Something in me was bleeding out—like my save file had a hole in it.
It wasn't a metaphor.
It was a red, flashing number in the top-left of my HUD.
ERROR: Integrity Critical. Lag detected.
HP: 163 / 290 (-1 HP/min)
Every second felt like an anti-cheat scan waiting to flag me.
A tiny, jarring lag spike that made my model jitter.
I stumbled over a rusted pipe, my hitbox clipping through the metal before snapping back with rubber-banding that nearly threw me to the ground.
"Cleanup," I muttered, my voice all static. "The game's trying to wipe me."
The Dregs was the devs' cut-content graveyard—half-finished props and junk players were never meant to reach.
Lore says The Sink's the lower stack—Tox runoff, factories, misery. In-game, The Dregs was the part they didn't finish.
It was the map's trash bin—where cut content gets dumped and forgotten.
Unfinished textures stretched across the walls—stretched wrong, like the skins got slapped on sideways and called it good. Green smog—flat 2D sprites that kept rotating to face me—hugged the floor.
My HP ticked down.
160…
159…
I needed a health pack. A healing fruit. A fountain. Anything.
But down here, there was no shopkeeper. There were only discard piles.
I dragged my feet—my robe hem scraping through a puddle of neon-green sludge.
A debuff icon flickered on my HUD.
STATUS: Tox-Burn. -2 HP/sec.
"Great," I hissed, scrambling up a pile of scrap metal. "Classic bug. Who drops a damage puddle in what's supposed to be a safe spot?"
I huddled against a slab of concrete that looked like it had been ripped from an old arena map.
My health was plummeting.
Pain hit like a debuff you can't cleanse. My vision turned into chunky pixels and static—like a stream choking mid-teamfight.
If I hit zero, that was it. No respawn timer. Just a hard wipe. Gone.
Then, I heard it.
Clank. Whirr. Zzzzt.
A bugged sound loop—short, repetitive, mechanical.
I peeked over the concrete slab.
A few steps away, pinned under a collapsed support beam, lay a Blue Team Assault Minion.
NPC ID: Minion_Assault_Blue_8821.
It was scuffed—its model kept popping between low-poly and high-res states, and its idle animation bent it like it forgot how to stand.
Its oversized hammer lay bent a few feet away.
The beam had crushed its lower torso, pinning it to the ground.
It was twitching, its single glowing eye-lens flickering from bright blue to a dull, dying gray.
Zzzzt. "For... the... Order..." Zzzzt.
Its voice line was bugged, looping the same half-second over and over.
I stared at it. An enemy. A Blue unit.
In a real match, I would have flung a core bolt at it without a second thought. It was just +21 Credits. It was a minion score.
But down here? Alone?
It looked like me—just another unit waiting for cleanup to despawn it and pretend it never existed.
My HUD flared.
CRITICAL WARNING: INTEGRITY 45%.
OPTION DETECTED: DRAIN A WEAK TARGET.
My right hand started stuttering—jittering like it was stuck on the same tiny animation loop.
The Source Drain skill I'd accidentally unlocked painted the dying minion in a harsh red outline.
Target: Low Integrity.
Action: Finish.
"No," I whispered. "I'm not… I'm not siphoning a mob."
135 HP.
The pain spiked.
My vision glitched—purple blocks flickering across my sight.
I fell to my knees, clutching my chest. Whatever was holding me together was coming apart. I could feel myself dropping pieces.
The enemy Minion saw me. It stopped twitching. Its lens focused. It didn't try to attack. Its single eye just watched me—another glitched asset waiting for the end.
It didn't have the logic for it anymore.
It just stared.
"Help..." it synthesized.
The word wasn't in the standard voice pack.
It wasn't a normal voice line. It sounded like the game panicked and spit out something new.
"I can't," I choked out. "I'm crashing, buddy."
128 HP.
DO NOT, my HUD screamed—one of those pop-ups you can't close, locking your screen until you click.
A tooltip popped up, obscuring the dying machine's face.
SKILL AVAILABLE: SOURCE DRAIN
EFFECT: Drains the target to restore your HP.
