System Error: The NPC's Reign of Terror

Chapter 12: Silent Warfare

My consciousness was ripped from reality by an invisible force, violently dragged into an abyss of pure data.

One second, I was still standing in Old Doc’s underground clinic, a place thick with the scent of machine oil and disinfectant, the cold metal of a circuit board still holding the warmth of my fingertips. The next second, the entire world dissolved, warped, and fractured before my eyes. Stains on the walls morphed into pixelated noise, and the pungent air was replaced by scrolling lines of error code.

My "Code Injection" ability was forcibly activated.

This wasn't an attack of my own making. It was "them"—the mysterious hacker collective calling themselves the "Webweavers." As if throwing open a cage door, they had dragged my consciousness straight inside.

This was their test. Not a street brawl, not infiltration and assassination, but a silent war waged in virtual space.

I hovered in an endless void of darkness, surrounded by a crisscrossing lattice of glowing blue lines that formed a massive, complex, and daunting three-dimensional labyrinth. This was their firewall—a data fortress known as the "Labyrinth." Every strand of light radiated a cold, rigid sense of order; every node pulsed with lethal defensive logic.

"Begin, 'Error Code.'" A processed, genderless synthesized voice echoed through the space, tinged with a condescending scrutiny. "Let us see what the one Old Doc staked his reputation on is truly capable of."

I took a deep breath, though I had no lungs here. I condensed my consciousness into a razor-sharp blade and plunged it into a seemingly weak data stream.

"Code Injection!"

My ability surged like a black, corrosive acid, attempting to corrupt and devour the blue data stream before me.

However, I failed.

The moment that black force touched the blue walls of the labyrinth, it was instantly purified and vaporized by a power far greater and purer than my own. A devastating data shockwave rebounded, slamming into the core of my consciousness.

*Bzzzt—*

My brain felt as though it had been struck head-on by a battering ram. Stars exploded in my vision, and my data-sight was instantly flooded with a barrage of red error warnings.[WARNING: High-level encryption protocol "Cerberus" detected... Insufficient permissions... Intrusion failed!]

[WARNING: Your "Code Injection" ability level is too low to penetrate the target's defenses!]

I gritted my teeth, fighting to stabilize my consciousness as it teetered on the brink of fragmentation. This wall was ten thousand times tougher than I had imagined. Compared to this, the Olympus Group’s prized municipal network firewall was nothing more than flimsy tissue paper. With my current basic abilities, a brute-force breakthrough was utterly impossible.

A direct assault would be suicide.

I forced myself to calm down. My consciousness swept like a ghost along the perimeter of the "Labyrinth" at high speed, frantically searching for any possible gap. I cranked my data vision to its limit, analyzing every inch of the firewall's architecture. The way this code was written... this multi-layered, nested encryption logic... I felt as if I had seen it somewhere before.

A fragment of memory I had intentionally suppressed suddenly surged from the depths of my mind.

The "Lost" Bar. The place where I used to work—and where I awakened.

On the day of my awakening, while trying to evade Athena’s city-wide dragnet, I had used my data vision to scan the entire bar for surveillance blind spots. At the time, I had noticed a strange signal source in the owner’s office. It was heavily shielded by a physical layer, yet it still leaked a faint trace of data fluctuation.

I had assumed then that it was a secret surveillance device planted by the Olympus Group. But looking back now, that unique, onion-like encryption algorithm was identical to the "Cerberus" protocol right in front of me.

The bar owner... he wasn't with Olympus.

He was a member of the Webweavers!

That middle-aged man I saw every day, who was always smiling as he wiped down glasses and occasionally grumbled about how slow business was, was actually a part of this massive underground organization. The signal source in his office wasn't some damn surveillance device at all—it was a secret Webweaver data node!

The realization sent a shock through me, but now was not the time to be shocked. It gave me a crazy, new idea.

If I couldn't take it by force, I would have to outsmart it.I flashed back to Old Doc roaring at me: “You’re not a normal program, Nova! You’re an ‘error’! And an error is something that exists outside the rules!”

Yeah, I wasn't a standard hacker. I was "Error Code," a bug in this world's system. How does a bug get through a perfectly designed program?

The answer: make the program fail itself.

I stopped all my useless attacks and began to alter my own data signature. I was no longer an intruder; I began to mimic, to disguise myself. I reached into the chaotic, disordered "glitch" data at the core of my system, reweaving it to simulate the thing I hated most—and knew best.

An Athena scanning probe.

Athena—the city’s AI goddess, the nightmare of every rebel, and definitely the Weavers’ greatest enemy. Their defense system was bound to be designed against a top-tier intrusion from Athena.

