The hunter fired, his arrow striking the spot where Ray had been a moment before. He looked down, confused by the empty space, and in that moment of confusion, the truck's code overloaded. Its collision physics went haywire, and the entire model started to rapidly collide with the floor, glitching violently.

The hunter, caught completely by surprise, leaped from the truck just as it launched itself into oblivion, de-rezzing into a shower of corrupted fragments. They landed gracefully on the ground below, with surprising agility

[COOLDOWN: 15 SECONDS.]

Ray charged from the wreckage, his own form a blur of motion. The hunter, his bow now useless at this range, manifested a short, curved blade. The two grey mannequins met in a silent, deadly dance. The hunter was skilled, his movements precise, his blade a blur. Ray, his own combat abilities suppressed by the cooldown, was forced to rely on the raw, brutal instincts of the ghosts inside him.

[COOLDOWN: 5 SECONDS.]

The hunter saw an opening. He feinted left, then spun, his blade slicing towards Ray's exposed side. It was a perfect, textbook maneuver. It was also exactly what Ray had been waiting for.

[COOLDOWN COMPLETE. ALL SYSTEMS OPERATIONAL.]

Ray let the blade come. At the last possible nanosecond, a shimmering, blue shield materialized on his arm, catching the blade with a dull, final thud.

The hunter's featureless face somehow conveyed a sense of absolute shock.

Ray's other arm blurred as a dagger appeared in his hand. He plunged it deep into the hunter's chest. The avatar flickered violently, then dissolved into a shower of inert, grey information.

Ray stood alone in the silent server graveyard. But he didn't move into the open. He hid behind a dead server rack and initiated a cleaning and repairing program. The wound on his back closed and healed. He then deployed a series of proximity sensors, shimmering, almost invisible tripwires that would ping his interface if anyone got too close.

With the area secured, he walked back to the monolith. His hand shifted, his fingers elongating and hardening into a high-frequency, vibrating drill. He plunged it into the wall of corrupted code, which shattered and dissolved around the precise application of his power. He reached in and pulled out the glowing key fragment, the clean code a stark contrast to the surrounding decay. The fragment looked nothing like a piece of a key. It looked like lines of light that float and twist like neural pathways.

One step closer.

Ray crouched low as the corrupted canyon stretched before him, a jagged ravine of broken server architecture and flickering code veins. He felt it—the fragment was close. He glanced down below: a player twiddling with a compass-like interface, another swinging a code-dowsing stick, a third being tugged along by a sniffing pixelated puppy. Every netstrider had cobbled together some method to locate the fragments.

But they hadn't noticed it. Not yet.

A shadow slithered below, slow and sickening. A Data Leech. A monstrous, glistening slug-daemon, big as a bus and stitched with corrupted packets that squirmed across its gelatinous hide. Its back was a jagged shell of fused junk code, and embedded at its center, glimmering like an anomaly in the filth, was the second key fragment.

The Leech pulsed with a visible aura of bit-rot, a heatwave of anti-code that shimmered with digital static. When one netstrider got too close, their feet melted mid-stride, and their avatar dissolved into a tangle of error messages. Basic weapons barely scratched it.

Ray kept his distance. He watched the terrain, the environment, the flow.

There. A massive data-crane.

It lumbered across a suspended rail overhead, trailing tangled wires, and paused only once every few minutes to dump a load of glitched-out memory blocks into a nearby digital incinerator. As the incinerator fired, he saw the Leech twitch, its aura faltering in response.

That was the window.

He counted. Timed the crane's pass. Read the lag between drop and aura shift. The moment the next load fell, he sprinted.

With a muffled dash command, his avatar blurred. The aura flared as he neared, distortion clawing at the edges of his code, but he hit the opening just right. Ray surged forward, phase-slipping through the weakened veil, reached up, snatched the fragment from the Leech's back, and tumbled into a nearby server alcove just as the aura surged back to full power.

Silent. Precise. Surgical.

Then came the screams.

"HEY! HE'S GOT IT!"

A half-dozen netstriders emerge, their grey mannequin avatars previously hidden in the shadows.