It wasn't griefing. It was emergency healing.
It was stealing what it had left and patching myself with it.
That's what I told myself as I crawled down the scrap. I used to know how games were made. Now I was doing a trash-fire fix with whatever still had HP.
I reached the Azure Minion.
Up close, it looked worse.
The metal was dented, oil spurting in choppy bursts—like its drip animation was dropping frames.
It reached a hand out, grasping at my robe.
"Blue... Red... Error..." it buzzed.
Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
"Yeah," I said, my hand shaking as I raised it over the minion's faceplate. "Matchmaking is broken."
I didn't want to do it.
But that cold "you're about to despawn" feeling hit—like the game had already marked me for cleanup.
I activated the skill.
[SOURCE DRAIN]
My hand didn't cast a spell. It glitched.
My fingers glitched into jagged white lines and speared into the minion 's chest.
There was no blood. It sounded like a busted modem noise—high, backwards, and wrong.
The minion convulsed.
I felt a surge—violent and intoxicating—rush up my arm.
It wasn't just health. It was data.
I felt its pathing and its one job pour into me—enough to shove my glitches out of the way for a second.
+45 HP.
+50 HP.
The minion's eye went dark.
Its body turned gray, the textures desaturating until it looked like a stone statue.
Then it broke into pixel-dust and dim, dead light.
"I'm sorry," I gasped, falling back against the dirt.
The buff didn't fade.
What I stole didn't just heal me—it made me bigger.
I wasn't just a minion anymore. I was something that could live through bugs that should've killed me.
SYSTEM NOTIFICATION
ASSIMILATION COMPLETE
RAW DATA HARVESTED: 260 XP
A golden pillar of light—visible only to an Operator, which I was now—dropped from the fake sky.
My body seized.
It wasn't designed to hold this much power.
My joints popped as my model scaled up, bones snapping into place mid-anim while my hitbox lagged behind for a beat.
The tattered red robe repaired itself, the fabric turning a deeper, crimson shade.
The wood of my staff hardened, the tip igniting with a permanent, crackling ember.
The constant drain shut off. Everything ran smoother—no stutter, no hitch, just clean control again.
The level-up fully healed me and cleared the damage like it never happened.
LEVEL 2 REACHED
STATS UPDATED:
> Max HP Increased: 290 -> 375
> Current HP: 375 / 375 (Full Restore)
> Mana Capped: 100 / 100
> +4 AD / +5 AP
> New Passive Acquired: [SINK SURVIVOR]
Wait.
I blinked, clearing the notifications.
I felt… lighter. Stronger—like something that had dragged itself up from the lowest depths and refused to sink again.
I looked at my hands. The jitter was gone. The frame rate was smooth.
[SYSTEM NOTICE: ANOMALY DETECTED]
I leveled up.
Proxies don't level up. We just scale with game time like everyone knows.
We don't gain XP. We are XP.
"I broke the rules," I realized, clenching my fist.
Sparks popped off my fingers and faded. "I can farm."
It hit me hard: if I could farm, then I could spiral fast.
If I could farm… if I could level… then I wasn't just trying to survive until the Core Node destabilized and the match ran its course.
I could get strong.
Strong enough to force a disconnect and wake up back home.
But to do that, I'd need more XP.
I looked at the pile of binary dust where the Minion had been.
A wave of nausea hit, but I force-swallowed it and kept moving.
I was a Sink Survivor now. Morality was a luxury for people who weren't stuck down here.
I stood up, gripping my staff.
The Dregs stretched ahead—endless rust, toxic runoff, and dead-end turns.
The first thing I tested was how smooth everything felt.
I raised my hand. Clenched it. Opened it.
60 FPS? No, this felt uncapped.
The blur was gone. The jitter since I spawned—like my body was about to desync—to come apart at the seams—had smoothed out.
I looked at the HUD.
[PASSIVE: SINK SURVIVOR]
Description: Unit has adapted to the hazardous environment of The Dregs—the contaminated underbelly of The Sink. Reduces incoming Poison/Chemical damage by 15%.
