System Error: The NPC's Reign of Terror

Chapter 11: The Ruined Labyrinth

I stuffed that damn Olympus "Cerberus" chip and the token Old Doc gave me into my pocket, then turned and walked away without looking back. I didn't want to look. Behind me, the clinic disguised as a mountain of trash stood like a silent tomb, while I was heading toward another—the abandoned Seventh Subway Station, the place scavengers called "the Labyrinth."

The entrance to the Labyrinth was the rotting maw of a giant beast. I stood on the edge of the shattered platform, with an all-consuming darkness beneath my feet. Only a few twisted pieces of rebar loomed faintly in the abyss like broken fangs. The stench of rust, ozone, and chemical waste fermenting together in the air was a hundred times more pungent than the sewers where I usually hid. Every breath felt like my lungs were being scoured by sandpaper.

I pulled the hood of my "Ghost Coat" tight, burying my face deeper. Old Doc’s words were still buzzing in my ears: "The Webweavers don't trust anyone, especially you, with that Olympus brand on you. They only believe in value."

My value? An "Error Code" hunted by every AI in the city? A ghost who didn't even know his own identity? To hell with value. I just wanted to survive.

I moved cautiously along the edge of the platform, the concrete beneath me liable to collapse at any moment. My Data Vision flickered wildly under the chaotic magnetic interference, red [ERROR] warnings constantly flashing at the edges of my sight. I was forced to shut it down and return to my most primal senses—my ears, my eyes.

Drip... drip...

The sound of water dripping from distant pipes.

Creak—

The groan of metal shifting with the temperature.

And then...

Scrape... scrape... scrape...

My heart constricted. My body froze instantly, nailed to the rusted wall. That sound wasn't right. It wasn't rats, and it wasn't the wind. It sounded more like something heavy being dragged across the rubble-strewn ground with a bone-chilling, incessant rhythm.

I held my breath, staring intently into the darkness ahead.

Nothing.

Only an endless darkness that felt as if it could swallow my soul.I waited for a full minute until the sound vanished. Maybe it was just my imagination; this hellhole was enough to snap anyone's nerves. Gritting my teeth, I pressed on, each step lighter than the last, like a cat in the dead of night.

After about a hundred meters, I reached a fork in the path. The tunnel to the left was relatively wide, its walls shimmering with a faint fluorescence like a welcome mat rolled out before me. The right, however, was narrow and pitch-black, as if it led straight to hell.

My gut was screaming at me. In the Sinking Zone, any sign of kindness was just a knife in disguise. Without a moment's hesitation, I turned into the dark narrow path on the right.

A pungent stench of blood mixed with the acrid smell of burnt engine oil hit me. My stomach churned, and I had to fight back the urge to gag. I reactivated my data vision’s low-light mode, and my field of view was instantly bathed in a sickly green glow.

What I saw made my skin crawl.

Several security bots, violently dismantled, hung from the tunnel walls. Their armor had been ripped open, wires and hydraulic lines spilling out like mechanical entrails across the floor. Nailed between the wreckage were several dried-out corpses. Their limbs were spindly, like a spider's, and scorpion-like stingers trailed from their backs. Sharp wires pierced their chests, pinning them to the walls in twisted poses.

Was this the source of that dragging sound? Or were they intruders like me—failed forerunners?

I noticed a mess of scratches etched into the ground at their feet. They looked like the frantic marks of a death struggle. Dreading to touch anything, I used my low-light vision to pick my way carefully beneath the hanging bodies.

The passage ended in a solid wall.

Fuck. Had I been played?

No, impossible. Old Doc wouldn't send me into a dead end. I turned back immediately, re-examining the tunnel lined with corpses and robotic wreckage. I had to have missed something.

My eyes fell once more on the scratches at the feet of the corpses. This time, I didn't dismiss them as the meaningless marks of a struggle. I crouched down, and my data vision began to scan and analyze the lines. They appeared chaotic, but as my system reorganized them at high speed, a faint pattern began to emerge.It was a circuit board layout, and one of the crooked lines traced a single, viable path.

My heart began to race. These weren't the marks of a struggle; they were a guide! A clue left behind by some poor bastard, bought with his life!

I burned the layout into my brain immediately and turned back to the fork in the road. This time, I headed down the left passage—the one that looked safe and glowed with faint fluorescence.

Sure enough, the passage was riddled with traps. The seemingly harmless fluorescent moss on the ground was a disguise for pressure-sensitive mines. The spores drifting in the air were hallucinogens designed to attack the nervous system directly. I even spotted a turret disguised as a derelict terminal, the red light of its camera lens flickering momentarily in the dark.

But all that s**t was meant for someone else. Now, I had a "map."

I moved like a ghost, threading through the gaps of death. Every step landed precisely on a safe stone; every breath was filtered through the collar of my "Ghost Coat." My data vision was heavily glitched here, constantly throwing up false path markers and illusions, but I forced myself to trust the layout bought with a life.

