The attack came at midnight.

Not from The Collective. From something worse.

Marcus was on watch — they'd set up a rotation, two-hour shifts — when his Code Sight triggered. A ripple in the barrier's data. Not physical — structural. Like someone had pasted corrupted code into the safe zone's protection script.

`[WARNING: Safe Zone integrity — 94%]` `[Anomalous entities detected outside barrier]` `[Entity type: UNKNOWN — not in standard bestiary]`

"Unknown." Marcus said the word out loud. In *Echoes of Ruin*, every enemy was documented. He'd designed every single mob, boss, and minion in the game. There were no unknowns.

Unless they were from content he *hadn't* finished.

He focused Code Sight outward, past the golden barrier. And saw them.

Shadows. Not metaphorical — actual shadows, as if someone had cut the darkness into shapes and given them mass. They crawled along the buildings surrounding Pioneer Plaza, fluid and wrong, like oil spreading uphill. No eyes. No mouths. Just... shapes. Humanoid, barely.

`[Entity: Glitch Beast — Shade Variant]` `[Classification: CORRUPTED — base entity not found in game database]` `[Threat Level: Tier 2]` `[HP: ???]`

Tier 2. The things Voss had warned about. And they weren't from Marcus's game — they were *corruptions*. System-generated mutations built from incomplete data.

"AVA!" Marcus shouted. "Wake everyone! We've got incoming!"

The plaza erupted. People scrambled. Children cried. Ava was on her feet in two seconds, knife out, combat-ready.

"What are we dealing with?"

"Shade variants. Tier 2. They're not from my game — they're glitched mutations. I don't know their attack patterns."

For the first time, Marcus saw something flash across Ava's face. Not fear — she didn't do fear. But concern. Real concern.

"How many?"

Jin, bleary-eyed but scanning, answered. "Eight. No — twelve. They're multiplying. Or splitting. I can't tell — my Analyst skill keeps returning corrupted data."

---

The first Shade hit the barrier.

The golden dome flickered — like a lightbulb about to die. The impact point showed cracks — not physical cracks, but data corruption. Lines of broken code spreading outward like frost on glass.

`[Safe Zone integrity — 87%]` `[WARNING: Barrier degradation detected]`

"They're breaking through the barrier," Marcus said. "That shouldn't be possible — safe zones are supposed to be inviolate."

"Well, tell them that." Ava positioned the fighters — the few people in the plaza who had weapons and were willing to use them. Maybe eight, including their core three.

The second impact. The barrier flickered harder. A section near the eastern edge went transparent for a split second — and a Shade arm punched through, clawing at the air inside.

Marcus's Code Sight screamed. He could see the barrier's code — it was being overwritten. The Shades weren't attacking physically. They were *injecting corrupt data* into the safe zone's protection script.

*Like a SQL injection attack,* Marcus thought wildly. *They're hacking the barrier.*

He had to counter-hack.

"Jin, keep scanning! Ava, hold the line! I need to try something!"

Marcus ran to the System Terminal at the fountain. He pressed his hands against the glowing pillar — and the Debugger class surged.

Code streamed across his vision. The safe zone's programming — clean, structured, elegant. And the corruption — jagged, recursive, eating through the firewall like acid.

`[Debugger: Safe Zone Firewall — critical errors detected]` `[Attempting patch... access level insufficient for full repair]` `[Partial patch available: Reinforce barrier for 10 minutes]` `[Cost: 50 XP]`

Fifty XP. Nearly a third of his current progress. But the barrier was failing.

"Do it," he whispered.

`[XP Spent: 50. Barrier reinforced. Duration: 10 minutes.]`

The golden dome blazed — bright, solid, blinding. The Shade that had punched through screeched — a sound like tearing static — and retracted. The corruption in the barrier's code burned away, replaced by fresh lines of defense.

The barrier held.

But only for ten minutes.

---

"Ten minutes!" Marcus shouted to Ava. "We have ten minutes before the barrier fails!"

"Then we kill them in ten minutes." Ava grabbed one of the Rot Hound fangs from the loot pile — she'd been crafting it into a proper weapon, wrapping the base with leather strips for a grip. Not a knife. A short sword.

