CHAPTER 67: PARADOX TAMER

"Unacceptable!" Elliot yelled, throwing his arms up in the air as if he were watching a failed magic show.

His tousled brown hair, à la Harry Potter on a bad morning, seemed to be at war with gravity. His elegantly rumpled black linen suit was paired with a lilac bow tie that fluttered slightly out of sheer aesthetic indignation. His gold fingernails tapped nervously on the glass table. Each tap seemed to accuse reality itself.

"He destroyed the Alpha! The Alpha!" he repeated dramatically as he spun around and then kicked an upholstered chair shaped like the game’s Totem. "Two days, Rafael! Two days programming that WONDERFUL code! No sleep, no hydration, no applying my facial vitamin C... and for what? For this... avocado with an ego to destroy everything with an emotional bow and an emo spider!

The support team, positioned at the back of the room, pretended to type diligently so as not to meet the gaze of the walking storm. An intern whispered a quiet "go, warrior," but didn’t even have the courage to say it out loud.

Elliot threw himself back in his gamer chair with a broken heart-shaped backrest, crossed his legs, threw his head back, and shouted:

"I swear by everything that glitters in this world that if my father wasn’t the manager of this piece of junk, I would sue you for colluding with chaos.

In the corner of the central screen, a pixelated rabbit-shaped AI assistant—with spinning eyes and a childish voice—flashed:

[SUGGESTION: Execute direct ban command on user "Eren Vale"?]

Elliot snorted, offended as if he had been called basic.

"Ban? Oh no, sweetheart. That would be assuming he won. That he’s smarter. And I’m not just handsome — I’m dangerous."

He jumped up and began walking in circles with his hand on his chin and his little finger raised as if he were a maestro of digital torture. His eyes burned with technical passion and personal revenge.

"We’re not playing by the rules anymore, got it? No more fixed rules. No more little scripts that anyone can exploit. If he wants to be an anomaly..."

He paused, raised his hand as if revealing the formula of the universe:

"...then the system will be an anomaly too."

He snapped his fingers with a click! as effeminate as it was firm. Dozens of holographic windows opened around him, displaying lines of code, player behavior graphs, summoning patterns, and even a tab with Eren’s avatar’s emotional history (which included bouts of tactical silence and bouts of sarcasm).

Typing with methodical anger, Elliot opened a new algorithm:

[ALGORITHM: Tamer Contingency Penalty – Mirror Project]

[Description: System that tracks the strategic deviations of player "Eren Vale" in real time and generates dynamic penalties based on his own methods. Each exploit discovered generates an opposite, unpredictable, and hopefully... destructive reflex.]

He chuckled softly. The kind of laugh that starts with "hmhmhm" and ends with a startling "HA!", causing one of the analysts to spill his coffee.

"Let’s see now, Lee Min-Jae..."

"Let’s see what you do when the system starts studying you like you studied it."

"When every move you make becomes a choreographed punishment."

He spun on his heels, staring at the system camera with a semi-possessed look:

"The next step isn’t punishment. It’s style."

"And this time, dear, you won’t be able to say it was luck."

And then, with one final click:

[EXECUTE: PCT–TMR.EXE]

[Target: "Eren Vale"]

[Emotional feedback activated]

**********

Meanwhile, inside BloodRealm, Eren watched the data flashing on the internal interface with half-closed eyes. He had not yet fully recovered from the previous combat — and now he was about to risk everything again.

[Vitality: 43%]

[Shadows of the Loop: 1/3]

[Triple Bond Maintenance: Consumption: 6%/minute]

The base of the Core was silent, but not the comforting silence of a safe home. It was the kind of silence that came after something terribly wrong.

Kaela growled softly, her eyes alert. Morwynn reappeared at the edge of the shadows, her body now more solid, though fragmented into spectral parts. Eren knew he needed the last piece.

He raised his hand.

[Summon: Sylha – The Scenic Ghost]

[Cost: 1 Shadow of Bond | Maintenance: Consumes 3% Vitality/minute]

The shadow beside him twisted into a theatrical ballet. A violet spiral, with splashes of pink sparkle. From the center, Sylha emerged—spinning in the air, arms outstretched, an exaggerated expression of eternal suffering.

"Ooooh! You finally called me, cruel lord of pacts! I was in the limbo of absence, where voices repeat themselves and echoes recite bad poetry!"

Eren raised an eyebrow.

"Hi to you too."

Sylha floated down beside Morwynn and Kaela, spinning in her own dramatic aura.

"And here they are! The furious wolf, the depressed spider, and the abandoned soul! A trio worthy of a tragic play."

Kaela growled impatiently.

Morwynn simply ignored her.

Eren, however, was not there to play anyone.

"Attention, you three. The system is reacting directly to me. The more solutions I create, the more it tries to compensate with new rules. The last one was a Hunter. The next one... will be worse."

Sylha spun around and stopped in midair, upside down.

"And what do you propose, oh our romantic bug?"

"Strategy."

He activated the panel. He showed the data. He showed the costs. The times. The latency patterns. And, above all, the new variable implanted in the code:

[Dynamic Tamer Penalty System: ACTIVE]

[Source: Dev-Level 1 Permission — Elliot Shard]

[Note: Real-time adaptation to target player actions]

Kaela punched a wall.

