It wasn’t a truck. It was an admin command.
03:00 AM. Coffee cold. Heart rate 180.
The server logs stackefched up in red. Lines blinked in and out like the system was trying to hide the problem.
Minion Spawning Error.
Crash: Missing Data.
World Finals started in five hours.
If Red Side didn't spawn Minions, my career was getting deleted—silent, automatic, no undo, no rollback, no appeal.
“Admin override,” I muttered. “Forcing Packet 44 through.”
My fingers hit Enter.
A spark—real, loud—like the rack snapped a stapler inside my skull.
A blue arc snapped from the rack into my fingertips, the kind of contact you feel in your teeth before you understand it’s pain.
I couldn't scream.
Nerves locked up—Fear stuck at 99% while the progress bar lied to my face.
My brain hard-reset mid-scream.
My throat locked—no room to scream, no spare cycles for being human.
Bandwidth choke. Like trying to shove a flood through old copper that should’ve been ripped out years ago.
My thoughts collapsed—whole years zipped into a corrupted archive, and only a few bytes unpacked clean—Fear, coffee, work, don’t die.
[SYSTEM: UPLOAD COMPLETE]
[TARGET: FRACTURE_INSTANCE_SINK_09]
[ASSIGNING BODY... ASSET_ID: Minion_Ranged_Red_734]
[WARNING: Memory Overflow. Corrupting non-essential files: Childhood, Name, Hope.]
Blackness.
Then the first thing that loaded wasn’t sight—it was smell.
No scorched air.
Just grease, raw sewage, and that hot-electronics stink—plastic and metal pretending they aren’t dying.
I forced my eyes open.
Resolution was low—blocky edges, smeared textures—the desperate blur of a client nuking settings just to stay alive.
A red overlay tinted everything. Numbers flashed in the top right.
HP: 298 / 298
I tried to rub my eyes out of habit, like that could fix a render problem.
A red, blocky torso floated into view—low-poly, indistinct.
A simple rod. No jeans. A crimson uniform. Tiny feet, tiny steps.
"Oh fuck," I tried to say.
What came out was a compressed-audio hiccup—my swear flattened into a tiny, humiliating chirp.
A massive iron gate groaned open ahead of us, the hinge audio looping half a beat late.
Beside me, two other red-robed dwarves and a larger one with a hammer marched forward.
They were locked to an invisible path, yanked forward like the game was dragging us by the collar.
My HUD flashed.
[Objective: March down Mid Lane. Die for the Core.]
[CRITICAL ERROR: DATA LEAK DETECTED. INTEGRITY: 99%]
My legs aren’t mine—my will slams into them and comes back denied.
They’re just a body stuck in a walk loop, and the lane script has me by the collar.
`> SYSTEM: Unit_Pathing_Update (Rate: 30 ticks/sec)`
`> DESTINATION: BLUE_CORE`
"Stop," I hiss, static crinkling in my audio output. "Pause execution. `break;`. Something."
Nothing.
The game keeps snapping me back into place every tick.
I'm marching in perfect triangle formation with two other Ranged Minions—#2941 and #2942.
Up ahead, three Assault Minions take point, soaking damage and the camera's attention like they were made to be spent.
They don't talk. They don't think.
They just execute their pathing until `HP == 0`—and if there’s a soul in there, it’s not on the roster.
Fog of War snapped back at the river line—darkness retracting in a clean circle, the kind of perfect you only get when the system doesn’t care who it’s hiding.
ALERT: ENEMY PRIME DETECTED
ID: MARA
LEVEL: 1
ITEM: STARTER BAND
She stands just outside her Outer Turret range, pacing in that twitchy, high-APM rhythm.
Click, move, click, move—inputs landing so crisp my jaw locked like I was bracing for impact.
She’s zoning us.
Her model throws off a gold burn, like the shader’s running too hot.
To her, I'm not a person. I'm a handful of gold and a smear of XP—clean math, zero guilt.
"Back up!" I yell at the Assault Minion in front, a hammer-wielding brute named #2937.
He ignores me. He walks straight into the engagement zone.
Mara doesn't attack immediately. She waits.
She’s freezing the lane, letting her own wave do the dirty work.
Three Blue Assault Minions swarm #2937. Their hammers fall in sync.
Mara's tracking my HP bar. Cold. Precise.
She’s counting down to the last-hit.
She steps forward. She casts `Skill 1 - Blasting Volley`.
Gold bolts drew my death across the lane—angles, timing, certainty.
The Blue Minions exploded where they stood, catching #2937 and the assault minion behind him in the splash radius.
-12 HP (Blue Assault Minion)
-75 HP (Blasting Volley)
#2937 burst into gold coins.
