Chapter 5: Loot from the Noose

The first chain went around Rowan’s throat while the hidden evolution menu still burned behind his eyes.

ERROR-CLASS EVOLUTION AVAILABLE

Select Forbidden Path:

— Null Harlequin

— Grave Compiler

— Patchborn Devourer

Selection pending…

He didn’t get to touch any of them.

A gauntlet of white metal clamped over his jaw and wrenched his head back hard enough to make his teeth click. The shrine’s blue lanterns smeared into streaks. Bellwether’s villagers blurred into pale ovals of terror and torchlight. Somewhere near the offering steps, Old Marda screamed his name, but the sound cracked against the air and died as three deletion knights forced Rowan onto his knees.

Their armor was wrong for the village. Too clean. Too smooth. It had no hammer marks, no mud, no scratches from thornwolves or dungeon grit. Plates of porcelain-white metal interlocked without straps or rivets, glowing with thin gold seams that crawled like living script. Their helmets had no eye slits—only blank masks stamped with the Ascension sigil, a circle cut by a vertical line.

They smelled of cold iron and burned parchment.

“Patchborn anomaly confirmed,” said the one holding him. The voice came out genderless, flattened by the helm. “Illegal persistence after death. Class registry corrupted. Shrine interface compromised.”

“You forgot charming personality,” Rowan rasped through the pressure on his throat.

The knight’s gauntlet tightened.

Pain flashed white through his skull. His interface juddered. The three evolution options stuttered, duplicated, collapsed, then snapped back into place with static crawling over their edges.

WARNING: External purge protocol detected.

Status: Bound / Suppressed / Publicly Condemned

Recommended action: Survive.

Great. Love actionable advice.

A second knight seized his wrists and pulled them behind his back. A third lifted the black-edged spear it carried, and the crowd recoiled as if the weapon gave off heat. Rowan saw faces he recognized from the last frantic day—Berric the miller, who had sold him a loaf and overcharged him because “strays pay in advance”; Nel with the missing ear, who had shown him where the village well was; a pair of children peeking between their mother’s skirts, eyes round as copper coins.

None of them moved to help.

He couldn’t blame them. Deletion knights were not guards. They were not quest enemies. They were System antibodies.

One had arrived in the village square like a falling star, golden command chains dragging across the dirt. Two more had stepped out of cracks in the air. They hadn’t negotiated. They hadn’t asked questions. They had looked at Rowan once and the world itself had agreed he was a mistake.

A bell began to toll from the watchtower.

Once.

Twice.

By the third strike, they were dragging him through Bellwether’s main road.

The noose waited at the market gallows.

Bellwether had seemed almost quaint when Rowan first stumbled into it half-dead, wrapped in a stolen cloak and covered in monster ichor. Cobbled lanes. Moss-roofed homes. A little fountain where glowing fish circled in impossible water. Now every shutter was barred. Quest boards had gone dim, their parchment notices curled inward like dead leaves. The village safe zone shimmered overhead, a honeycomb dome of faint blue light—and beyond it, the blood-red sky of Asterra churned like an open wound.

The deletion knights marched him beneath that sky while villagers gathered in their wake.

“By authority of the Ascension System,” announced the lead knight, its voice carrying without effort, “this settlement is placed under corrective quarantine until anomaly removal is complete.”

A woman sobbed.

“Corrective quarantine?” Rowan said. “That’s a nice way to say you’ll kill everyone if I sneeze wrong.”

“Silence preserves collateral assets.”

“I’ll put that on a pillow.”

The knight holding his wrists twisted. Bone ground against bone. Rowan swallowed a grunt because he refused to give the faceless bastard the satisfaction.

His inventory flickered in the corner of his vision.

Inventory access: Restricted

Reason: Bound status / Execution protocol

Slots available: 0 / 12

Corrupted Slots available: 1 / ?

Rowan blinked.

Corrupted slots?

The market square came into view. He had passed it that morning when the world still made the flimsy pretense of being survivable. Stalls had sold onion pies, chipped daggers, charms against cave rot, and tiny glass bottles filled with firefly light. Now the stalls were shoved aside, awnings torn, crates broken under armored boots.

The gallows stood at the center, a weathered platform of dark wood. It looked older than the village, older than the shrine, old enough to have been built by people who knew exactly what kind of world needed a public hanging stage.