"Are they going to keep changing the rules as we play?"

"Exactly," replied Eren. "It’s like playing chess against a board that bends."

Morwynn analyzed the information coldly.

"If the system is learning from you... then it’s making you part of it. Consuming you."

"It already consumes me," Eren muttered.

Sylha tilted her head.

"You feel it, don’t you? The pulse deep in your chest? The cold in your veins? The exhaustion that isn’t physical?"

Eren nodded.

[Vitality: 38%]

[Warning: Excessive simultaneous bonds may cause mental collapse]

Sylha floated over to him and touched his face lightly.

"You’ve become a walking bug, my dear. A glitch of flesh and desire."

"And you know what? I love it."

Morwynn let out a sound between a click and a stifled laugh.

Kaela crossed her arms, feigning contempt.

Eren, for his part, took a deep breath. He knew that keeping those three creatures active at the same time was accelerating his degradation. But he couldn’t give up on any of them.

Kaela was strength and instinctive loyalty.

Morwynn was strategic wisdom and sabotage.

Sylha was manipulation and emotional response—the heart of the bond.

He stared into the void.

"From now on, everything I do will be observed, copied, used against me."

"But if the system adapts to me... then I am the standard."

"And if I’m the standard..."

"I can be his downfall."

The three looked at her in silence. Even Kaela stopped grinding her teeth.

Morwynn took a step forward.

"What’s the plan?"

Eren smiled. It was a subtle smile. The smile of someone who was bleeding inside, but still playing to win.

"I’m going to teach him wrong."

Morwynn blinked slowly, as if appreciating the irony.

Kaela cracked her neck with a sharp snap, returning to alert mode.

Sylha... clapped her hands.

"Teach chaos to be illogical? That’s so... poetic."

"So tell me, bug commander: what’s the first step?"

Eren responded with a gesture.

"Let’s go down to the Reversal Room. Kelna left the artifacts I asked for. If the system wants to observe me, it will have to face what it doesn’t understand: its own anatomy."

The Reversal Room was a circular chamber embedded in the bowels of the Core base. The walls pulsed with veins of raw mana, intertwined with alchemical inscriptions and runes of dubious origin. The air was cold, charged with an ancient vibration, as if the place were outside of time.

In the center were three pedestals. On top of each one was an artifact.

A Fragment of Living Code, still damp, pulsing like an exposed organ.

A Partial Response Mirror, capable of reflecting not the image, but the intentions behind a command.

A Binary Rupture Glyph, unstable, flickering between magical shapes and broken mathematical formulas.

Eren approached calmly. Even weakened, he seemed more steadfast than ever.

Each of his steps resonated with a metallic echo, as if the game itself were listening.

"If Elliot wants algorithmic warfare..." he murmured, placing his hands on the fragment, "then he’ll get it. Only with weapons he doesn’t understand."

The Living Code Fragment opened into thin tentacles of liquid light, twisting into the veins of Eren’s hand. His interface flashed, reacting:

[Warning: Magical interference detected in source code reading]

[Protocol: Tamer class does not have permission to access system metadata]

[Temporary override accepted | Reason: Anomaly recognized]

The monsters took a step back.

Eren felt as if he were putting his hand inside the brain of a mythological creature—hot, pulsating, incoherent. Lines of code and feelings crossed in contradictory spirals.

Kaela frowned.

"Won’t that kill you?"

"Maybe."

"But I’d rather die trying to subvert this world than play by its rigged rules."

The Response Mirror activated on its own.

A flickering image formed. Not of Eren — but of someone watching Eren.

A thin silhouette, messy hair, crooked suit, bow tie vibrating slightly with residual magic.

Morwynn recognized the pattern immediately.

"That’s the developer."

Eren nodded.

"Elliot Shard. The manager’s son. Self-centered. Unstable. He’s using his own system to get revenge on me."

"And he’s winning... because he plays like a god who doesn’t want to be questioned."

He then took the third artifact—the Glyph of Binary Rupture—and activated it with his remaining energy. The rune flickered, then stabilized, creating a zone where conflicting rules could coexist without exploding.

[Unstable Zone Created: Permission Conflict]

[Within this space, system and player commands compete for priority]

[Cost: 5% Vitality/minute]

"Perfect," whispered Eren. "If I can’t beat him on his turf, I’ll make him fight on mine."

Sylha glided through the air, spinning slowly as she watched him.

"You know what you’re doing, right?"

"Of course not." Eren smiled. "But neither does the system."

The phrase hung in the air like a spell.

He sat down in the center of the room, crossed his legs, and began compiling the fragment’s readings.

Lines of code pulsed across his retinas: commands mixed with feelings, commands that only worked when accompanied by real intention.

As if the emotional exploit itself had infected the database.

Kaela approached, kneeling beside him.

"Do you want us to watch?"

"No. I want you to watch. I want you to see when the world realizes that the worst class in the game has become the biggest bug in history."

He looked up at the ceiling of the chamber, as if staring at Elliot himself.

"You may have written the game.

But I’m the player who read between the lines."

And there, at the center of the conflict between magic and system, Eren began the process of tactically reprogramming himself.

It wasn’t just a matter of winning.

It was about reinforcing the paradox: the more the system tried to contain him, the more necessary he became.