CHAPTER 61: ECHOES OF THE CODE

The steam escaped from the cup as if it had a life of its own, rising in timid spirals to the motion sensors on the ceiling. The aroma of bitter, almost burnt coffee filled the cold room on the eighth floor of Daejin Entertainment, where the main servers of BloodRealm pulsed like artificial hearts.

Elliot Shard stared at the screen with glazed eyes behind his thick glasses. He blinked slowly, as if each line of code in front of him were a poem that only he could read. His hair—an untamed mass of dark strands à la Harry Potter—stuck out in all directions, but Elliot didn’t care. Not today, not ever. He was wearing a navy blue suit, a lime green plaid bow tie, and a Totoro pin on his lapel. His socks had rainbows on them.

"This coffee is garbage, Minhee," he grumbled, spinning his chair around.

"It’s not my job to make coffee, Elliot," replied a tired woman in the corner of the room, without taking her eyes off the screen.

"Of course it’s not your job, dear. But you’re the only one here with any talent for it, so just take on the informal role of barista and help me out, okay?"

No one answered. The team was already used to it.

He stood up, crossing the metal floor with quick steps. He approached the Prism Screen, a 98-inch monstrosity connected directly to the telemetry core of the European server. On it, a real-time visualization showed the behavior of players on the western continent.

"Pause everything," he muttered.

The screen froze.

With a touch on the bottom edge of the frame, Elliot opened the internal logs.

"Hmm... this is... strange. Like, really strange. What is this? ’Tamer Rank F with affinity of 7.3...?’ Is this a bug? This... this isn’t possible."

He zoomed in with two fingers. The screen responded by displaying the player’s ID:

[Player ID: L-MinJae]

[Character: Eren Vale]

"Oh, my God. Guys. GUYS!" he shouted, throwing the empty cup on the floor. "Look at this! There’s a player... A TAMER... with an affinity of SEVEN POINT THREE. That’s impossible!"

"It must be a system error," said another dev, without looking up.

"Oh yeah? It must be? Wow, thanks for the information, Einstein. Are you the system now, Jisoo?"

Elliot began pacing back and forth, his dress shoes making an annoying tap-tap-tap sound. He huffed, bit the tip of his index finger, then snapped his fingers as if he were in the middle of a fashion show.

"Ugh... breathe, Elliot. Breathe. You know you’re a star. You’re a non-binary crystal of technical performance. You don’t need to freak out. Yet."

The screen flashed again. Elliot sighed and accessed the player’s stock memory.

[Simultaneous links: 4]

[Shared status: ACTIVE]

[Contract restriction: IGNORED]

"OH MY GOD!" Elliot slammed both hands on the screen. "HE’S USING A SYNCHRONIZATION EXPLOIT!"

"Calm down, man, it’s not the first time this has happened." Remember the necromancer build?

"IT’S NOT THE SAME THING, SEUNGGI! This guy is hacking the emotional mechanics! HE’S MAKING THE MONSTERS LIKE HIM! This breaks the ENTIRE concept of game design!"

He pulled up the virtual keyboard, furious, and began writing an emergency report.

The sound of the keys slowed down.

Not because anyone had stopped typing — but because Elliot Shard had stopped talking. And when Elliot was silent for more than 20 seconds, it meant only one thing: he was about to explode.

With his back to the rest of the team, he stood motionless in front of the Prism Screen, his arms crossed, his eyes glazed over, his bow tie askew, hanging like a warning of impending instability.

On the screen, the performance distribution chart by class for the last quarter trembled with an abnormal spike.

The Tamer class.

Again.

Elliot pursed his lips, took a deep breath through his nose, and spoke with unbearable sweetness:

"Minhee, dear... as a UX designer, could you explain to me why the hell the Tamers line is rising?"

She didn’t answer. No one answered. The team already knew the tone.

"Hm. Nothing? Not even a ’maybe players are rediscovering the class’? How lovely."

He turned slowly, spinning on his heels with a theatrical step. His impeccably polished shoes gleamed under the white LED ceiling lights.

"Just to put this in context, okay? Just to refresh the memory of the ladies and gentlemen here," Elliot raised a finger, theatrically, "I was the one who dragged the Tamer class down into the statistical trash. I was the one who broke the multiple bond build. Me. Not fate. Not the data. Me."

He cleared his throat.

"And now," he pointed to the screen, "this is a personal affront. It’s a mockery. It’s digital spit in the face of my 12-year-old self, when I lost FIVE games in a row to some Tamer bastard in a smelly internet café with a broken mouse."

He walked over to the floating keyboard and began typing with speed and anger. Each keystroke felt like a slap in the face of an imaginary programmer.

"I rewrote the entire damn emotional architecture of the class. I imposed a delay on loop commands, nerfed affinity gain, rebalanced the cost of support skills, and even so... even so... look at this!

