Chapter 3: Exploit or Die

The station had been abandoned in the way half-finished dreams were abandoned: not empty, not dead, just waiting for someone foolish enough to step back inside and touch the wet paint.

Cold fluorescent light buzzed overhead in uneven strips, bleaching the cracked platform white one second and plunging it into bruised shadow the next. The tiled walls wore tutorial murals that had never been completed. Smiling cartoon commuters stood beside faceless guards with blank speech bubbles over their heads, as if the artist had walked away midway through teaching the world how to survive.

Elias stood beneath one of those mute murals and stared at the translucent blue panes hanging in the air in front of him.

Hidden Class Confirmed: Beta Tester

Subclass Thread Unlocked: Fault Diver

You perceive unfinished systems, unstable entities, and exploitable rule conflicts.

Warning: Interaction with unresolved code may produce local or cascading instability.

His pulse kicked hard enough to hurt.

He had spent the last fifteen minutes convincing himself he was not dead, not hallucinating, and not trapped in the world’s most elaborate IT-themed psychotic break. The effort had been undermined badly by the fact that every time he focused, more menus appeared.

He flicked his eyes down.

Level: 7

Class: Beta Tester (Hidden)

Vitality: 11

Perception: 16

Agility: 12

Will: 14

Unassigned Points: 5

Instability Tolerance: 3

Level seven.

Twenty-four years of mediocre life choices had not prepared him for the emotional impact of getting seven levels in under an hour by falling through reality and beating glitched sewer vermin to death with a broken metal sign.

He breathed out through his nose. “Okay. Sure. Great. The universe finally recognized transferable IT skills.”

A few feet away, Lyra stood with her hands clasped behind her back, silver hair catching the stuttering station light and turning it into pale fire. She looked like someone had cut a character out of a fantasy game and dropped her into a Chicago subway after forgetting to finish rendering the background. Her coat—if it was a coat—fell in soft layered panels that shifted between cloth and translucent geometry depending on the angle. Her eyes were too clear, too steady.

She watched him without blinking.

“You really don’t do small talk, huh?” Elias asked.

She tilted her head a fraction. It was the same motion she had made in the tutorial ruins before leading him out through a corridor that did not exist until she touched the wall. Silent, patient, impossible.

Then, unexpectedly, she spoke.

“You are loud when you think.”

Her voice was soft and precise, like something that had been stored in clean glass for a very long time.

Elias barked a laugh before he could help it. “Good. Glad I’m making a strong impression on the deleted zone ghost.”

Lyra’s expression did not change, but something amused flickered deep in her eyes. “I was a guide unit. Not a ghost.”

“That somehow made it worse.”

He looked back at the panes. One pulsed at the edge of his vision, waiting to be opened.

Class Skills Available

Fault Sight I — Perceive fractures, weak states, and contradictory logic in targets and terrain.

Exploit Mark I — Convert a perceived fault into a temporary combat vulnerability.

Forced Desync I — Agitate unstable rules around a target, causing unpredictable but often advantageous malfunction.

Passive: Debugger’s Appetite — Gain bonus rewards from unstable enemies, hidden events, and first-contact anomalies.

Warning: Active skills generate local instability.

There it was. The catch. There was always a catch. Cosmic wish fulfillment apparently obeyed the same design philosophy as freeware with suspicious permissions.

Elias read unpredictable but often advantageous malfunction three times.

“Often,” he muttered. “That is a deeply untrustworthy word.”

Lyra’s gaze shifted to the far tunnel, where darkness breathed between concrete pillars. “Do not use them carelessly.”

“Because?”

“Because Patch Zero remembers every wound.”

The buzz of the lights seemed to sharpen. Somewhere in the tracks below, water dripped in a slow metal rhythm. Elias rubbed the back of his neck. “You keep saying things that would absolutely kill in a trailer.”

She turned and started walking.

That was apparently his answer.

Elias went after her, boots crunching over broken glass and tile fragments. The station stretched farther than any normal platform should have. Every twenty yards, the architecture changed a little. Old Chicago concrete became sleek white composite walls, then raw black geometry with wireframe seams showing through, then snapped back to stained tile and peeling advertisements for concerts that had never happened. One ad showed a family of four smiling in a train car beneath the slogan SAFE COMMUTE PROTOCOL ACTIVE. Half the father’s face was missing. The children had no eyes.

“You said this was a tutorial zone,” Elias said quietly. “This feels less tutorial and more ‘the dev team got fired halfway through production.’”

Lyra trailed her fingers along the wall. Where she touched, static silver symbols surfaced for an instant and sank again. “This station linked the onboarding paths. Civilians learned movement, inventory, danger cues. Party roles were assigned below.”

“Below?”

She pointed ahead.

The platform widened into a ruined concourse. Turnstiles had fused with blocky chunks of unfinished code, like someone had poured blue glass through steel bars and left it to harden. Escalators climbed to nowhere and ended in a vertical slab of darkness. The departure board above the center hall flickered through impossible destinations.

LAUNCH

SAFEHOUSE

NULL

RETRY

Elias slowed. The air smelled wrong here—ozone and wet concrete, yes, but beneath it something sweeter and rotten, like fruit left in a server room until it learned to bleed.

“Tell me there’s not a boss fight in the creepy train station,” he said.

Lyra stopped at the edge of the concourse. “There is a guardian.”

“Of course there is.”

“It did not spawn correctly.”

“That sentence also did not help.”

She looked at him then, really looked, with the faint clinical attention of someone checking whether a tool had finally developed enough awareness to fear what it was being used for. “You wanted to know what your class does.”

Something moved down on the tracks.

