CHAPTER 44: ERROR 404

Falling inside a collapsing building wasn’t like the movies where you have time to have a meaningful conversation or grab a convenient ledge. There was no slow motion, no dramatic orchestral score swelling in the background, just the deafening roar of twisting metal and the terrifying sensation of your stomach trying to exit through your throat while gravity decided to take a personal day.

Rin plummeted through the hole he’d blasted in the floor, debris raining around him like a hailstorm of concrete and glass, but it wasn’t just falling debris, it was worse. The "Gray" energy Rin had unleashed—that volatile, unstable mix of his void and Senna’s white order—wasn’t just breaking the tower physically, it was deleting it digitally.

Chunks of the ceiling didn’t crumble, they dissolved into massive, floating cubes of blue light that flickered and vanished, erasing anything they touched.

"Don’t touch the blue stuff!" Rin screamed, his voice barely audible over the wind roaring in his ears.

"Grab something!" Tau roared from below, the S-rank flailing as he tried to find purchase in the air.

Rin reached out, his fingers brushing against a severed server cable that was whipping around like an angry snake, but he missed it, his hand closing on empty air as he tumbled past Sector 58.

"Nyx!" Rin screamed, spinning in mid-air to spot her, trying to orient himself in the chaos. "Slow us down!"

Nyx was tumbling near Joy, her face pale and blood streaming from her nose, she looked terrified which was a new look for her. She threw her hands out, trying to catch them in a gravity bubble, her eyes glowing with strain.

"I can’t!" she yelled back, her voice cracking. "The physics are wrong! It’s slippery!"

The air around them felt greasy, static-charged, resisting her control like trying to catch a wet bar of soap, every time she tried to grab hold of the gravity well it shifted, the "upload" Thorne had attempted having left the local laws of physics in a blender.

They fell past Sector 50, then Sector 40, speed increasing exponentially, terminal velocity wasn’t just a theory anymore it was a concrete wall they were about to hit in approximately twelve seconds.

"We’re going to die!" Tayo screamed, clutching his sound emitters to his chest, his dreads whipping around his face.

"Not today," Rin grunted, forcing his body into a dive to catch up to the group.

He checked his status, the system window flickering in his vision like a broken monitor.

[System Alert]

[Mana: 0%]

[HP: 14% (Critical)]

[Status: Energy Poisoning]

’Great stats for a pancake,’ Rin thought.

He checked his Inventory.

[Inventory: 32/50 Slots]

[Item: Dune Stalker Carapace (Alpha)]

[Weight: 400kg]

[Durability: High]

[Description: The harvested shell of a desert predator. Highly resistant to impact and heat.]

’Chekhov’s Bug Shell,’ Rin thought, a desperate, stupid plan forming in his concussion-rattled brain.

"Group up!" Rin shouted, pulling his limbs in to dive faster, the wind tearing at his ruined tactical jacket. He caught up to Joy, grabbing her harness and yanking her close. "Everyone on me, right now!"

Tau understood immediately, the Director grabbed Tayo by the vest and threw him toward Rin, then used a burst of his fading golden aura to launch himself into the cluster. Nyx adjusted her fall, drifting into the group by pushing off a floating piece of debris.

They were a tangle of limbs falling through a hollow shaft of dissolving crystal, the walls around them turning transparent and glitchy.

"Inventory," Rin gasped, focusing on the space in front of them. "Eject."

BOOM.

The massive, curved shell of the Alpha Dune Stalker materialized instantly beneath them, displacing the air with a thunderclap. It was the size of a small boat, hard as tank armor, curved like a sled, and smelling faintly of dead bug.

They slammed onto it, the impact knocking the wind out of Rin and nearly bouncing Tayo off the edge.

"Hold on!" Rin yelled, jamming his fingers into the cracks of the chitin to anchor himself.

The shell plummeted, heavy and aerodynamic as a brick, spinning lazily as it fell through the center of the disintegrating tower.

"This is your plan?" Joy shrieked, clinging to Rin’s arm. "Surfing?"

"It’s a drop pod!" Rin yelled back. "Nyx, steer!"

"Steer what?" Nyx spat blood, crawling to the back of the shell. "It’s a dead bug!"

"Push us sideways! Aim for the desert!" Rin pointed to the massive hole in the side of the tower where the wall had simply failed to render. "If we hit the foundation we die, we need to hit the sand!"

Nyx nodded, wiping blood from her eyes, realizing the logic. She braced her feet against the rim of the shell, her hands glowing with the last dregs of her mana.

"Brace!" she screamed.