Ray didn't wait. His system was in cooldown. He was exposed so he started to run.

The netstriders rushed after him, chasing him through the broken terrain.

One hurled a half-formed "spear" subroutine, but the code was so unstable it dissolved mid-air, exploding into a harmless but blinding shower of bouncy, smiling pop-up ads that clogged the narrow canyon.

Ray darted left, then right.

Another contestant, perched on a high ledge, tried to manifest a simple "rockslide" program to block his path. But their shoddy code glitched, and instead of a wall of rock, a cascade of oversized, pixelated rubber ducks tumbled down the cliff face, bouncing harmlessly off Ray's shoulders as he ran.

He skidded around a corner, the floor beneath his feet suddenly jittering, threatening to dissolve into a pit of corrupted data—another clumsy trap he barely avoided. He looked back. They were still coming, a frantic, disorganized mob driven by the glittering prize he now held.

The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

He saw a collapsing firewall ahead, a shimmering curtain of orange and red code that was about to close off the path. He didn't have time to go around. He slid and slipped through the gap just as it sealed shut.

He was in a quieter, darker section of the canyon now.

Silence.

Then—shnk.

A cold blade slipped into his chest, his avatar jerked.

"Got you," came a sharp, familiar, female voice. Kitsune.

Then Ray's mannequin avatar bloated cartoonishly.

BOOM!

Confetti. Bright, ridiculous, multicolored confetti.

From deeper in the wall, a tiny midget-sized Ray waved mockingly before squeezing back into the shadows. He'd used a Compression Program, slipped into the wall, and left the decoy when his cooldown had passed.

Kitsune's featureless face somehow conveyed a sense of pure, frustrated disbelief. Her HUD pinged. A data fragment was left behind. She tapped it.

It expanded.

One single, shimmering emoji: 😉

Following the lead for a third fragment, he arrived at a small, abandoned shed. He looked inside: just an empty space. But as he took a step through the entrance, the server graveyard dissolved, and Ray found himself in a new, disorienting space. He was standing in the center of a small, ornate, circular chamber. The floor was a polished, black obsidian that reflected the single, soft light source from above. And the walls, from floor to ceiling, were covered in hundreds of perfect, seamless, reflective mirrors.

In the very center of the room, floating at eye level, was the third key fragment, shimmering with a clean, pure light.

He wasn't alone. A few feet away, another grey mannequin avatar materialized. They were wearing a set of grey bunny ears on their head. They gave him a small, nervous, almost imperceptible nod, their head angled downward.

Could she be Glitch? Ray asked himself. But he kept his mouth shut. It was better to maintain his anonymity.

He ran a quick scan of her, but there was no concise result. It was likely that the server was blocking any attempt by the players to identify each other.

He glanced at her chest, and it seemed she had turned off the number that should have been displayed there, just as he had.

The synthesized, genderless voice of the tournament announcer echoed through the chamber.

[The objective is simple. The key fragment is yours for the taking. However, only one of the 'mirrors' on the wall is the true exit portal. The others are traps. Touching a false mirror will teleport you back to the beginning of this stage and reset the puzzle. Choose wisely.]

After a short pause the voice spoke again.

[Safe zone on.]

Ray killed the offensive program he was preparing and instead ran a simple analysis program on the nearest mirror. His log was instantly flooded with a massive, impossibly complex data packet.

With his limited processors, it took a couple of minutes to analyze the whole code.

They're not mirrors, he realized. They're windows broadcasting high-fidelity, real-time feed of this room

He looked over at Anya. Her approach was different. She was perfectly still, her bunny-ear antennae twitching as she "listened". It was a sound strategy, but it would take time. She had proved that she was a master of observation, her paranoid nature making her exceptionally good at spotting anomalies.

His attention shifted back to the problem at hand. Analyzing the code of every window would take too long.

He glanced at the hundreds of windows around.

I need a faster solution.

The windows could only reflect what their rendering cache was programmed to see. The room, and the contestants within it. But what if he introduced a variable they couldn't possibly have in their cache? He focused his will, reaching into his own memories. In his hand, a perfect, digital replica of the old, scuffed electric toothbrush he had absorbed from his apartment materialized.