From the crossbeam hung a rope.

From the rope hung a blade.

Rowan’s steps faltered.

It was suspended where the noose should have been, tied by its hilt with black cord. A sword, though barely. Its blade was long and uneven, as if forged from a shard of midnight and then beaten by hatred until it agreed to an edge. Rust-red veins pulsed beneath its surface. A broken eye-shaped gem sat in the crossguard, cracked down the center and leaking faint violet smoke.

The air around it tasted like copper.

Every villager kept well back from the gallows.

Old Marda, stooped and shawled, pushed through the crowd until a deletion knight’s spear barred her way. “Don’t put him up there,” she whispered, all the color drained from her weathered face. “Not with that thing.”

The lead knight turned its blank helm toward her. “The condemned shall be executed with a suitable purgative implement.”

“That’s Widowbite,” Marda said. “That sword drank three mayors and a tax collector.”

Rowan coughed. “You say that like the last one was a downside.”

Her watery eyes snapped to him. Fear and fury lived there in equal measure. “Boy, hush for once in your cursed life.”

The sword swung gently in a wind Rowan couldn’t feel.

Item detected: [Widowbite, Gallows Fang]

Rarity: Cursed / Boss-Fragment / Illegal

Level Requirement: ???

Status: Hungry

Warning: Equipping this item may result in soul-loss, oath-binding, stat inversion, involuntary laughter, or narrative escalation.

Narrative escalation? Rowan thought. Even the tooltip is judging me.

The knight shoved him up the gallows steps.

Wood creaked beneath his boots. The square below opened wide, packed with villagers and white-armored executioners and frightened silence. The shrine’s bell kept tolling in the distance, slower now, each note sinking into the dirt like a stone dropped into a grave.

Rowan’s mouth was dry. His heart hammered so hard he could feel the chain around his throat jump with it. He had died once already—body jacked into a testing rig, alarms screaming, Ascension Engine’s launch build tearing itself apart while his monitor displayed a sky the color of blood.

He remembered the smell of hot plastic.

He remembered laughing because the bug report field had still been open.

He remembered typing, Repro steps: exist.

Then nothing.

Then Asterra.

Now a gallows.

If this is a second death, I’m asking for a refund.

The lead deletion knight climbed onto the platform after him. Two others stood at the stairs. A fourth had appeared at some point on a rooftop, spear angled downward, the point tracking Rowan’s skull.

“Rowan Vale,” the lead knight said.

The name struck the air.

Several villagers flinched. Names had weight here. True ones especially.

“Patchborn anomaly. Unregistered soul. Carrier of corrupted combat routines. You are sentenced to immediate erasure for violation of System integrity.”

“Can I appeal?” Rowan asked.

“No.”

“Can I request trial by combat?”

“No.”

“Can I at least pick my last meal?”

“No.”

“Terrible customer service.”

The knight took the hanging sword from its cord.

The instant metal touched gauntlet, the platform groaned. Violet smoke curled around the knight’s wrist. The broken eye-gem brightened.

—WHO TRESPASSES UPON MY THRESHOLD—

The words did not enter through Rowan’s ears. They scraped across the inside of his skull, huge and distant, as if shouted by something buried under mountains.

The deletion knight did not react. “Cursed implement recognized. Execution compatibility accepted.”

“I don’t think the sword likes you,” Rowan said.

“Irrelevant.”

The knight raised Widowbite.

The crowd drew breath as one.

Rowan looked at the blade, at the jagged dark edge poised to cut him out of existence, and his glitching interface threw one last flicker in the corner of his vision.

Corrupted Slot available: 1 / ?

Would you like to assign item?

Valid target required.

Assign item.

His thoughts went very still.

Back in Ascension Engine’s test servers, inventory had been one of the oldest disasters. Drag an object into a locked slot during a latency spike and it would duplicate. Equip a quest item while stunned and it would overwrite your boots. Throw something into storage at the exact frame a cutscene began and the engine sometimes forgot where the item was supposed to exist.

Rowan had once crashed an entire build by placing a live chicken into a guild vault.

He stared at Widowbite.

At the lead knight’s gauntlet around the hilt.

At his own bound hands.

