-colored mass with his sword, turned away from the crimson creature following that shoved shoulder.
That exact moment was it.
The mass the crimson creature had been pressing forward followed the turning man in black.
As the sword that had been holding against it lost the force that was pushing from the front, the blade that was receiving the blood-colored mass tilted and lay flat.
When faced head-on, the mass had caught on the center of the blade and held, but as the sword turned sideways, there was nothing left to catch on.
The mass of energy slid along the back of the lying sword and flowed inward.
The crimson creature hadn't deliberately aimed for that either.
It likely didn't know the Kirin would strike from the side.
It was simply that the force it had been pushing straight ahead, having lost its front, found nothing to support it and spilled out.
A physical impact from one side.
And then, where the Kirin had grazed past, there was something else that the massive body had dragged along.
Zero saw it.
In the path the Kirin had passed, the red floor shifted once.
It wasn't a broken texture.
It was deeper than that.
Something else that had been laid beneath the floor welled up through the spot the Kirin had scraped.
It looked like... 'a different board' that the Kirin seemed to have dragged in.
A corner of the world twisted once right there.
The physical impact and the twisted world struck the man in black at the same time.
Kwa-ang-!
— ?? The black dude's flying
— Where's he flying off to?
— Hey, there's a wall at that far end, the map boundary
The man in black was lifted into the air.
He hadn't retreated on his own feet.
Pushed by that mass and lashed by that twist, he flew, leaving a long, single afterimage.
Shwaa-ae-ae-ae-ak-!
Towards the very end of the Red Arena, the edge where no player had ever set foot.
Up to that point, all came into a single glance.
He crossed the boss field, went over the player camp, and in one leap, cleared a yard so vast that tens of thousands could rampage in it.
It was a terrifying speed, not flying, but as if distance were being folded haphazardly.
At the end of it was the invisible wall.
The wall that not only Zero-to-Hundred but countless players had tested with faint hopes or for fun, the one that could never be crossed.
There lay 'the end of the GOR worldview.'
The man struck that wall.
Teong-!
If he had struck it, he should have bounced back.
— Oh, hold on
— The wall...!?
— That! That! That!!
— ...Did it break through? I think it really broke through?
— That... that could be broken through? For real?
Just like the other players, Zero also couldn't believe what he had seen.
The man in black didn't bounce.
At the spot of impact, the wall caved inward.
The solid surface that had been blocking gave way, centering around where the man's back had touched.
It didn't stop there.
As if someone behind the wall were pulling that spot with a finger, the surrounding surface was sucked into the center along the dent.
It was like a tightly stretched screen being pierced at one point and dragged inward.
The drawn-in surface could hold no longer and crumpled.
The straight boundary line wrinkled along those folds, then, like a line drawn wrong and half-erased, folded inward and tore.
Jjeo-jeo-jeok-!
Through the tear, the man in black was sucked in.
Beyond the map's end.
To a place where no coordinates in this game were charted.
And the man in black disappeared within.
The noisy chat window fell dead silent for an instant.
As if tens of thousands right there had all lost their words.
— .....Then it exploded.
— WTF was that just now??
— Where did the black dude go? He disappeared.
— -He went outside the map?? That's possible??
The crack that had split open there remained unmended.
The wrongly drawn line didn't smooth back out but gaped open.
Through it, beyond the wall, was revealed.
The end of the Red Arena, beyond that wall that had never been crossed.
There was nothing there that should be.
No loading screen to the next map, no warning message blocking the way, not even a pitch-black skybox.
It was just utterly dark.
Not something left half-colored, but a place where what to color was never decided from the start.
Instead.
Something was drifting.
At first, I thought it was dust.
Watching, it wasn't dust.
Lumps large and small were drifting slowly through that darkness.
As if dust floats in space, comets pass, and rocks roll, in that dark place, such things were floating.
There was no up or down.
They neither fell nor rose, each drifting at its own speed as if forgetting the concept of weight.
But they were neither stars nor stones.
They were things made and left unfinished.
A half-drawn mountainside sideways, attached to nothing. was floating
One slope had its ridges fully formed, but the opposite side was cut cleanly in mid-air, revealing through its cross-section that it was an empty shell.
A piece of a fortress wall, only half-textured, spun round.
The stone-stacked side was pristine down to every bit of moss, but the opposite side exposed its ashen base, alternately showing the finished and bare sides with each rotation.