She didn’t try to float them, she unleashed a repulsor blast directly behind them, a gravity cannon meant to shatter bones, using it as a thruster.

The recoil hit the shell like a rocket booster.

They stopped falling straight down and started falling diagonally, the G-force slamming them into the chitin as they turned into a missile aimed at the outer wall of the fortress.

"We’re gonna crash!" Joy yelled, burying her face in Rin’s shoulder.

"Better than splatting!" Rin yelled back, grabbing Tau’s arm to keep the Director from sliding off.

They hit the outer wall at Sector 10.

CRASH.

The shell smashed through the crystalline structure, shards of mana-glass exploding outward like a grenade. They burst out of the tower into the open air of the Sperrgebiet, trailing smoke, dust, and blue pixels.

The sudden transition from the enclosed tower to the open desert was blinding, the sun was setting but the sky was wrong, lit by erratic flashes of purple lightning.

They were still falling, but now they had an angle.

"Heads down!" Tau roared, shielding Tayo with his own body.

The shell hit the slope of a massive sand dune at a hundred and twenty miles an hour.

It didn’t stop, it bounced.

Rin felt his teeth rattle as they skipped off the sand like a stone on water, the impact jarring his spine, flying another fifty feet through the air before slamming down again.

Sand sprayed over them like a tsunami, the shell carving a trench through the desert floor, throwing up a wall of dust fifty feet high. They spun, the world turning into a blur of beige and blue and pain, the shell grinding and screeching as it tore through the dunes.

Finally, with a grinding crunch that sounded like the shell cracking, they dug in and flipped.

Rin was thrown clear, rolling across the sand, limbs flailing until friction finally stopped him.

He lay there for a moment, staring at the sand grains an inch from his nose, checking to see if he was dead.

Pain. Lots of pain.

’Okay, not dead.’

Rin rolled onto his back, groaning, and looked up at the sky.

It wasn’t blue.

The vortex was gone, but the sky looked... bruised. The clouds were static, frozen in jagged shapes that looked low-resolution, and the color was shifting between purple and gray, pulsating like a monitor with a broken connection.

"Sound off," Tau’s voice rasped from somewhere in the dust cloud.

"Alive," Joy groaned from somewhere to Rin’s left. "I think I swallowed a pound of sand."

"My arm is definitely broken," Tayo said, his voice tight with pain but steady. "Left radius."

"Alive," Nyx spat, "unfortunately."

Rin sat up, spitting sand, his body felt like one giant bruise but the adrenaline was keeping him moving, keeping the shock at bay.

He looked back at the Glass Fortress.

It wasn’t falling.

It was dissolving.

The massive spire, which had dominated the skyline just minutes ago, was turning into pixels—literal cubes of blue light—that floated upward and vanished into the atmosphere. It wasn’t collapsing under gravity, it was unmaking itself, erasing its own existence from the server as the mana sustaining it failed.

"He didn’t finish the upload," Rin whispered, watching the foundation flicker and vanish like a hologram being turned off. "So the assets are failing to load."

"Speak English," Tau said, limping over, dragging his shattered dao sword which was now just a jagged hilt.

"The tower wasn’t real," Rin said, standing up on shaky legs. "It was a construct, part of the dungeon dimension Thorne was trying to merge with Earth. When we broke the connection, reality rejected it. It’s a bug fix."

"So we won?" Joy asked, sitting up and holding her head, her pink hair matted with dust.

Rin looked at the sky again. He looked at the sand, which was rippling in patterns that didn’t match the wind, shifting like liquid mercury.

[System Error]

[World State: Unstable]

[Mana Density: Fluctuating]

[Anomaly Detected: Global]

"No," Rin said, a cold feeling settling in his gut that had nothing to do with the desert night. "We didn’t win. We crashed the game."

A sound echoed across the dunes.

It wasn’t a roar. It was the sound of tearing metal, magnified a thousand times, a screeching, grinding noise that made Rin’s teeth ache.

In the distance, about a mile away, the air split open.

Not a neat circular portal. A tear.

A red gash appeared in the air, jagged and bleeding light, looking like someone had taken a knife to a painting.

Then another one, to the west.

Then three more to the south.

"The barriers are down," Tau said, his face pale beneath the grime. "Those aren’t stable portals. Those are breaches."

"The desert is waking up," Nyx said, standing next to Rin, her eyes tracking the tears. "And we have zero mana, broken gear, and no extraction."

Rin forced himself to stand straighter. The tracker in his shoulder was dormant, dead silent, likely because the network it connected to was currently having a seizure.

"We need to move," Rin said. "Before whatever comes out of those tears catches our scent."