“Hey,” Rowan said softly.

The knight paused with the sword high.

“Any last confession will be recorded and purged.”

“Yeah. I confess I’m about to do something stupid.”

Rowan blinked hard and shoved his will into the broken inventory prompt like a knife into a lock.

Target: sword.

Invalid. Item is currently held by hostile entity.

Target: hostile entity’s held item.

Invalid.

The blade started down.

Time narrowed.

The crowd blurred. The knight’s gold seams burned. The sword’s edge fell toward Rowan’s neck with impossible precision.

Target: the noose.

Invalid. Noose is execution environment.

Target: execution environment contents.

The interface shivered.

The blade kissed the first hair at the nape of his neck.

Glitched inventory interaction detected.

Assigning nearby cursed implement to corrupted slot…

Success?

Widowbite vanished from the knight’s hands.

The execution stroke continued with nothing in it.

The deletion knight’s empty gauntlets chopped the air above Rowan’s shoulder.

For half a heartbeat, nobody moved.

Then Rowan’s corrupted inventory screamed.

Not metaphorically. It screamed. A howl of metal, hunger, and broken raid music exploded behind his eyes. His knees buckled. His teeth sank into his tongue. Blood filled his mouth. A black sword icon appeared in his lone corrupted slot, twitching like something alive trapped under glass.

Item acquired: [Widowbite, Gallows Fang]

Binding failed.

Binding succeeded.

Binding failed.

Compromise established.

—PHASE TWO BEGINS WHEN THE STARS ARE FED—

Rowan spat blood onto the gallows. “Nice to meet you too.”

The lead knight looked at its empty hands.

Its helm turned slowly toward Rowan.

“Inventory theft of execution implement,” it said. For the first time, something like anger vibrated in that flattened voice. “Additional violation recorded.”

“Put it on my tab.”

The knight lunged.

Rowan had no weapon in his hands. His wrists were chained. His neck was chained. His stats were trash. His class was a crime scene. But the inventory slot burned with a new weight, and when he thought of the sword, his right hand spasmed.

Widowbite appeared.

Not neatly. Not with the tidy shimmer of normal equipment. It tore into existence through a slit in the air, hilt slamming into Rowan’s bound palms hard enough to split skin. The chain around his wrists snapped taut between his forearms, forcing him to hold the sword awkwardly behind his back.

The blade dragged downward, heavy as a coffin lid.

Warning: Strength requirement unmet.

Penalty: Weapon Weight x4

Compensating…

Patchborn trait [Improvised Exploit] triggered.

Temporary Handling: Acceptable, barely.

The knight’s gauntlet punched for his face.

Rowan dropped.

The punch sheared through the space where his head had been and cracked a support post behind him. He hit the planks on one knee, twisted his bound wrists under his legs with a pain that made his shoulders shriek, and brought Widowbite around in a clumsy, desperate arc.

The sword struck the knight’s shin.

It should have bounced.

Instead, the cursed blade bit through white armor with a sound like a butcher’s cleaver splitting bone. Gold code sprayed from the wound in bright strings. The knight staggered.

Critical hit!

Damage dealt: 87

Corruption damage: 14

Widowbite has tasted sanctioned experience.

—YOUR OFFERING IS INSUFFICIENT, LITTLE ADD—

“That was a level twenty execution robot,” Rowan grunted, rolling away as a spear punched through the boards beside him. “Adjust your standards.”

The deletion knight on the stairs vaulted onto the platform. Another spear thrust came low. Rowan raised Widowbite with both hands still linked by chain. The spearhead struck the flat of the blade and the impact blasted through his arms into his ribs. His boots skidded. The gallows railing shattered behind him.

For an instant he hung over open air, the market square spinning below.

Then the chain around his throat yanked tight.

His breath cut off.

He had forgotten the neck chain. The knights had not.

The lead knight held the other end in one gauntlet and reeled him back like a hooked fish. Rowan clawed at the iron links with one hand, Widowbite wobbling dangerously in the other. His vision spotted black.

Below, Old Marda shouted something. A stone flew from the crowd and bounced uselessly off a deletion knight’s helm.

Silence cracked.