Floor fragments that hadn't been assigned where to lie, a few trees without leaves, a building with only outlines drawn and inside left unfilled-all drifted weightlessly.
Scraps pushed aside somewhere during creation, before being assigned coordinates to settle in place.
They were fragments that had stepped one foot outside the finished world, pieces not yet become a world.
Zero realized what they were.
He had rolled around in this field for over ten years.
There was no map he hadn't visited.
No boss he hadn't fought.
And so, even though it was a scene he'd never seen before, he felt he knew what it was.
'That... looks like resources under development?'
Before being laid into the game.
Map fragments not yet finished.
Somewhere not yet released to the world.
'Unreleased area?'
Did that even make sense?
Why was an unreleased map visible?
And why was it beyond the wall at the map's end...?
It wasn't that there was another layer of wall.
Beyond the wall, there was another world.
A world the company hadn't opened yet, where no player had ever stepped foot.
And it wasn't a completed world locked away, but one left unfinished, drifting in the darkness.
— Hey, what's that? The map end broke open
— Something's floating around beyond the wall, what's that? Stars?
— Stars my ass lol That's like unimplemented data
— Unimplemented? Why is an unreleased map there
— Whoa, isn't this a new map leak? Spoiler alert, spoiler
— The black bastard got sucked in there; if we follow, is it first dibs on the new map?
— Crazy bastard, if you go in, the GMs will delete you? That's outside the map.
— How can there be a map outside the map, dumbass? That makes no sense.
The chat window boiled again.
Just moments ago, they were dying in droves, and already some were talking about leaks and first dibs.
Zero shut out everything except what he saw.
This was no time to mind those idiots.
Of course, under normal circumstances, he too would have been gauging the timing or method to dive in beyond.
Are there rewards to claim first?
Is there an angle for the last hit?
But this time, it wasn't that naive a situation.
It was long past seeing that man in black as something to catch.
Hadn't he concluded ages ago that it wasn't a bug, a boss, or a GM, but something that had rolled in from outside the rules?
So no thoughts of strategies or drops came to mind.
Instead, something else surged up like a mushroom cloud.
'Beyond that... what the hell is there?'
The end of this world was not the end.
Beyond the wall he believed to be the end, there was another world.
That world was left half-made, floating in darkness.
And.
'The man from outside the world' entered 'yet another outside the world.
A sequence of situations was unfolding that, for now, could neither be caught, broken, nor understood.
Something beyond that gaping tear was overflowing, something utterly untouchable by the ways Zero had lived for over ten years.
...
The lights in the Pantheon server room hadn't gone out once in six days.
It had long since been forgotten how many shifts the duty rotation had gone through.
From the day the Kirin evaporated, an emergency had been declared, and rather than lifting, that emergency only deepened by the hour.
On every large monitor that covered the walls, the Red Arena was displayed.
Over a dozen screens showed the same chaotic mess from only slightly different angles.
Players turning gray in droves, textures that lost their coordinates and flickered, and in the very center, two markers with blank IDs embedded.
They had all been staring at such things for days.
"Are the GM logs sorted yet?"
The team lead asked, his headset hanging off one ear.
His voice was completely hoarse.
"Sorted, nothing. The operators who just went in... not a single one came back. They all just... turned off."
The server manager answered without taking his eyes off the monitor.
"They went in with invincibility on, right? And they all died?"
"That's what's driving me crazy. I just saw it with my own two eyes, you know? Not a trace of the invincibility buff blocking anything. They were just all deleted, in the same light as when players die."
The team lead swallowed a curse.
The swallowed curse had nowhere to go and just lingered in his mouth.
On one side of the screen, death logs were still streaming continuously.
Amidst the players turning off, several operator markers blinked and disappeared in the same color.
Wherever GMs vanished, the floor sank as if a tooth had been pulled, and countless empty holes the system couldn't process were being punched everywhere.
"How many refunds are there now?"
"...I gave up counting. I'm not even looking at the forums. If I look, I won't be able to work."
"Stock price?"
"It's hovering near the lower limit."
Someone let out a long sigh.
No sooner had that sigh fallen than the warning tone from the server manager's monitor rose another notch.
Bbi-bi-bi-bik-
"...What now?"
