I stared at them.
"… You're telling me I went through all of that…"
"… for a loot box."
Your effort has been quantified. Reward distribution requires selection.
"Explain them."
[ Nova ]
Divine Box — High-tier rewards. Extremely low probability.
Cursed Box — High risk. High return. Negative effects possible.
Normal Box — Stable rewards. Minimal risk.
Mystery Box — Outcome unpredictable. Classification: Unknown.
I sat with the options for a while.
The Divine Box felt bright and distant — the kind of thing that existed for other people. The Cursed Box had a weight to it, a darkness that sat differently than the others. The Normal Box was exactly what it said: reliable, safe, and completely uninteresting after what I had just put my body through.
The Mystery Box was harder to read. It didn't feel like any of the others. It felt like a question.
"… You really couldn't make this simple."
No response.
I exhaled slowly, rubbing my face with both hands. Every muscle in my arms reminded me that they had opinions about this motion.
"I'm not picking Normal," I said. "Not after all that."
I looked at the Cursed Box. Something about it felt like a bad idea in the specific way that things feel like bad ideas when they genuinely are.
"And I'm not adding more damage on top of what I'm already carrying."
That left the Mystery Box. And the Divine, which I dismissed without ceremony — I was a Level 1 Irregular with a borrowed classification and no confirmed guild affiliation. The universe did not owe me high-tier rewards.
The Mystery Box, though.
I had worked for this. Not cleverly. Not skillfully. Just — repeatedly, through failure after failure, until there was nothing left to fail with and I kept going anyway. If that counted for anything — and I had decided, somewhere around repetition thirty, that it would have to — then picking safe seemed like a waste of the lesson.
A small, exhausted half-smile formed somewhere on my face.
"… Hard work should count for something, right?"
Probability does not guarantee reward quality.
"Yeah, yeah."
I reached out. My finger hovered over the Mystery Box for a moment.
"… Open it."
I pressed.
• •
The box did not glow.
It shook.
The light that leaked from it was not gold and not white and not any color I had a name for. It was wrong in the specific way that certain things are wrong — not broken, but belonging to a different set of rules than the ones I had grown up with.
[ Opening… ]
The air around the panel distorted. Like whatever was inside had been compressed past the point where compression is a reasonable description and was now attempting to exist in a space that hadn't been designed for it.
Then the screen spasmed.
Text overlapping, distorting, rewriting itself faster than I could follow — and then:
[ ERROR ][ ERROR ][ ERROR ]
[ Reward Generation Failed ]
[ Attempting Reconstruction… ]
[ SYSTEM ERROR ]
[ Unknown Data Detected ]
[ Forcing Skill Creation… ]
The words stuttered on the panel. Like something was resisting the process from the inside.
Then, slowly — reluctantly, in the way that things appear when they would prefer not to exist but have been given no choice in the matter:
[ Skill Acquired ]
GLITCH (Lv. 1)
An error within the system, given form.
▪ Unpredictable outcome upon activation
▪ May alter skills, perception, or reality in minor ways
▪ Cannot be fully analyzed
⚠ Warning:
Use may result in system instability, physical backlash,
or consequences that cannot be predicted or reversed.
[ Skill Bound to User ]
[ Removal: Impossible ]
I read it twice.
I read it a third time, in case the second reading had been wrong.
It had not been wrong.
"… So I went through all of that."
I gestured at the panel with one aching arm.
"… And I got a broken skill."
Correction: you received something the system failed to create.
Silence.
"… That doesn't make it better."
It makes it dangerous.
I looked at the word again. The one sitting at the center of the panel, underlined by the weight of everything the system had failed to do with it.
GLITCH
"… How do I even use this?"
No answer came.
The screen held its light for a moment longer. Then it dimmed — not off, but settled, the way a fire settles when it has decided to stay where it is for a while.
I sat on the floor of my apartment with every muscle in my body lodging a formal complaint, staring at a skill the system itself had failed to generate properly, permanently bound to a user the system itself couldn't classify.
I thought about my brother's name on that manifest. About Knightsky's fists, white-knuckled, saying the word sorry to a crowd that wasn't ready to hear it. About Park Do-Jin's expression when I had shoved him — that cold, flat, recalibrating look.
About the line the status window had shown me for one unguarded second before scrubbing it:
Source: Kim Tae-Hyun.
I exhaled slowly.
"… Alright."
I pushed myself to my feet. My legs objected. I stood anyway.
"Nova."
Yes.
"What's the quest for tomorrow?"
A pause. Then, with the particular quality of something that approves of the question without being willing to say so:
Initializing Day 2 parameters.
I looked at my hands. The hands that were not the ones I had woken up with two days ago. The hands that had bled from a careless tap and completed a hundred push-ups on a broken timeline and pressed a button that the system itself had failed to process correctly.
I had one month before I needed to go back.
One month to become something the system couldn't predict, built from skills the system couldn't name, carrying a connection to my brother that the system had tried to hide and failed.
It was a beginning. Ugly, painful, and structurally unsound.
But then — so was everything worth doing, at the start.