It was not a clean motion. It came in jumps, each one slightly out of order, like frames playing in the wrong sequence. A long shape dragged itself out from under the opposite platform. Black conductor’s shoes scraped concrete. Then a limb too long for a human arm hooked over the edge and pulled the body up after it.

Elias’s skin tightened all over.

The thing that climbed onto the platform had started life as a station attendant. He could see the design intention in the cap fused into its skull, the red transit vest embedded in a torso gone lopsided and huge. But other things had been forced into the model. Tutorial mannequins without faces protruded from its back like half-absorbed passengers. A train door had grown through one shoulder and hung there opening and shutting with a hydraulic wheeze, revealing rows of small square teeth. Its left arm ended in a bundle of ticket scanners clicking like insect mandibles. Where its face should have been, there was a smooth dark screen full of static and occasional flashing text.

WELCOME RIDER.

ERROR.

STAND CLEAR.

The creature unfolded to full height and hit the ceiling lights with the top of its cap. The bulbs burst in a rain of sparks.

Malformed Mini-Boss Detected

Platform Warden [Corrupted/Prototype]

Status: Unstable, Overwritten, Hostile

Recommended Action: Run if you are sane.

“Oh good,” Elias said. “The hidden UI has jokes.”

The Warden’s screen-face flared white, and a voice boomed from every speaker embedded in the station at once.

“PLEASE PRESENT TICKET.”

Then it charged.

Elias moved on pure panic. He threw himself sideways as the creature smashed through the spot where he had been standing. Tile exploded. The impact shook the platform hard enough to make his teeth clap together. A turnstile cartwheeled into the wall. The Warden tore itself free in a shower of concrete and came around faster than something that big should have been able to move.

Blue text flashed in the corner of his vision.

Skill Available: Fault Sight

“Yeah, now would be ideal,” Elias snapped.

He triggered it almost by instinct.

The world lurched.

For one nauseating second, the station peeled open like layers of bad code. Concrete became coordinates. Light became grids. The Warden bloomed into overlapping silhouettes—one a normal tutorial NPC, one a hulking security construct, one a broken knot of data trying to wear both skins at once. Cracks of red-gold light ran through it, not physical cracks but contradictions. The train door shoulder didn’t belong. The left knee was on the wrong animation rig. The screen-face lagged a fraction behind the body every time it moved. Most of all, a pulsing flaw glowed under its ribs where two hitboxes intersected and failed to agree on what occupied the space.

Pain stabbed behind Elias’s eyes.

Fault Sight I Active

Instability +1

The station answered immediately. The departure board above them screamed static. Two pillars near the track edge flickered transparent, showing endless darkness inside.

“That’s bad,” Elias said.

Lyra was already in motion.

She crossed the concourse with eerie gliding speed, stepping not where the floor was but where it wanted to be. The Warden swung its scanner-claw at her. She bent backward in a movement so clean it looked preanimated, letting the bundle scythe inches over her throat, and drove a silver shard into the creature’s ankle seam. Not metal—a piece of sharpened light, maybe, or broken interface glass. The Warden roared as pixels sprayed from the wound like sparks.

“The ribs,” she said. “You can see it. Use that.”

“Working on it!”

Elias grabbed the nearest thing his hands found: a loose metal stanchion ripped from a queue barrier. It was a terrible weapon, too long and unbalanced, but it beat using his fists against nightmare transit staff.

The Warden came for him. Its steps left duplicate footprints that appeared a second late. Its speaker-voice cracked in and out.

“PLEASE—PLEASE PRESENT—PRESENT YOUR—”

Elias ducked under a sweeping arm and slammed the stanchion into the glowing fault under its ribs.

The impact felt wrong, as if the pole had struck water and steel at the same time. Then the world hiccuped.

The Warden’s torso shifted six inches to the left without the rest of its body following.

Its own arm punched through its side.

For one beautiful, grotesque moment, the monster stared at itself in apparent confusion while the static on its face resolved into a giant blinking question mark.

Exploit Opportunity Found

Would you like to apply Exploit Mark?

“Yes,” Elias said through gritted teeth.

The air around his hand turned cold. A thin angular sigil burned itself into his palm, then shot forward and stamped onto the Warden’s rib-flaw like a red error icon.

Exploit Mark I Applied

Target vulnerability formalized.

Damage to marked fault greatly increased.

Instability +1

The nearest escalator suddenly reversed direction with a scream of gears. Every broken ad screen in the concourse flashed the same message in blood-red letters.

DO NOT ABUSE SYSTEMS.

“That feels pointed,” Elias muttered.

The Warden convulsed and let out a blast of compressed air from vents hidden in its chest. Elias was thrown backward. He hit the floor hard, slid through a rain of glass, and barely rolled before a ticket-scanner limb smashed down where his head had been. Sparks burst so close to his face he smelled burning hair.

Fear tried to flatten him. He had no build, no armor, no clue what his cooldowns were, and his party consisted of one underfed IT guy and a deleted guide NPC who fought like she had been taught by an assassin and a ballet choreographer at the same time.

The Warden jerked toward him. Its static-face flashed new text.

FARE EVASION DETECTED.

Then a chime rang through the station.

A train was coming.

Elias twisted just in time to see headlights igniting in the tunnel—too high, too close, bearing down the track with impossible speed. But the track wasn’t clear. The Warden was straddling part of it, and the train itself was wrong: only the front half rendered, the rest a streak of blue wireframe and black void.

“Lyra!”

She did not waste breath answering. She lunged, caught the collar of his jacket, and hauled him upright with startling strength. “That is not for passengers.”

“I figured that part out!”

The unfinished train screamed into the station.

The Warden raised both arms. “STAND CLEAR OF CLOSING—”

The train hit it broadside.