"Hold on. Hey, hey! Pull up the coordinate log for the Red Arena again. One of those markers just crossed the map boundary!"
The server manager pulled his chair closer, nearly pressing his face to the screen.
The hand holding the mouse stopped.
The eyes chasing the log stopped as well.
He was definitely tracking it with his own eyes, and the screen was clearer than ever, but his brain couldn't accept it.
"Crossed? Crossed to where? There's a boundary wall there; there's nowhere to cross to."
The team lead turned off his own monitor and moved over to the server manager's side.
"That's what makes no sense. The coordinates hit the boundary line, then crossed beyond it. To a place where they absolutely shouldn't be able to cross."
"...Coordinates appeared beyond the boundary?"
"They appeared. And not just one or two..."
The server manager swallowed once.
"Nearly infinitely."
The team lead's eyes followed the screen.
Amidst the familiar coordinate ranges, numbers he'd never seen before were embedded line after line.
Even after rolling in this field for over ten years, they were values he'd never seen a single line of.
The server manager clicked on one.
A window opened.
[Resource: Zone 2_Draft_Undeployed]
"..."
"..."
Both couldn't open their mouths for a while.
The server manager spoke first.
"Team Lead. Isn't this... that map we were going to open next quarter?"
"...Crazy."
"An undeployed draft just got scattered onto live coordinates. One that was locked in isolated storage. And it hasn't even been approved for release yet."
"Who opened it? Fuck!"
"Nobody. No record of a deployment command. That data shouldn't be touching the live line at all."
The team lead glared at the screen.
An undeployed area leaking into live couldn't be explained by a backup accident or a rollback mistake.
It was something that shouldn't be possible in code.
Yet it was happening right before his eyes.
Explanations aside, the screen was perfectly showing that event.
Just then, the server manager, scrolling down the screen, stopped his hand.
"...Team Lead. But this."
"What now?"
"What's floating... isn't just our map."
The server manager zoomed into the area beyond the boundary.
On the pitch-black empty coordinate field, besides the undeployed drafts, unidentified lumps were floating in abundance.
Not just one or two.
Some looked like terrain fragments, some like structures, and some were impossible to even classify.
"What the hell are all those?!"
"...I don't know."
The server manager clicked on one.
A window tried to open and shattered.
The same happened with others.
The coordinate values were captured, but the identity couldn't be read.
"They're not our resources. The format is different from the start. The engine can't read them. Those are almost like..."
After a long pause, the server manager continued.
"From another game... no, they look like they're from another world."
"Another world, what nonsense. Get a grip."
"Then you take a proper look, Team Lead... Those things... no matter how good our engine is, it can't implement stuff like that! But... those things are floating en masse inside our server. And if they were ours, why wouldn't they open?!"
The team lead closed his mouth.
He couldn't find anything to refute.
"Ha... So, what's the one that crossed over? Which of the two?"
The server manager back-traced the coordinates.
Then made a sound that was either a sigh or a hollow laugh.
"That... the pitch-black bug."
"That... crossed over to the unreleased map?"
"It didn't just cross over; it smashed through. The boundary wall coordinates are broken only at that spot."
The team lead threw himself back against the chair's backrest.
He looked up at the ceiling once, then dropped his eyes back to the screen.
There was no way the answer would be written on the ceiling.
"...We can't stop this anymore, can we?"
"...No."
"Respawns are dead, the boss vanished code and all, two things we can't even read crawled in and are rampaging across the entire server, GMs got wiped in one go, and now even an unopened map leaked, fuck. And on top of that, a ton of things that aren't ours are floating. What's next? The whole server just flies away?"
"If it ends with the server flying away... we'd be lucky."
"...What?"
"This isn't just one game blowing up. It's a board where the whole world is connected and running. How far this leak goes..."
"What do you mean by that?"
"Haven't you watched the news?"
"What news?"
"They say in all sorts of online games right now, something, whether bugs or viruses, is running rampant. It's not just us here in GOR."
"What...?"
What the hell is going on?
Beyond that broken boundary on the screen, on the pitch-black coordinate field that should have been empty, undeployed resources were blinking on one by one.
Beside them, unidentified things flickered along.
Even though no one had turned them on, by themselves.
If one line was turned off, two turned on.
The turning-on side was faster than the turning-off hand.
And straight into the center of it, that unknown thing, whether bug or virus, was flowing deeper in.