The Shades circled outside, probing the barrier. Through Code Sight, Marcus watched their behavior — erratic, unpredictable, nothing like the programmed enemies he knew.

Then he saw it. A pattern. Not in their attacks — in their *data*. Each Shade had a core — a nugget of system code at its center, pulsing with amber light that only Code Sight could see. The core was the only part of them that was *real* code. The rest was corrupted data — visual noise, intimidation, static.

"I see their weak point!" Marcus called. "Center mass — there's a core. It's the only part that's solid. Destroy the core, destroy the Shade."

"Center mass," Ava repeated. "I can do center mass."

The barrier flickered. Eight minutes left.

Ava went out.

She stepped through the barrier — it parted for allied players — and the Shades converged. They were fast. Fluid. They moved like water, reforming around attacks.

But Ava was Army. And center mass was every shooter's default target.

She drove the fang-sword through the first Shade's chest. The blade hit something — the core. Solid. Real. She twisted. The core cracked.

The Shade *screamed* — everywhere and nowhere — and dissolved into black static.

`[Glitch Beast (Shade Variant) defeated. +60 XP]`

"One down!" Jin called from inside the barrier, scanning frantically.

Marcus watched through Code Sight, calling targets. "Two o'clock! The one reforming behind you — core is shifted left, near the shoulder!"

Ava spun, struck. Another Shade dissolved.

`[Shade Variant defeated. +60 XP]`

Six minutes. Ten Shades remained.

Three plaza fighters joined Ava outside the barrier — a construction worker with a rebar club, a college athlete with a pipe, and an older man with a machete he'd found in a hardware store dungeon.

Marcus guided them all — Code Sight tracking the cores, calling positions. "Center mass! No — that one's shifted high, chest level! Left! LEFT!"

It was messy. The construction worker took a hit — a Shade's arm passed through his shoulder like smoke, and he screamed, clutching at a wound that wasn't bleeding but *burned* with cold.

`[Status Effect Applied: Shade Touch — -2 HP/sec for 30 seconds]`

"Healing gel! Get him a gel!" Marcus shouted.

Jin ran out, slapped a gel pouch on the man's shoulder. The burning stopped.

Four minutes. Six Shades left.

Ava was a machine. Strike, pivot, strike. She'd killed four solo. But the Shades were learning — or glitching. They started splitting when hit, creating smaller versions of themselves.

"They're multiplying!" Jin reported. "Six became eight! No — ten!"

Marcus gritted his teeth. The Debugger pulsed. He could see the multiplication code — sloppy, recursive, no exit condition. A classic infinite loop bug.

*I can fix this. But the System warned me about excessive use...*

Two minutes.

Marcus made the call. He activated Code Sight at full intensity and reached — not physically, but mentally — into the nearest Shade's data structure. Found the multiplication script. Found the bug.

And injected a patch.

`[Debugger: Bug patched — recursive multiplication disabled]` `[WARNING: Anomaly score increased. Current score: 2/10]`

The splitting stopped. The smaller Shade fragments froze, then dissolved.

"They stopped multiplying!" Jin yelled.

Thirty seconds left on the barrier.

Ava cleaned up. Two strikes. Three. The last Shade dissolved into static and silence.

`[All hostiles eliminated]` `[Safe Zone integrity restored — 100%]` `[Marcus Chen: Anomaly score — 2/10]`

Marcus sat down hard. His head was splitting — the Debugger use felt like running a processor at maximum load. Everything was hot and buzzing.

Ava walked back through the barrier, covered in... nothing. The Shades left no blood. Just static residue that faded in seconds.

She looked at Marcus. "You guided every single strike. You saw things we couldn't see."

"The cores. The corruption code."

"And you stopped them from multiplying."

"I patched the bug."

She sat beside him. Silent for a moment.

"Your anomaly score. Two out of ten. What happens at ten?"

"I don't know." An honest answer. "Nothing good."

Ava looked at the purple sky. At the barrier. At the people inside who'd just survived a nightmare.

"Then we need to get you stronger. And we need to get everyone else stronger too." She stood. "Vertical Maze. Tomorrow. We clear it, we gear up, and we prepare for whatever comes next."

Marcus nodded. His head throbbed. But he was alive. They were all alive.

And the System had watched everything he'd done.