My disguise was crude, like a supercar cobbled together from scrap metal. Any competent firewall would have seen through it in 0.01 seconds and torn me to shreds.

But Cerberus was too powerful—and too arrogant.

When my shoddy Athena probe shakily brushed against the Labyrinth’s barrier, it was identified instantly.

【ALERT: Athena protocol intrusion detected! Initiating maximum-level countermeasures!】

The entire Labyrinth roared to life.

Countless blue lines turned a blinding scarlet in an instant. The once-impregnable defensive walls began to warp and restructure violently, like an ancient beast driven to fury, opening its maw to devour everything in its path. Thousands of aggressive "hunter-killer programs" were activated, with a single objective: to utterly annihilate the Athena probe that had dared to provoke them.

This was exactly what I wanted.

To execute its counter-intrusion protocols, this perfect system had to switch from "Absolute Defense" mode to "Active Attack" mode in a fraction of a millisecond. That transition was its moment of maximum vulnerability. It’s like a clenched fist opening to grab something—the palm gets exposed for a split second.In that fleeting window, I seized my chance.

I didn't run. Instead, I charged headlong into the data torrent that threatened to shred everything. A split second before being swallowed whole, I took my core consciousness—the chaotic cluster of data that was "Error Code"—and, like a lethal virus, slammed it into the imperceptible system vulnerability created by the mode switch.

My gamble paid off.

All of Cerberus's processing power was focused on destroying Athena. It never expected that hidden inside this "Athena" was a completely different "virus"—one it had never seen and could not comprehend.

My consciousness was like a drop of ink falling into clear water, instantly spreading wildly through the Maze's internal network. The red "hunter programs" shrieked past me with destructive fury, yet they were blind to my presence. To them, I was no longer an enemy, but a harmless, unrecognizable piece of redundant data within the system.

I had succeeded. I had used its own strength to perform a reverse infiltration.

I tore through layer after layer of data barriers, racing toward the heart of the Maze. There, a massive blue sphere of pure energy rotated slowly. It was the core of the entire defense system—its heart.

The test required me to leave my mark here.

I reached out a "hand" and willed my consciousness into a shape. I didn't leave my name, nor any provocative symbols.

I left only one thing.

A complex circuit board symbol made of concentric circles and intersecting lines.

It was the pattern from the back of the circuit board Old Doc had given me—a symbol he could never decipher, but one that meant the world to me. A promise.

With that done, I severed the connection without hesitation.

The entire virtual space began to shatter inch by inch like glass. The light faded, and endless darkness rushed back in.

When I "opened" my eyes again, I was back in reality. I was still standing in Old Doc’s clinic, as if everything that had just happened was merely a fleeting hallucination. But I knew better.

Before me, the darkness was no longer empty.A figure wrapped in a black high-tech cloak, their face obscured by a silver spider mask, stood there silently. He seemed to have stepped right out of the shadows, noiseless and still. The faint glow of circuitry pulsed along the edges of his cloak. On the mask, eight crimson electronic eyes stared at me coldly, as if scrutinizing a curious specimen.

"Welcome, 'Error Code'."

His voice, filtered through the mask, sounded young and clear, yet it carried a strange cadence that felt naggingly familiar.

"Any friend of Old Doc's is a friend of the Weavers." He extended a hand wearing a black tactical glove. "Your performance... was intriguing. You’re the first to use 'Athena' to trick 'Cerberus' into opening the gate."

I didn't take the hand immediately. My gaze remained locked on him, searching for any clue in his posture or his voice. That voice... I’d definitely heard it before. Not the words themselves, but a certain inflection—a tiny, almost imperceptible verbal tic. It was like a needle pricking at a corner of my memory.

"Are you 'Spider'?" I asked coldly.

"Just a codename." He seemed to read my suspicion and withdrew his hand nonchalantly. "Now, let’s get down to business. You passed the test. In exchange, we’ll help you c***k that little toy you’re holding."

His gaze shifted to the encrypted chip I was clutching—the one taken from "Bonebreaker" Brute, which might hold the secrets of my past.

"Olympus Group military-grade encryption," Spider said, his tone laced with blatant disdain. "A nuisance, but not unbreakable."

He turned, his cloak cutting a sharp, cold arc through the air. "Follow me. It’s time you saw the other side of the world."

I followed him into the deepening gloom. I knew that from this moment on, my life would slide completely into an unknown abyss.

Yet, for some reason, I felt no fear. Instead, a flicker of twisted excitement stirred within me.

Because, finally, I was no longer fighting alone.

Or rather, I had found a new set of tools to exploit.