The Scrapper didn't move. He just sat on his half-rendered bench, his pixelated face flickering like a dying television.
"You've got the eyes of a King, boy, but you're walking into a graveyard. The Buffer-Hounds don't care about your zero mana. They only care about what's leaking from your seams."
Jinsu didn't break his stride. "I don't leak mana. I consume it."
The tunnel ahead widened into a vast, vaulted chamber that might have been a subway terminal decades ago. Now it was something else entirely. At the center stood the Static Fountain — a jagged pillar of frozen white noise that hissed with the sound of a billion deleted conversations. The air around it tasted like burnt copper and forgotten names.
Then the shadows moved.
From the edges of the unrendered pillars, three massive shapes detached themselves. Twice the size of the Lag-Stutterer. Their bodies composed of thick, oily black cables that pulsed with stolen blue light — mana they had ripped from other things to keep themselves alive.
[Entity Identified: Buffer-Hound]
[Rank: C- (Corrupted)] '
[Status: Starving / Aggressive]
The lead hound opened its throat. The sound that came out wasn't a growl. It was a digital screech — a frequency that made Jinsu's Stability flicker like a candle in wind.
"Hungry," the hound vibrated, the word synthesized from stolen voice-logs. "Give... Compliance... give... Reality..."
"I have none to give," Jinsu said.
He dropped into a low stance, bare feet gripping the cold unrendered floor.
The hounds lunged simultaneously. They didn't skip frames like the D-Rank variants. They moved with Variable Velocity — slowing and speeding mid-air to destroy a defender's timing. A physics exploit. A cheat built into their corrupted code.
Jinsu's world turned violet.
[Active Skill: Eyes of the Architect (Lv. 2) — Structural Analysis]
In his vision the hounds were no longer beasts. They were clusters of red logic lines. He saw the anchor points — the nodes where their physical forms were tied to the world's engine. The specific coordinates where they existed.
Remove the coordinate. Remove the creature.
"Found it," Jinsu rasped.
He stepped into the lead hound's trajectory. To the Scrapper watching from the dark it looked like suicide. But Jinsu wasn't aiming for the head. He reached into the empty space behind the hound's jaw where a glowing blue node pulsed.
[Skill: Absolute Arrest]
His fingers sank into the beast's neck like it was made of smoke. The violet static surged. The hound didn't just stop — it inverted. The stolen blue mana inside its body was forcibly sucked into Jinsu's palm, rushing into the void like water down a drain.
The creature let out a final distorted whimper before collapsing into a pile of lifeless grey cables.
[Nihil Engine: Mana Siphon Complete]
[Processing +2]
The other two hounds skidded to a halt.
Their predatory instincts were warring with something new. Something they had never encountered before. The slow, terrible realization spreading through what passed for their minds.
This thing is higher in the food chain than we are.
"My turn," Jinsu said.
He didn't wait. Two strikes. Two bursts of static. Two more piles of grey cables on the unrendered floor.
Jinsu stood in the center of the chamber, chest rising and falling slowly. The violet glow in his eyes was deeper now. More permanent. Like something that had started as a temporary light and decided to stay.
The Scrapper stood up from his bench, his pixelated form stabilizing slightly in Jinsu's presence — the way a corrupted file stabilizes near something with higher processing priority.
"Impressive," the Scrapper rasped. "You didn't just kill them. You de-compiled them." He tilted his blurred head. "The Null-Broker is going to love you. Or try to sell your heart for parts."
He pointed toward the Static Fountain.
"Touch the white noise. If you're really a 0.00%, it'll let you through. If you're lying..." A sound like grinding gravel that might have been a laugh. "You'll be scattered into the wind as raw data."
Jinsu walked to the fountain.
He reached out and plunged his hand into the screaming white static.
A thousand needles of ice. Then sudden, terrifying silence — the particular silence of a frequency that has been listening and finally stopped.
The wall of noise parted.
Beyond the fountain lay a sprawling underground world built from the deleted history of the city.
Neon signs flickered over storefronts that had never officially existed. The crowds moved with faces that were blurred, missing, or layered over each other like bad photographs. People the System had written off. People surviving in the margins of a world that had decided they didn't count.
The Glitch Market. The place where the System's garbage became someone else's revolution.
At the end of the main thoroughfare sat a shop built entirely from rusted server racks. A hand-painted sign hung over the door:
[THE NULL-POINT]
Jinsu pushed the door open.
A man sat behind the counter, assembling a rifle made of glass and glowing circuitry. He didn't look up. His hands moved with the practiced efficiency of someone who had built and rebuilt the same weapon so many times he no longer needed to think about it.
"The ink is still wet," Jinsu said.
The man's hands stopped.
He looked up.
Where his eyes should have been were two glowing violet horizontal lines — burning with the same cold light as Jinsu's own.
"Then the Architect is finally awake," the Null-Broker whispered.
He set the rifle down slowly on the velvet cloth.
"Let's see if your hardware can handle the update."