He expanded a section of the logs. Combat data. Four monsters active in synergy. Passive buffs. Status sharing. Total absence of penalties for multiple control.

Elliot kicked the swivel chair. It flew two meters before hitting the counter and falling with a thud.

"And WHO WAS THE IDIOT who released this iteration without reviewing the affinity module?" he shouted, his eyes flashing with anger. "I SWEAR, if I find out that this was altered by someone here, I’m going to text my dad RIGHT NOW."

Absolute silence.

Minhee closed his eyes for a second. The intern by the window swallowed hard. The older programmer in the corner fiddled with his headphones, pretending to be in a meeting.

"That’s right," said Elliot, with a cynical smile. "Because, apparently, the ONLY way to make this team work is to resort to the old ’paternal touch of management’. An email. A message. A ’Hi, appa, today the guys let the tamers climb 0.06% in the rankings. Want to talk to them in person?’

The intern almost cried.

Elliot snapped his fingers, suddenly calm. He returned to the screen and began to put together a report.

****

INTERNAL OBSERVATION REPORT – Unexpected Trend

By: Elliot Shard, Chief Programmer of Balance and Preventive Nerfs™

Subject: Anomalous statistical behavior – Tamer class

Affected clusters: 5A, 7EU, 9Z-ME

Trend graph: Unjustified progressive increase over the last 16 days

Synergy Average: Rose from 1.3 to 3.8 in specific cases

Impact on PvE: High

Impact on PvP: Emerging

Possible causes (unconfirmed):

– Non-linear bond build ignoring contract requirements

– Skills being activated outside the presence field

– Emotional command priority bugs

– Failure to apply simultaneous affinity limitations

Partial conclusion:

This may be an old structural breach reemerging through unexpected behavior by players with emotional manipulation routines. Needs to be analyzed in depth before any patch.

Recommendation (provisional):

– Review logs from the last 7 days in the clusters mentioned

– Suspend any attempts at accidental buffing in the class

– Block approval of new high synergy monsters for tamers in upcoming updates

– Update affinity system documentation with a note on potential emotional exploitation

Personal Note:

If this pattern consolidates, I will rewrite the loop algorithm myself. And this time, with pain.

Incidentally, the AI that wrote the script for that ridiculous ghost — Sylha — deserves to be fired. That looks like code written in a manic fit.

****

Elliot paused for a moment. He took a breath. The room was still silent. Only the hum of the air conditioner and a slight clinking of his cup on the table could be heard.

With a slow gesture, he clicked "Save as Draft."

He didn’t send it.

Not yet.

He looked at the graph one last time, his eyes softer now. Almost nostalgic.

"I swore that class would never rise again," he muttered. "After that day. After that defeat. No one would ever use Tamer to walk all over me again."

He took a sip of cold coffee.

He grimaced.

Then he smiled, melancholy.

"But you guys are persistent, aren’t you? Damn tamers. You always come back. Like an ex-boyfriend with unresolved issues."

He moved away from the screen.

"Okay. I’ll see you guys. But the next time that curve goes up... I’ll cut it in half. With a scalpel."

The chair returned to its place. The keyboard turned off. Elliot crossed his legs, turned slowly, and leaned his head back against the headrest as if planning an elegant execution.

The screen, previously silent, flashed with a residual line:

[Interference detected in the emotional subsystem.]

[Automatic monitoring initiated.]

Elliot didn’t even see it. He was already smiling with his eyes closed.

"Nerf coming soon, sweethearts."

*********

The trail leading to the new state cut through a valley of red earth, damp from the rains of the previous week. It was the kind of path that opened up not only on the map, but also at the destination — a road of promises and unresolved tensions.

Eren walked at the front of the group, his eyes half-closed under the gray light that leaked from the overcast sky. His steps were measured, not out of caution, but out of habit, as someone who had never trusted firm ground for long.

Kaela followed a few meters ahead, sniffing the air with her senses alert. Her arms were crossed, her tail swinging like a wound pendulum.

In contrast, Nyssa walked with soft hops, distracted by the pale colors of the flowers growing along the roadside.

Morwynn oscillated between presence and absence, her body fragmenting into strands of shadow that trickled down rocks and tree trunks.

Sylha floated around like a breath of animated mist, laughing to herself between whispers, as if listening to jokes told by ancient ghosts.

The atmosphere was relatively calm. Almost peaceful. But then came the crack.

Not a real sound, but a sensation—as if something had been reconfigured in the invisible structure of the world. Eren stopped. His interface flashed for an instant.

[System Notification]

Update in progress...

"Wait..." he muttered, frowning.

The monsters stopped too, almost at the same time. Even those who did not share his status view reacted to the change as if something had squeezed the air around them. The ground did not shake. The sky did not change. But the world became... too quiet.

Kaela turned around immediately.

"Did you feel that?"

Eren did not answer right away. He opened the interface again. The tabs were slower, as if someone were redesigning them in real time. The contract options took longer to load. There were minor graphical errors: duplicate icons, shaking affinity bars, and an identification number that changed on its own and then returned.