The particle effect sprayed over me—warm light, fake wealth, real loss.
Chromatic aberration tore across my feed—colors splitting at the seams. My vision bugged like the client was about to crash.
“System cleanup,” I mutter, Panic spiking—my UI jittering like I just got hit with packet loss. "She's clearing the wave."
The explosion didn't just hit the assault minion.
The AoE hitbox clipped the Ranged Minion next to me. #2941 loses a chunk of health.
Mara steps forward again.
Her auto-attack projectile flies out—boosted by her passive. It hits #2941.
-65 HP.
She’s prepping the wave.
She wants to crash the wave into turret to deny us gold and XP—starve the lane, starve me.
And I’m next in the queue.
I look at the ground.
A blue path-line burned across my HUD, dragging me straight under the turret’s range ring—an arrow that only pointed at damage.
Wait—we don't have a Siege Minion.
This is Wave 1, the cheap wave—the one you throw away because it’s disposable.
Target Priority: Siege > Pet > Assault > Ranged.
The Assault units are dead or dying. I am the frontline now.
`> WARNING: TURRET AGGRO IMMINENT`
"Override!" I scream internally, fighting the hard-coded locks.
I try to force a move input to the left, into the riverside brush.
`> ERROR: Invalid Path. Unit must follow Lane_Logic.`
My body lurches forward. I can hear the turret humming.
A slab of core-stone; the crystal on top heats up. It locks onto the sole remaining Assault Minion.
PCHOO.
The turret fired. The shot hit like a thrown engine block—pure damage wrapped in a pretty effect.
-160 HP.
One more shot and he’s dead.
Then the turret calculates the next target. It will resolve to `Unit_ID: Minion_Ranged_Red_734`. Me.
Mara knows this.
She walks past the dying assault minion, her eyes locking onto my small, robed form.
She raises her hand, prepping `Eclipse Snare`. If it lands on me, I'm deleted—zero frame delay.
"Exception handled, you meta rat," I growl, and my voice comes out in minion-grade compression—cheap, brutal, still mine.
I dig into the only variable I can touch—`Attack_Range`.
Standard Ranged Minion range sits just outside the turret's danger zone. Far enough to poke, not far enough to be safe under a turret. If I stop to attack, I stop moving. It’s a valid state override.
I lock onto a Blue Assault Minion that hasn't even reached us yet.
If you encounter this narrative on Amazon, note that it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.
It’s absurdly far, way out of range.
But `Attack(Target)` forces the game to check range.
If I cancel the attack frame before the movement logic kicks in...
I spasm.
My arm raised to fire an arcane bolt, then snapped back to neutral.
Frame one. Reset. Frame one. Reset.
`> EVENT: Animation_Cancel`
I stutter-step in place, trembling like a texture that won’t stop popping.
The movement lock breaks for a split second. The spline pulls, but my attack command overrides.
I freeze, just outside the Turret’s aggro ring.
Mara’s skillshot cut through where I was supposed to be and missed, the line of it too clean for how close it came.
She led the target, expecting me to walk forward.
She paused, her model ticking a few degrees at a time—micro-adjustments like she couldn’t decide if I was a bug… or a confession.
A question mark ping `?` appears over her head.
She saw that.
ALERT: DATA LEAK DETECTED
INTEGRITY DROPPING
The exertion burned—heat behind my eyes, nausea in my gut, and my UI insisting it was just numbers.
My HP ticks down, not from damage, but from the strain of fighting the kernel.
-2 HP.
Mara steps forward. She’s not farming anymore. She’s scouting me.
A yellow question mark ping `?` hovered over Mara's head, pulsing with a steady rhythm.
In a normal game, minions are background noise. Numbers. Set dressing.
But Mara had stopped farming. She was looking right at my hitbox.
"Don't look at me," I muttered, my audio output garbled by the minion voice filter. "Look at the map. You're getting ganked."
She didn't move.
She stepped closer, her character model clipping slightly through a dying assault minion.
My console spat red errors.
ALERT: BEHAVIOR ANOMALY DETECTED
UNIT_ID: Minion_Ranged_Red_734
VARIANCE: > 5.0%
DIAGNOSIS: CORRUPTED ASSET
ACTION: PURGE
This wasn’t a respawn timer. This was the system trying to wipe me like a bugged file.
It was a deletion command—cold, administrative, like I’d failed a unit test and someone merged it anyway.
The ground beneath my robe didn’t crumble; the collision just… stopped believing in me.
One moment I was standing on the mossy stone of The Fracture, the next I was falling through the geometry.
"Wait—!"
The world clipped out.
