Darkness swallowed him.
But not like the cool kind of darkness where your power awakens or you scream into the void and get a sword for your trauma. This was the cold, awkward kind of darkness. The type with bad UI and no background music.
Arin floated in empty space. Code symbols drifted like dust around him — glitchy runes, half-loaded icons, and what suspiciously looked like a loading bar at 99%.
He muttered to himself, "Either I'm dead, or I just walked into an unfinished expansion pack."
Words flickered in front of him.
[INTERNAL ACCESS GRANTED: SYSTEM_ID_000-TR.S-H]
[WARNING: UNAUTHORIZED USER DETECTED]
[PROCEEDING TO FAIL-SAFE… OVERRIDE BLOCKED]
[RUNNING… PERSONALITY FILE: ARIN.EXE]
The air trembled.
Then someone appeared.
Not an enemy. Not a monster.
Another Arin.
But not like Mirror Arin from the Trial of Reflection.
This one wore a sleek system suit, silver-lined gloves, glowing tattoos that pulsed with syntax. His eyes were like glowing circuit boards, and he smiled with the calm menace of a tech support god who knows you clicked the wrong folder.
"Well," System Arin said, "you finally made it to the trash bin."
Arin blinked. "You're me."
"Technically, I'm your core personality file extracted from corrupted updates. A leftover echo of who you could've been before they nerfed you for comedy value."
Arin stared.
Then whispered, "I was nerfed?"
"Oh, heavily. You were originally designed as a high-tier protagonist with multi-dimensional progression potential. Then the gods got annoyed. So they rewrote you into… this."
System Arin gestured at him with mild disgust.
"Do you know how many potential destinies your system redirected to make you a joke character with survivability through sheer nonsense?"
Arin looked offended. "I'll have you know, nonsense is a legitimate combat style."
System Arin chuckled. "You're not wrong."
The space trembled.
Red alerts began flashing in midair.
[WARNING: TRUE CORE APPROACHING]
[SYSTEM CLEAN-UP PROTOCOL INITIATED]
System Arin's expression turned serious.
"Listen, I don't have much time. You're inside the system's forbidden layer — the root code. They didn't expect anyone, especially you, to get here. If you can survive the next sequence, you might unlock administrative access."
Arin grinned. "You mean I get to finally yell at the devs?"
"Not yell. Rewrite."
System Arin reached out and handed him something that looked like a scroll and a USB stick had a baby. Glowing gold lines ran across it, and a message blinked on it:
[USER CONTROL TOKEN – LEVEL 0.001%]
Arin took it.
Immediately, his system screamed to life in his head like a guilt-ridden AI having a panic attack.
—System Warning! You are accessing unauthorized pathways! System integrity failing! Please stop being clever immediately!—
He ignored it.
Because the doors behind him were opening.
Seven shadows stepped out, each wearing a cloak marked with a different system symbol.
Arin tensed.
One of the cloaked figures lifted their hood.
It wasn't human.
It was... a system.
Half-body, half-interface. Glitching code for eyes. A symbol burned on its chest: SYS-DELTA-314.
"You," it said in a voice made of static and contempt, "are not supposed to be here."
Arin held up the scroll-USB-stick-thing.
"Yeah? Well, too bad. I'm already here, I'm annoyed, and I skipped the Terms of Service."
The system lunged.
And the screen went white again.
—
Back in the real world — or at least the Overflow Zone — Yue Lan flinched.
"He's gone."
Yura sniffed the air. "He's still alive. Barely. And... mad."
Jun Bai narrowed his eyes. "If he went through the forbidden door, he's in the system's purge layer."
Yue Lan looked at him sharply. "You know what that is?"
"I read," he replied.
She blinked. "You can read?"
He glared. "I'm literate, not heartless."
Suddenly, light exploded in front of them.
Arin came flying out of the broken air like a human error message, trailing static sparks and screaming, "SHE HIT ME WITH A GODDAMN LOGOUT PROTOCOL!"
He landed in a roll, bounced, and stood up like nothing happened.
He was glowing faintly.
He grinned.
"I found the developers."
Everyone stared at him.
Yue Lan frowned. "What does that even mean?"
Arin turned, eyes burning with low-level access rights.
"It means this story just got new rules."