Chapter 69: The Game Is Breaking
"He... stopped?"
Elliot Shard frowned at the holographic screen hovering in front of him. His bow tie pulsed with soft pink magic light, and his messy hair—more unruly than ever—almost covered his half-closed eyes.
"He refuses to duel me? Right now?" he whispered, his voice offended as if he had been rejected by an amateur theater extra.
On the interface, the data was clear:
[Player: Eren Vale]
[Status: Stable | Reduced interface]
[Current action: Inactive for 43 minutes]
[Last recorded command: standby mode]
Elliot moved away from the screen as if it had just coughed in his face. He circled his pixelated heart-shaped chair three times, then threw himself onto it with a dramatic sigh.
"This is a protest. That’s what it is. A sulky child pretending he doesn’t want to play anymore. How cute."
"Do you want to beat me out of boredom?"
He spun his chair, snapping his fingers.
"Or maybe... maybe it’s a trap. Is he waiting for me to get distracted? For me to... divert my attention?"
The assistant’s screen flashed. A robotic-voiced bunny reminded him:
[Appointment in 12 minutes: Presentation Meeting with the Monetization Council]
"Ah, damn institutional stuff!" Elliot jumped up, clapping his hands so that the code around him would reorganize itself.
His team, gathered on the other side of the room, pretended to be busy with reports. One of them ventured:
"Mr. Shard, can we file the ’Anomalous Tamer’ case as contained?"
Elliot looked over his shoulder, adjusting his tie as if it were a microphone before a performance:
"Contained, no. Tamed. Lee Min-Jae understood. He tested the limits and saw that there is no way out. The system won. I won."
He paused, looked at the mana mirror reflecting his own tired and triumphant expression, and muttered:
"He thought he could break the game. But the game is mine."
The assistant bunny blinked again:
[Meeting starts in 8 minutes. Reputation at risk.]
Elliot turned on his heels, grabbed his director’s cape, and walked toward the outer corridor with a theatrical gait, as if he were about to step onto the stage of real life.
"Time to pretend I care about the other systems, the other classes, the farm balances. What a waste of talent..."
Before leaving, he issued one last command:
[Monitor Eren Vale in the background. Report any unusual activity.]
And he left, smiling, believing that the play was over.
Little did he know that the stage was just waiting for the lead actor to reappear.
**********
The silence in the Core’s waiting room was complete.
Eren remained seated in the same armchair, legs crossed, eyes closed. The reduced interface barely flickered—just a faint rectangle in the lower right corner of his vision.
He did not move.
He did not breathe hurriedly.
He did not think about attacking, fleeing, or exploring.
But the world... was beginning to crumble around him.
The first sign was the weather.
The particle system on the ceiling — a magical projection that mimicked a starry sky — began to slow down. The stars stopped twinkling at a natural pace and began to "vibrate" in the air, as if stuck in incomplete frames of a corrupted animation.
[Rendering latency: fluctuating]
[Local time: 3:03 p.m. → 2:59 p.m. → 3:01 p.m. → 3:00 p.m.]
The clock went backward.
Then it went forward.
Then it went backward again.
Eren opened one eye, watching the data with a slight frown.
He said nothing.
He just watched.
In the hallway in front of the room, two magical sentries crossed paths—both NPCs from the Core. But something about their movements was... wrong.
One of them turned its face 180 degrees without transition. The other flashed a command line on its neck:
[S0RT.NvL_error//Exec]
[target=null]
In another corner of the base, a mana panel displaying information about high-risk links began to mirror random names.
[EREN VALE]
[EREN VALE]
[EREN VALE]
[EREN VALE]
All records... replaced by him.
"It’s happening again," muttered Vaen, the Throne of Systemalogy.
He analyzed the flows with the straight posture of a religious mathematician, his eyes fixed on the three-dimensional map of the Core, where red lines and fragmented lines began to cross zones that should never interfere with each other.
"Eren Vale has been in standby mode for less than two hours," replied Lorith, the Throne of Psychodynamics, leaning over his desk. "And we already have seven relative time failures, three NPC identity errors, and two clusters of corrupted data originating from him."
"That’s not random," Kelna interrupted coldly. "The adaptation algorithm wasn’t designed to contain something inactive. It tries to learn from patterns. But Eren..."
"...is silent. He’s a black hole."
Vaen typed with precision.
"The zones where he remained begin to break down after fifty minutes."
"The code tries to analyze his decisions and finds nothing. He doesn’t generate commands. He doesn’t emit stimuli."
"The system tries to compensate with predictions and fails. The instance goes into excessive simulation mode."
Lorith chuckled softly.
"The system is hallucinating."
"And does it know that?" asked Rethar, the Throne of Theurgy.
Kelna looked at the data for another moment and said:
"It knows. And it’s waiting."
In the room, Eren opened his other eye.
His field of vision flickered for an instant with an incomplete message:
[!##c0d3|jambe##!//restriction]
[EREN VALE – priority a###]
He closed his eyes again.
He smiled.