The world tore into gray noise, and the lane’s textures peeled away like wet stickers.
I dropped past the skybox and into the unrendered space under the map.
Static-wind tore through my audio, loud enough to feel like needles behind my eyes.
> FALL SPEED: -2500u/s
I fought the physics and lost on every tick.
Zero friction. Zero control.
Panic spiked. The game didn’t react. That silence hit harder than any damage number.
I wasn't just falling; I was being discarded—like a temporary file finally noticed.
The server was flushing the cache.
Below me, a new texture loaded in.
Not the gray void—something jagged, green, and rusted.
The Dregs.
I braced for impact.
Minions don’t get landing animations—just impact, a damage number, and whatever’s left of you afterward.
CRUNCH.
I hit a rusted grate.
My vision pixelated—hard drop to 144p—then snapped back so fast it made me nauseous.
FALL DAMAGE
-90 HP
I groaned, the audio file skipping.
I rolled onto my side, checking my HUD.
HP: 198 / 310
"Still rendered," I gasped. I checked my hands.
They were shaking, glowing with the faint red particle effects of the Red Team.
"I'm not null. I'm still here."
I pulled myself up. Lag-haze. Green.
Sickly—like the air was buffering, like my lungs were trying to stream poison over dial-up.
Pipes leaked neon sludge that made the floor textures crawl and smear, like the map itself was getting sick.
This wasn't The Fracture.
This was the asset dump—where old content got abandoned and the bugs never got patched.
A debuff icon appeared in my peripheral vision. A skull inside a gas cloud.
ENVIRONMENTAL HAZARD: CAUSTIC FOG
EFFECT: -1 HP / 3s
HP: 197...
"Poison tick. Of course," I spat. "Lazy design—ship it broken, let the players bleed for it."
I needed to move.
I needed a health pack, a fountain, or just clean air.
I checked my mana bar: 100/100.
At least my mana was stable—one bar the system couldn’t argue with.
I took a step.
My pathing line—the red guide that usually dragged me to lane—was spinning in circles.
Pathing down here was broken.
I was on manual control, and for the first time since the upload, relief and Fear hit together—two windows fighting for my attention.
I walked toward a pile of scrap metal, my robe dragging through a puddle of tox-waste.
HP: 196...
Skritch.
Metal screeched, killing the hum of machinery. It came from behind a rusted vent.
I froze.
My aggro radius was small, but down here it didn’t matter—this place had already decided I was the target.
A nose poked out.
Pink, twitching, covered in weeping sores.
Then the eyes—beady, red-jacked with tox-tech augments.
It wasn't a prime. It was a critter—trash-tier.
But down here even trash came with a stat block and a way to get me killed.
TARGET: SINK RAT (Variant: Tox-Mutant)
LEVEL: 1
HP: 150
AD: 30
RESISTS: 0/0
It hissed—iron-scrap fangs, jagged, weeping oil that looked too dark to be a shader trick.
A red exclamation mark `!` flared over its head.
COMBAT STATE: ENGAGED.
"I’m a senior backend engineer," I said—my voice shredded through the minion filter. "I optimized the netcode for Tournament Mode. I can handle a rat."
The rat lunged.
It was faster than a lane minion—too fast for something that looked like leftover trash given teeth.
A twitching mess of matted hair and scrap-metal teeth.
I panicked.
I tried to sidestep, but my base Movement Speed was pathetic—barely faster than a waddling minion.
My turn rate was sluggish.
-30 HP.
The rat bit into my shoulder.
Pain lanced through me—sharp and immediate—like bad data jammed straight into my nerves—no filter, no warning.
HP: 166 / 290
I lashed out with `Arcane Bolt`. My staff flared.
Mana Cost: 0.
Lucky. Way too lucky.
Basic attacks were free, which meant the real cost was going to show up somewhere else.
A bolt of red energy struck the rat.
-23 HP.
The rat didn't flinch. It had 127 HP left.
It coiled for another jump.
"Kiting," I snarled. "I need to kite."
I watched the rat's model.
It crouched—the pre-attack animation frame. 0.5s windup.
I clicked—willed—myself backward.
The rat leaped.
I was already moving.
Its jaws snapped on empty air where I had been a server-tick ago.
MISS.
I stopped. Auto-attack timer ready. Fire.
-23 HP.
The rat landed, turned, and snarled.
I cancelled my backswing animation by issuing a move command.
Step. Shoot. Step. Shoot.
It was the oldest mechanic in the book: orb-walking.
Doing it with borrowed limbs felt like typing a password while someone kept yanking my mouse away mid-click.
On a keyboard, it was muscle memory.