He looked at his team.

Joy was battered, her combat suit torn. Tayo was cradling his broken arm, his sound emitters sparked and useless. Tau looked like he’d gone ten rounds with a god and lost. Nyx was favoring her left leg.

They were a mess.

"Which way?" Joy asked, trusting him despite everything.

Rin pointed north, away from the dissolving tower and the tearing sky, toward where the extraction point was supposed to be.

"Toward civilization," Rin said. "If it’s still there."

He took a step, and the sand under his foot turned to glass, then back to sand, then to water for a split second.

"Watch your step," Rin warned. "The ground is glitching."

"Fantastic," Tayo muttered. "I love walking on landmines made of physics."

They started walking, a slow, painful trudge through the deep sand. The sun had fully set, but it wasn’t dark. The sky was glowing with that sickly purple light, casting long, weird shadows that seemed to move on their own.

"Rin," Joy whispered after ten minutes of silence. "Your mom... back there."

"She made her choice," Rin said, his voice flat, cutting off the conversation because he couldn’t handle it right now. He couldn’t think about Senna, about the fact that she was alive, powerful, and actively trying to end the world.

"Movement," Tau hissed, dropping into a crouch despite his injuries.

They froze.

Ahead of them, near the crest of a dune, something was happening. The air was shimmering, distorting.

A creature stepped out of the distortion.

It looked like a wolf, but wrong. It was missing patches of skin, replaced by wireframe polygons. Its eyes were glowing red squares. It was a corrupted entity, born from the glitch.

It sniffed the air, turning its blocky head toward them.

It howled, a sound that was half-animal, half-dial-up modem screech.

"Glitch Wolf," Nyx named it instantly. "D-rank base, but unstable."

"I have no mana," Tayo whispered. "I can’t blast it."

"I’m empty too," Joy said.

Rin stepped forward. He felt the fracture energy in his core. It wasn’t the smooth, flowing purple river anymore. It was jagged, gray, crackling with static. It hurt just to hold it.

"I got it," Rin said.

The wolf charged, moving in stutter-steps, teleporting forward a few feet with every stride.

Rin waited.

’Pulse.’

He didn’t try to form a blade. He just pushed the raw, corrupted energy out of his palm.

On.

A bolt of gray static shot out, hitting the wolf mid-leap.

The creature didn’t die. It didn’t bleed.

It crashed.

The wolf froze in mid-air, suspended by the glitch, then shattered into a thousand pixels that dissolved into the wind.

Off.

Rin dropped his hand, smoke rising from his fingertips. His arm felt numb, the nerves fried.

"That’s new," Tau noted, eyeing Rin warily.

"It’s effective," Rin said, hiding the tremor in his hand. "Let’s keep moving."

They walked through the night, the desert around them alive with the sounds of a broken world. They saw things that shouldn’t exist—rocks floating in the air, patches of sand that burned with cold fire, creatures that flickered in and out of existence.

By the time the sun began to rise—a square, pixelated sun that slowly resolved into a circle as it climbed—they saw the highway.

Or what was left of it.

The B2 highway was cracked, sections of it floating a few feet off the ground. But parked on the shoulder, looking like a miracle, was a heavy transport truck, the driver standing outside staring at the sky with his mouth open.

"Transport," Rin croaked.

They stumbled toward the road. The driver saw them—five people covered in blood, dust, and glowing monster residue—and reached for a tire iron.

"Association business!" Tau barked, flashing his badge, though it was dented and scratched. "We are commandeering this vehicle."

The driver took one look at Tau’s face, then at the dissolving tower in the distance, and threw the keys.

"Take it," the driver said. "I’m walking. I don’t want to be anywhere near whatever you people did."

"Smart man," Nyx said, climbing into the cab.

Rin helped Tayo and Joy into the back, then climbed into the passenger seat while Tau took the wheel.

"Where are we going?" Tau asked, starting the engine.

"Windhoek," Rin said, leaning his head back against the seat, exhaustion finally crashing over him like a wave. "We need to see what’s left of the Association."

"And then?"

Rin looked at his hand, where the gray sparks were still dancing faintly under his skin.

"Then we find my brother," Rin said. "Before he eats the rest of the country."

[Quest Updated: The Glitch]

[Objective: Survive the Fallout]

[New Target Identified: Project Indra]

The truck rumbled to life, turning away from the forbidden zone and heading back toward a home that probably wouldn’t recognize them anymore. The war wasn’t over. It had just changed servers.

Rin closed his eyes, and for the first time in twenty-four hours, the System was quiet.

But the world outside was screaming.