He narrowed his eyes.

[Link Error]

[Reloading sync module...]

"Yes," he replied at last. "Something is wrong. The system has been updated. And it wasn’t announced on any official channel."

Sylha floated around like a leaf carried by a ghostly wind, giggles escaping between invisible teeth.

"Hihihi... I know that feeling... Someone has tampered with the board. And it wasn’t a player."

The words hung in the air, but only one person there understood what they really meant. Eren.

It wasn’t magic. Nor was it a change in the weather. Nor was it a new visible threat. It was the system. The game. That invisible architecture that held everything together. Something in his digital bones had shifted. As if the world itself were trying to recalibrate around him—but without success.

Eren opened the interface. The link bars took two seconds longer to load. Small lines flashed where they shouldn’t have. Icons floated out of alignment. The sync tab failed to open.

It wasn’t a bug. It was a patch.

Then Sylha stopped. She stopped laughing. She stopped spinning. She even stopped shining.

She floated toward Eren with such an unexpectedly sober expression that Morwynn, still hidden in the shadows, raised an invisible eyebrow. The ghost’s eyes became glassy, fixed. A strange shade of blue took over her body.

She held out her hands.

"It’s here," she said simply.

Between her palms appeared something that had not existed before in that world: an object that seemed to pulsate with consciousness. A translucent egg of organic crystal, with veins of light snaking beneath the surface like liquid roots.

Eren hesitated, but took it. The artifact was cold and alive at the same time. When his fingers touched the surface, a sudden pain shot through his head, cutting inside as if it were sculpting his mind with scalpels of light.

And everything around him disappeared.

He was standing in a chamber that was neither real nor imagined—only imposed. A space formed by lines, pulses, and symbols that defied physics. In the center, four thrones of different materials—flesh, stone, crystal, and metal—were connected by threads of liquid light, snaking between them.

The figures occupying them had hidden faces, intertwined voices. They were the leaders of the Core. Eren recognized them, though he had never met them in person. They had watched him before. Interfered. Created problems.

Eren frowned. The pain in his head had not gone away. The artifact still vibrated in his hand, as if the connection were being sustained by force.

"You," he growled. "You again."

The voices responded like an echo coming from all corners.

"The curve of the world twists, Eren Vale."

"The stars that once revolved in your favor now hang like blades over your head.

"The universe is in turmoil. The great tapestry has been silently mended.

"Oh, don’t give me that," Eren retorted, his jaw tense. "I know exactly what’s going on. You call it the universe. I call it the system. And it’s trying to cut me off. It’s not magic. It’s code. And someone messed where they shouldn’t have.

Silence.

The crystal figure spoke.

"You are a dissonant singularity."

The flesh figure spoke next.

"You are the beat that escapes the music."

Eren clenched his fists. The aura around him changed. The lines of code running along the walls of the thought room trembled.

"If this is another attempt at control, you can give up. You screwed me over once. I won’t let you do it again."

Then the metal figure raised its voice. Deep, heavy.

"We admire you, Eren Vale."

He remained silent.

"You showed that rules are not absolute. That emotion is a weapon. That the bond is not code. It is decision."

The stone figure added:

"That’s why we want to see you. To speak without the veil of projections. And explain what’s to come. Because it’s going to get worse."

Eren narrowed his eyes.

"Why?"

"Because the machine has noticed you. And now it’s moving to crush what it doesn’t understand."

The light flickered.

The vision shattered.

Eren returned to the physical world with a muffled sob. The artifact in his hand trembled until it burst into blue dust, which dispersed into the air like smoke from a broken dream.

Kaela already had her fists clenched. Nyssa looked at him with silent concern. Morwynn emerged from the shadows like an extension of her own fear.

"What was that?" Kaela asked, her voice low and controlled.

Eren rubbed his forehead. Cold sweat dripped from his temple.

"Interference from the Core."

Kaela let out a growl.

"Those bastards again..."

"They sent me a message," he added. "They say that the ’universe’ is reacting to me. That the... stars are moving against my existence. That something above all else has decided that I’ve gone too far."

"And what do you think?"

Eren looked at his own interface.

"I think they’re right. But not in the way they think."

He opened the links tab. It was different. Slower. Fragmented. And... something was missing.

The button.

[Summon All – Disabled]

Silence.

He tested a command. Nothing.

"Shit..." he whispered. "I lost access to simultaneous summoning."

Nyssa approached, her round eyes shining.

"Is that... normal?"

"No," he said harshly. "This is a change. Deliberate."

The feeling returned. Like a breeze made of algorithms. A subtle presence in the air, observing, processing, testing.

And then came the last message of the day.

[Patch 2.7.9-A has been applied.]

[New rule: mandatory link.]

Eren closed his eyes.

"I understand."

The game was no longer the same. And from then on, neither would he be.