He held it up. He scanned the hundreds of reflections. In every single one, his grey mannequin avatar stood, its hand held up. But the hand was empty. All except one. In a single mirror, directly across the room, he saw it. The reflection of his avatar, holding the toothbrush. This was the mirror.

While Anya was still diligently "listening," her back to him, Ray walked calmly, confidently, across the polished black floor, towards the key.

But that was what she had been waiting for.

Ray felt his foot sink in. The floor had become a liquid-like morass of corrupted code and was crawling up his leg, holding him fast. A simple but effective "Quicksand" program.

There it is, Ray thought. He didn't panic. He activated his own trap. He sent a targeted pulse from a basic "Stun" program he'd pre-loaded, not at Glitch herself, but at the grappling hook program she had just manifested in her hand.

But Glitch had a counter for his counter.

The grappling hook in her hand was a decoy. The stun pulse hit it, causing it to dissolve into a shower of useless pixels. At the same instant, a second, hidden grappling hook, which she had already placed on the ceiling above the key fragment, activated. It dropped, snagged the key, and retracted in a split second.

She had anticipated his counter-attack and had already planned two steps ahead.

Glitch then dashed to the true mirror, and without a moment's hesitation, she stepped through it, the key fragment now hers.

By the time Ray had freed himself from the trap and walked through the mirror, she was long gone. He looked ahead at the desolate server graveyard with no sign of her.

He'd been played.

It was a lesson and every lesson learned was a victory in itself. He started walking toward the next key fragment, a new, profound respect for his quiet and anxious ally-turned-rival settling in his mind.

Ray found himself in an open area that glowed with a soft, green light. As he took a step forward, a message appeared before him.

[NO KILL ZONE. PLAY NICE ;)]

The digital air here was clean and carried the faint, pleasant scent of lemons. A hundred meters away and up, across a dizzying, open chasm, was a semi-transparent platform. A large, holographic thumb pointed downward toward the shimmering, pure white light of the key fragment resting upon it.

Ray looked around. He watched as other grey mannequins stacked crude, unstable blocks of code, attempting to build simple, precarious bridges across the chasm. Most of their structures were clumsy, inefficient, and prone to collapse, sending their avatars plummeting into the digital void below, only to be unceremoniously respawned back at the beginning.

Beside him, a single, pulsating cube of raw, uncompiled code materialized, along with a terminal displaying a basic "builder" program. The objective was clear. The path was not.

The synthesized voice of the tournament announcer echoed in his head. "Construct a path. Claim the fragment."

Ray didn't even touch the builder program. Arty's data shard flashed in his mind—the complex physics of a trebuchet, the brutal efficiency of a railgun. He was going to build a machine to fly.

He placed his hands on the cube of raw code and ran a deep scan, but after a couple of minutes, he came to a conclusion: the cube's code was locked. He tried to replicate it, but every construct he created was immediately deleted by the server. The message was clear: use the cube or find another fragment elsewhere.

He began to weave. Using the data he had gained from Arty's shard, he began to construct a massive, elegant, and brutally efficient catapult. It was a masterpiece of digital engineering, its arm a long, graceful arc of black, reinforced code, its base a solid, stable foundation.

The other netstriders, seeing the genius of his plan, quickly abandoned their own bridges and began to build their own, crude catapults. The digital sky was soon filled with the comical, chaotic sight of grey mannequins launching themselves across the chasm. Some of their creations were too weak, sending them tumbling pathetically into the void. Others were too strong, launching their creators into the distant, static-filled sky, never to be seen again.

Ray waited, ensuring all his calculations were correct. He watched as one other contestant, a skilled and meticulous operator, successfully launched themselves, their trajectory a perfect arc towards the key fragment.

Now.

Ray stepped onto his own catapult. He launched himself into the air, a silent, grey projectile soaring across the digital sky. He and the other contestant were now on a direct collision course with the platform, and the key.

But Ray had learned his lesson from his encounter with Glitch.

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