The villagers surged—not forward exactly, but out of paralysis. Berric overturned a crate into a knight’s path. Nel hurled a jar of pickled radishes with surprising accuracy. Someone loosed a hunting arrow from a rooftop. It shattered against divine armor, but the sound mattered.

Bellwether was terrified.

Bellwether was also very tired of being stepped on.

“Civilians interfering with purge,” said the rooftop knight. “Escalating.”

Its spear lifted toward the crowd.

Rowan saw the spearhead glow.

He saw the children under their mother’s skirts.

Something hot and ugly tore loose in his chest.

“Hey!” he choked.

The lead knight kept hauling.

Rowan stopped fighting the pull and lunged into it.

The sudden slack made the knight overcorrect. Rowan slammed shoulder-first into its breastplate, ribs crunching. He hooked the neck chain around Widowbite’s jagged guard and twisted with all the panicked strength he had.

The cursed blade’s edge kissed the chain.

Iron screamed.

The chain broke.

Rowan sucked in air like a drowning man. The world snapped back into color. He drove his forehead into the knight’s blank faceplate. It hurt him far more than the knight, but the impact made the helm tilt.

“That’s for the noose,” he wheezed.

Then he kicked the knight off the gallows.

It didn’t fall like a person. It dropped like a statue, crashing through a merchant stall in an explosion of splinters and dried beans.

The rooftop spear fired.

A lance of white light streaked toward the crowd.

Rowan moved without thinking. He threw Widowbite.

The sword left his hand spinning end over end, trailing violet smoke. It intercepted the lance halfway to the villagers. Light and cursed metal collided with a thunderclap that blew out every lantern in the square. Rowan was hurled backward. Villagers screamed. Deletion knights braced as dust swallowed the gallows.

For two heartbeats, Rowan saw nothing but gray.

His interface flickered madly.

Skill fragment resonance detected.

Source: Deletion Knight Purge Lance

Patchborn absorption possible if source destabilized.

Condition: Kill or corrupt source.

“Sure,” Rowan coughed, pushing himself up with wrists still chained. “I’ll just kill the heavenly antivirus with my charming lack of plan.”

—BREAK THE ADDS BEFORE ENRAGE—

Widowbite slammed point-first into the gallows beside him, returning like an obedient nightmare. The hilt vibrated. The eye-gem stared.

“If you can talk,” Rowan said, grabbing it, “you can help.”

—FEED ME EXPERIENCE—

“That’s not help. That’s a business model.”

The dust cleared enough for Rowan to see the lead knight rising from the wrecked stall. One leg dragged, gold code leaking from the cut in its shin. The stair knight advanced across the platform with spear raised. The rooftop knight prepared another shot.

The fourth knight stood at the edge of the crowd.

Its spear was pointed at Old Marda.

She had both hands lifted, not in surrender, but because she was holding a kitchen knife so small it was almost insulting.

“Back,” she told it, voice shaking. “Back, you polished grave marker.”

Rowan’s stomach dropped.

The knight drew back its spear.

There was no time to reach her. No time to think. No time to be clever.

Only the glitched inventory, still raw and screaming around Widowbite’s icon.

Rowan looked at the space between himself and Marda.

Inventory target: self.

Invalid.

Target: equipped weapon.

Valid.

Store.

Widowbite vanished from his hand.

The sudden loss of weight nearly pitched him forward. The stair knight lunged, spear aimed at his gut.

Retrieve.

Rowan didn’t summon the sword to his hand.

He summoned it where he was looking.

For a glorious, impossible frame, the System believed him.

Widowbite appeared point-first in the air between Old Marda and the deletion knight, hilt toward no one, blade angled downward like a falling guillotine.

Gravity and hatred did the rest.

The cursed sword dropped through the knight’s spear arm.

White armor split. The spear clattered away. Gold code sprayed across Marda’s shawl like molten thread. She stared, eyes huge, as the severed arm dissolved into squares of light.

Glitched Inventory: Remote Retrieval discovered.

New Technique recorded: Bad Idea Blink

Cooldown: 30 seconds

Cooldown corrupted: ??

Rowan barked a laugh that tasted like blood. “Bad Idea Blink? I hate that it’s accurate.”

The spear meant for his gut punched into his side.

For a second, there was no pain. Just pressure. A strange warmth. Then fire opened from hip to ribs and he screamed.

You have taken 61 damage.

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