I was beginning to understand how the "Webweavers" operated. Their method of screening intruders was dripping with hacker-like malice and ingenuity. The corpses pinned to the walls were likely the failures—those who couldn't decipher the clues or were betrayed by their own systems. They had exploited logic loopholes in the "Athena" surveillance system to design their traps; these triggers weren't purely physical, but logic bombs meant to deceive scanning probes. The tech skills of this group were far beyond anything I had imagined.

Finally, I reached the end of the passage. A massive circular hatch made of heavy alloy loomed before me, resembling the vault door of an ancient bank. The gate was mottled with rust, and in its dead center was a slot that perfectly matched the shape and size of the circuit board fragment Old Doc had given me.

This was it.

I took a deep breath, steadying my racing heart. Stepping up to the gate, I pulled out the token. It felt cold in my hand, and its circuit patterns seemed to emit a faint, almost imperceptible pulse of energy in the dark.

I slowly slid the circuit board into the slot on the gate.

*Click.*With a crisp click, the token fit perfectly into the slot. Then, the metal patterns around the slot began to glow. Streaks of blue light, like electric currents, spread rapidly along the circuits on the gate, finally converging directly above it.

A hidden scanner extended from the wall, and a red beam of light swept from top to bottom, enveloping me. My body tensed instantly, ready to activate "Physical Rewrite." I could feel the beam analyzing my physical structure, my heartbeat, and even the abnormal data streams of the "Glitch System" inside me.

The scan lasted for a good ten seconds, then the red light vanished. The gate did not open.

Instead, a massive, flickering question mark composed of blue points of light was projected into the air in front of me.

Then, a cold, electronically processed voice echoed from all directions, as if the entire ruins were speaking to me. The voice was devoid of emotion, like a pre-programmed routine.

"Identity verification... Outsider. Abnormal data structure detected."

"Present your 'value,' or rot in the Labyrinth."

Value. That damn word again.

I froze. I thought the token was my ticket in. But now, they were demanding "value" from me.

Did they mean money? I was penniless. Did they mean intel? I knew next to nothing about their enemy, "Athena." Did they mean force? My pathetic combat skills were a joke to them.

So what exactly was the "value" they wanted?

The cold electronic voice didn't give me much time to think. I could feel the surrounding air grow heavy, and from the cracks in the walls came the clicks of machinery being activated. A cold murderous intent, like an invisible net, slowly closed in on me.

I had to prove myself immediately.

My mind raced. They were hackers, believers in data. My "Glitch System," my "Data Vision," my "Physical Rewrite"—in their eyes, these were probably just another form of code. And they had mentioned an "abnormal data structure"...

Could it be that the value they wanted was me? The very existence of this "Error Code"?

A wild thought flashed through my mind like a bolt of lightning.

The best way to deal with a group of top-tier hackers wasn't to flex muscles, but to show them a "vulnerability" they had never seen and could not understand.

I looked up, staring directly at the flickering question mark. My voice was dry with tension, but unwavering.

"My value... is me."I held out my right hand, palm up. Then, under the "gaze" of that electronic voice, I didn't summon anything; instead, I issued a direct command to my own system.

"Code Injection."

I injected my consciousness—a fragment of my "Glitch System"—straight into the glowing question mark hovering before me. It wasn't an attack, nor was it a hack. It was a demonstration—a raw, naked exposure.

I became a flash drive and jacked straight into their computer.

*Buzz—*

A low-pitched drone exploded inside my skull. Massive streams of data backwashed instantly into my consciousness; my data vision was instantly flooded with scrolling code and defense protocols. Firewalls, data spikes, logic traps... like a school of sharks scenting blood, swarming toward my mind in a frenzy.

It felt like my brain was being torn apart.

"WARNING! High-intensity intrusion detected! Protocol conflict! System integrity compromised!"

The system within me screamed with piercing alarms. But I didn't flinch. Gritting my teeth, I let the aggressive data streams wash over my consciousness. At the same time, I unleashed my core "Error Code" trait—that anomalous logic capable of "physically rewriting" the rules of reality—spreading it like a virus.

I wasn't trying to breach you.

I was letting you infect *me*.

A split second before my consciousness was completely drowned, the attacks stopped abruptly.

Dead silence.

The cold electronic voice spoke again, but this time, there was a barely perceptible trace of... confusion, perhaps even excitement, in its tone.

"Data structure unparsable... logical paradox... Are you... a living 'glitch'?"

The blast door before me let out a heavy rumble and began to rise slowly.

Standing behind the door was a figure in a black cloak and a spider mask. His voice, filtered through a modulator, was the very same electronic voice I had just heard.

"Welcome, 'Error Code.' A friend of Old Doc is a friend of the 'Weavers.'"

He paused, and the gaze from behind the mask seemed to pierce right through my soul.

"Now, let's see just how much 'value' a 'glitch' like you can bring us."