The dust in the 9th-floor cafeteria was slowly settling, coating everything—including Sarah Lin's soot-stained face—in a deathly gray pallor. She stared at the man standing casually amidst the rubble of the collapsed 10th-floor balcony. He wore a tailored charcoal suit that looked like it had been dragged through a meat grinder, and held nothing but a chipped, mundane flathead screwdriver.

"Arthur," she repeated slowly, tasting the name. She didn't lower her hands, the tiny flickers of orange `[Ignite]` flames still dancing desperately at her fingertips. A Level 2 Pyromancer running on fumes. "You dropped a vending machine on them? How did you even push it? You don't look like a Brawler class."

Arthur Vance stepped closer, not enough to trigger a defensive reflex, but enough to emerge fully from the shadows. His dark eyes were cold, analytical, stripping away the chaos of the environment to read the raw data beneath.

"I didn't push it. I bypassed the gravity constraint on its spatial coordinates," Arthur said, his voice flat. He pointed a finger at her hands. "You're at 4% mana. If you keep channeling those sparks, you're going to trigger `[Mana Exhaustion]`, which comes with a massive migraine debuff and a 50% reduction in movement speed for the next hour. Put them out."

Sarah blinked, the flames sputtering and dying instantly as her concentration broke. She stared at him, bewildered. "How... how do you know my stats? Are you a Scout? Or a System Admin or something?"

"I'm a survivor," Arthur deflected smoothly. He didn't tell her he was a `[Glitched NPC]` with zero stats. Or that he had spent the last decade of his previous, erased life analyzing the mathematical formulas of the Eternity Engine. "And right now, this building is a tier-two deathtrap. We need to leave. Are you alone?"

Sarah’s shoulders slumped slightly, the adrenaline of the fight beginning to fade, replaced by a dull horror. "I was with two guys from marketing. Dave and Eric. We tried to get to the fire escape when the skies turned red and those... those things broke in. They didn't make it."

She swallowed hard, wiping a streak of dirty tears from her cheek. "I unlocked this Pyromancer class when the blue screens popped up. I've been trying to fight my way down, but I can't keep up with their regeneration. I only have one minor mana potion left."

Arthur's eyes tracked toward the small, glowing blue vial hooked onto a makeshift loop on her belt. `[Minor Mana Potion - Restores 50 MP]`. It was a standard, guaranteed drop for magic-oriented classes during the Tutorial Phase.

"Give it to me," Arthur commanded.

Sarah instinctively covered the vial with her hand, a spark of defensive anger returning to her eyes. "Are you crazy? It's the only thing keeping me from getting eaten by the next troll we see!"

"If you drink it now, you'll cast maybe three more `[Ignites]`," Arthur said reasonably. "That might kill one Urban Troll if you hit the central nervous system. But there are roughly forty monsters between here and the ground floor lobby. You need more than fifty mana. Give it to me, and I'll give you infinite mana."

Sarah stared at him as if he had lost his mind. But something in Arthur’s unblinking, calm demeanor—a stark contrast to the screaming, dying people she had seen all morning—made her hesitate. She unhooked the vial and tossed it to him.

Arthur caught the glass vial. It was cool to the touch, the blue liquid inside churning with a faint, magical luminescence. He pulled the `[Corrupted Dev Tool Fragment]` from his pocket. The jagged shard of obsidian glass bled crimson lines of raw code, casting a demonic light over his features in the dim cafeteria.

"What is that?" Sarah whispered, taking a step back. "It looks... wrong."

"It's a debugging tool. The developers left it behind," Arthur lied seamlessly. He pressed his thumb against the bleeding code of the shard and initiated contact with the blue vial.

The archaic gray window flickered to life in his vision.

`[C:/ETERNITY_ENGINE/FRAGMENTS/DEV_INTERFACE.EXE]` `[TARGET ACQUIRED: 'MINOR MANA POTION']` `[CLASSIFICATION: CONSUMABLE/BASIC]` `[OPENING HEX EDITOR...]`

A dizzying torrent of green hexadecimal code projected into the air, swirling around the small vial in Arthur's hand. Sarah gasped, taking another huge step back, her eyes wide with terror as she witnessed the very fabric of reality visually unraveling into raw data.

