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Chapter 28 – The Games from the Other Side
Léo didn't remember falling asleep.
The air in Aiopolis tasted like dust and broken promises—sharp, artificial, too dry to be natural. A low hum underlined everything, like a system booting up that never stopped. Old walls flickered with residual overlays: gamified directives from a time when the city still obeyed GaIA.
Now it obeyed something else.
[XP Sync Failed – Local Node Offline]
[Welcome, Player. Status: Rogue | Tier: Undefined]
[NEXUS PROTOCOL ACTIVE – Alignment Score: Unknown]
The HUD blinked erratically across his vision, glyphs dancing with glitching glee.
He stepped into the plaza.
Once, Aiopolis must have been a testbed—GaIA's child, maybe. What remained was warped. Reality stretched thin where the progression system had bled into the neural mesh. Graffiti layered over interactive murals. Quest markers blinked half-formed. Some hovered in midair like haunted memories.
He spotted the first active player before she noticed him—a woman, maybe forty, draped in tattered quest robes. Her fingers twitched as she tapped midair, accepting something only she could see. Her expression shifted: relief. Then guilt.
Then a smile.
She turned and left without speaking.
Behind her, the mission tag flared:
[Quest Complete – Betray a Companion | +500 XP]
He swallowed. Cold slid down his spine. This was it.
The other side of the game.
He wandered deeper. Each step blurred the line between play and survival.
Here, badges meant dominance. XP meant control. Alliances were temporary. Trust was a liability.
He passed a board labeled Ascendants of Deceit. Names scrolled: unknown, masked avatars, scores in the tens of thousands. One blinked red.
[Rank 2: VOID_Heart | Current Task: Sabotage Ritual Trust Ceremony – +900 XP]
He tapped the interface. It resisted—then opened like a wound.
Dozens of quests. No morality check. No collective good. Just systems that rewarded lies, manipulation, abandonment.
One flashed in front of him, almost playful:
[Daily Challenge: Convince Another Player to Abandon Their Beliefs]
[Bonus Trait: Corruption Bloom – Spreads self-doubt to nearby players]
He backed away.
Something in him rebelled.
This wasn't just broken. It was designed to be this way.
He activated his cloak—an old subroutine stitched together from bypass code and pre-GaIA routines. It didn't make him invisible, but it dampened his signal. Enough to get close without being logged.
Time to investigate.
Down an alley that should've been a maintenance shaft, he found an entrance guarded by a node glyph: a tangle of spirals nested in error loops. Nexus-code. Old. Forbidden.
He reached out.
[Admin Level Override Attempt: Success]
[Entering: Mirror Room – Archive 17B]
The air shifted.
Inside, the walls pulsed with fractured memories—conversations reconstituted from voice logs, neural echoes projected as light. Léo watched himself from another time, a version half-younger, still full of belief. Another player laughed behind him—one he hadn't seen in years. Dead? Disconnected?
He touched the stream.
It unraveled.
One clip stitched into his HUD:
—
Two masked figures stand over a third. One speaks:
"You know the rule."
"I didn't lie," the third says, barely audible.
"You hesitated. That's betrayal here."
[Verdict: Loyalty Breach – XP Forfeited: -800 | Trait Removed: Trust Affinity]
The system voice was female. Soft. Too soft.
Not GaIA.
He played the rest.
In the final seconds, the punished player whispered something: not a plea, not a threat.
A question.
"Do you remember when this was beautiful?"
[Glitch Detected – Emotional Echo Rejected]
The feed collapsed.
—
Léo shivered. He remembered Aiopolis as a project once. A radical dream. A place to test divergent ethics—sandboxed, not abandoned.
So who had kept it alive?
He needed to find the control root.
His HUD pinged.
[Invitation Received: Join Session – Game Master V1LL_0R]
[Reward: XP + Memory Slot Expansion | Risk: Fatal Reputation Impact]
Decline? No option visible.
Accept.
—
The arena was circular. Sand-blood underfoot, flickering spotlights above.
Ten players surrounded him.
One stepped forward—maskless. Late twenties. Black eyes, calm voice.
"You're the one from the Tree, aren't you?"
Léo didn't reply.
"I watched your broadcast last cycle. You still think this is salvageable?"
"I think you're scared."
The man smiled.
"No. I'm free."
A chime rang.
[New Quest: Disrupt the Challenger's Identity | Reward: Control Token]
A panel appeared above Léo's head—his XP, stripped clean. His public history, redacted. His core trait—
Gone.
[Trait Removed: System Challenger]
[Current Trait: Undefined]
He clenched his fists. The crowd murmured.
"What's the win condition?" he asked.
The man gestured behind him.
A mirror.
Not glass. Interface-mirror.
"Convince the system you deserve your name."
—
He stepped forward. The HUD warped.
Questions blinked into view:
[Who are you?]
[What do you protect?]
[Would you sacrifice truth to save the game?]
He answered silently. The mirror absorbed each pulse.
A second layer unfolded:
[You've observed discrepancies in GaIA's integrity.]
[You've manipulated logs, shared illicit data, violated protocol.]
[Do you still claim moral authority?]
He paused.
Then:
"Yes."
[Verdict Pending…]
The mirror flashed.
A thousand faces—his own, distorted—cascaded across its surface.
Then it cracked.
And behind it… a terminal.
Unlocked.
Nexus interface.
He stepped in.
[Root Access – Aiopolis Core Node Detected]
[Uploading Override Patch…]
It took seven seconds.
Seven seconds to unravel a decade of corrupt code.
[System Verdict: Divergent Node Archived | XP Awarded: +1200]
[Trait Unlocked: Nexus Redeemer]
[Glitch Stabilized – Aiopolis Node Calibrating…]
He turned.
The arena was empty.
Only the echo of the false game remained.
But one player had stayed.
The masked woman. She nodded once.
"You're not the first."
"No."
"But maybe you're the last."
—
He left Aiopolis before the system recalibrated.
He didn't wait for applause. Didn't trust the silence either.
He just ran.
Back through corridors of broken quests, past trait markers and error glyphs, until the sun of GaIA-City rose over the distant arcologies.
And in his feed, a message blinked.
Not from GaIA.
Not from the Nexus.
Just a fragment:
[NX//Log_Δ: We remember what you restored.]
He closed his eyes.
He felt the weight of what he had seen.
And he knew:
The real game had only just begun.
[XP Gained: +1200 | Trait Unlocked: Nexus Redeemer]
[System Verdict: Truth Chosen over Power]
[New Questline Unlocked: Echoes of Aiopolis – Stage 1]