In here, it was my body—gravity tugging, lungs burning, Fear riding every click like it wanted to be the one thing that didn’t desync.
HP: 165... (Poison)
The rat shrieked, frustrated by the pathing abuse.
It activated a skill. Its tox-tank glowed bright green.
`> ENEMY CASTING: VENOM SPIT`
A projectile—slow enough to track, fast enough to end me.
I threw myself behind a rusted pipe just as a glob of acid slapped against the metal.
DODGE.
"My turn, you obsolete asset."
I popped out. The rat was on cooldown.
I fired in a tight rhythm, syncing my steps to the attack rhythm like a metronome bolted to my ribcage.
-23.
-23.
-23.
-23.
The rat’s HP dropped to critical (12 HP).
It squealed, turning to flee.
"Oh no you don't. No resets."
If it ran far enough, its Aggro Radius would snap and it’d sprint back to spawn, regenning to full.
I couldn't let it leash.
I chased, my robe snagging on debris.
The rat scrambled up a pile of trash. I raised my staff for the final shot.
-23 HP.
TARGET SLAIN.
+20 XP.
I slumped against the pipe and slid into the muck.
My lungs labored—overclocked, wheezing like a dying fan that refused to spin down.
I was alive. But The Dregs' fog was still eating me.
HP: 165...
"Need... sustain," I wheezed.
I looked at the dissolving corpse of the rat.
A small loot marker hovered over it, pulsing like a notification your client refuses to clear.
I checked my internal sheet: `Minion_Ranged_Red_734.json`.
Under `Skills`, there was a corrupted entry I hadn't touched yet.
[SKILL_2]: Source Drain (GLITCH)
TYPE: Active
COST: 25 Mana
DESC: Execute low-integrity targets to harvest code.
"System," I rasped. "Execute Skill: Source Drain. Target: Dead Asset."
My hand desynced into a wireframe claw, the geometry showing through like exposed bone—my body finally confessing what it was made of.
I plunged it into the rat's digital remains.
I didn't want the meat; I wanted the code.
I wanted the logic that let this thing live in poison without dying.
My mana bar dipped.
MANA: 75 / 100
Green junk-code surged in.
Corrupted data jammed my throat and lit my nerves on fire.
It felt like a forced install—hot, invasive, and stamped with my name anyway.
SKILL SUCCESS: SOURCE DRAIN
... PARSING TARGET DATA ...
... EXTRACTING PASSIVE ABILITY ...
NEW PASSIVE ACQUIRED: [TOXIN FILTER]
DESCRIPTION: Grants immunity to atmospheric Sink toxins.
I gasped as the code integrated.
Something clean finally clicked—and for once the system eased up, like it remembered there was a person jammed inside this thing.
The lung-burn zeroed out—Pain there one tick, gone the next.
The burning in my lungs vanished.
I watched my HP bar.
165... 165... 165...
It stopped dropping. The environmental tick was gone.
"Stable," I breathed, closing my eyes. "I'm stable."
I slumped there, waiting for the lag-haze to clear.
I had a passive. I had XP. I was adapting.
If I could farm enough code, maybe I could upgrade this body.
Level up. Patch the holes. Stay alive on the Grid.
I opened my eyes and looked at the HUD one last time, expecting to see green numbers.
The fan-noise in my ears sputtered out. My stomach dropped.
HP: 164 / 290
"What?"
I stared at it.
The poison icon was gone. The Toxin Filter was active.
I shouldn't be taking damage.
Then I saw it.
Below the HP bar, a secondary meter—one I had ignored in the panic of the fall—was throbbing red.
A system-level alarm.
INTEGRITY: 89%
STATUS: DATA LEAK ACTIVE
DECAY RATE: -1 HP / 60s (ACCELERATING)
The Toxin Filter stopped the poison. It stopped the physical damage.
But it didn't stop the leak.
Whatever I was made of in here was still coming apart.
I wasn't dying because of the environment. I was dying because I didn't belong here.
Cleanup hadn’t finished the job, but it kept running—quietly deleting me in the background, one chunk at a time.
HP: 163...
I wasn't bleeding out. I was being erased.
Generated by GlitchWriter.
SYSTEM MESSAGE:
Welcome to the Protocol.
Tech-LitRPG experiment. As a software engineer, I built a custom Logic Engine to assist with writing, aiming to track stats, cooldowns, and damage numbers as accurately as possible.
spaghetti code happens.
The Engine is currently in v.0.9 (Open Beta).
My request to you:
If you spot a math error or a logic glitch, let me know in the comments! I treat them as Bug Reports and will "patch" the chapter.
Release Schedule: Daily updates for the launch window.
Follow or Rating helps the algorithm index this project.