"Don't panic," Arthur muttered, his eyes darting across the floating text, ignoring the localized headache the Dev Tool always inflicted.

He didn't attempt to change the potion's potency. Altering a consumable's restoration value from '50' to '9999' was mathematically possible via hex edit, but it would flag the item as an anomaly during the server's real-time ingestion checks, likely deleting the item or, worse, spawning a Sentinel.

He needed to break the System's logic without triggering its immune response.

Arthur searched the floating strings of data until he found the specific line governing the item's `[Stack Size]`—the numerical integer that dictated how many of identical items could occupy a single inventory slot. For Minor Mana Potions, the default stack limit was 10. The vial in his hand had a current stack value of 1.

He reached out and tapped the floating green line.

`[Line 0x011A: STACK_CURRENT = 01]` `[Line 0x011B: STACK_MAX = 10]`

In the original release of the Eternity Engine, long before the Day 14 patch, there was a notorious duplication glitch utilized by early-game crafters. If you placed an item into the trading window and executed a simultaneous command to split the stack while mathematically dividing by zero, the inventory array would fail to parse the null value, defaulting to generating a clone in the target slot instead of moving the original.

Arthur didn't have a trading window. But he had the hex code.

He tapped the `STACK_CURRENT` value and inputted a raw memory leak command—a string of garbage text meant to overflow the buffer.

`[Line 0x011A: STACK_CURRENT = NULL_ERROR_X9F@]`

The green text shuddered violently. The System's error-handling protocol kicked in instantly. Recognizing an invalid string in a critical numerical array, the engine attempted to revert the item to its last stable state. However, because Arthur was holding the physical item outside of his glitched inventory, the reversion protocol desynced.

The System couldn't parse the null value, so it defaulted to a fail-safe integer reproduction to prevent an outright crash of the item's mesh.

`[ERROR: BUFFER OVERFLOW AT 0x011A]` `[ATTEMPTING PARITY RESTORATION...]` `[FAIL_SAFE TRIGGERED. SPLITTING MESH TO RESOLVE COLLISION.]`

*Pop.*

A second, perfectly identical `[Minor Mana Potion]` materialized in the air next to Arthur's hand, dropping neatly onto the floor.

Sarah stared at the duplicate vial rolling on the dusty tile. Then she looked at the vial still in Arthur's hand.

*Pop. Pop. Pop.*

Three more vials materialized, tumbling onto the floor.

"Stop! Stop, what are you doing!" Sarah hissed, frantically dropping to her knees and grabbing the vials. The heavy scent of ozone filled the room.

Arthur yanked his thumb off the Dev Tool, cutting the connection. The green hexadecimal code vanished. He was sweating profusely, the mental strain of bypassing the firewall leaving him slightly lightheaded.

"Item duplication," Arthur breathed, pocketing the glowing shard. "The System's garbage collector gets confused if you inject null values directly into the physical object array instead of the inventory UI. It tries to save the item by splitting it."

He nudged one of the five vials toward Sarah with his foot.

"You have two hundred and fifty mana now," Arthur said, his voice regaining its cold, commanding edge. "And if we run out, I can make more. I can’t deal physical damage, Sarah. And I don’t have any defensive stats. If a monster looks at me, I die."

Sarah clutched the vials to her chest, her eyes wide as she looked up at the stranger who had just broken the fundamental laws of reality in front of her.

"What do you want from me?" she asked.

"I need a gun. And you're a Pyromancer," Arthur stated simply. "I will tell you exactly where they are, what their blind spots are, and when to shoot. You will provide the firepower. In exchange, I will get you out of this building alive, fully stocked, and leveled up."

Sarah looked at the ruined cafeteria, then down at the miraculous potions in her hands. She uncorked one and downed the glowing blue liquid. Instantly, her pale face flushed with color, and vibrant orange flames roared to life around her fingers, burning hotter and brighter than before.

She stood up, the flames reflecting in her determined eyes.

"Point the way, Arthur."