I wasn't just a minion anymore. I felt like an over-leveled Prime—a boss-class unit loose in a tutorial zone.
I looked down the rusted corridor.
The Dregs was a mess—jagged scrap shapes, green sludge with barely any texture, and flickering lights that didn't even throw shadows right.
It was the game's dump—where "deleted" just means left behind until the next cleanup finally wipes it.
And it was crawling with XP.
A screech echoed from behind a pile of twisted pipes.
My HUD highlighted the audio source with a red chevron.
[TARGET: DREGS RAT (Lvl 1)]
[STATE: IDLE]
"Aggro radius test," I muttered.
I stepped forward.
My pathing tried to snap me onto the usual routes, but I fought it and moved my own way.
I didn't walk in a straight line. I strafed.
The rat popped out.
It was ugly—a low-poly mess of fur and syringes, eyes glowing with a simple emissive texture.
It saw me. The AI triggered. It shrieked and lunged.
I didn't panic this time. I checked the distance.
About my max auto range.
I raised the staff. The cast went off instantly.
[-20 HP]
The bolt of red energy struck the rat mid-air.
It recoiled, a chunk of its health bar turning grey and vanishing.
It hit the ground and scrambled toward me, teeth bared.
Standard minion AI would stand still and trade blows. I checked my HP bar. If I missed the kite, I would die.
I moved.
Attack. Step back. Attack. Step back.
It was the oldest trick in the book. Orb walking. Kiting.
I orb-walked between autos—shoot, step back, keep spacing, keep DPS up.
[-20 HP]
The rat lunged, snapping at empty air where I'd been a frame ago, its prediction lagging behind my cancel.
[-20 HP]
It was getting close. I could smell the rust on its breath.
The hitbox on these things was janky; I couldn't risk a collision.
I planted my feet and channeled.
The staff glowed brighter, turning from red to a sickly, phosphor green.
"Get deleted."
[-20 HP]
[-23 HP]
A stream of glitch-light ripped out of the rat and flowed into my staff.
The creature convulsed, its texture flickering white, then collapsed into a pile of dissolving polygons.
[+35 XP]
CURRENT XP: 55 / 380
I exhaled, watching the body despawn.
"Clean," I muttered. "In and out."
I looked deeper into the tunnel. There were more red chevrons lighting up.
A whole nest.
"Time to farm the whole nest."
The grind was dull and mean—and it worked.
For the next hour, I turned the corridor into my farm lane.
I pulled them one by one, playing around their short aggro leash.
Shoot, kite, drain. Shoot, kite, drain.
I took hits, of course. I wasn't a pro.
[-15 HP]
Acid burned my robes, eating into my HP.
Pain spiked—like a stun you didn't see coming—but I stayed on my feet and drained the HP back.
[-23 HP]
My HP bar yo-yoed, but I kept it above critical.
With every kill, the numbers climbed.
> CURRENT XP: 195 / 380
Level 3 was slow and steady.
Level 3 meant a stat bump. Maybe a new skill to unlock. A new skill slot—if whatever was holding me together didn't break.
I stood over the dead rat model—a 'Diseased Rat' variant with extra armor stats.
It dissolved into blue motes of light.
I wiped at my forehead out of habit. Nothing came off.
It felt like my whole body was overheating.
I felt hungry—HP-hungry, XP-hungry. Like the grind had teeth now.
"Just one more wave," I told myself. The same lie every grinder tells. "One more wave and I'm back."
Except I couldn't go back.
There was no safe zone for me. Just rust, poison, and more targets.
I stepped over a pool of stagnant industrial runoff, scanning for the next target.
The tunnel opened up into a larger chamber, filled with massive, corroded vats.
The lighting here was different—dimmer, with a sickly yellow tint.
My HUD flickered.
[WARNING: ENVIRONMENTAL HAZARD DETECTED]
[AIR QUALITY: FATAL]
I paused.
The background sound changed.
The subtle dripping of water and distant pipe groans faded out. A low synthetic hum faded in.
Then came the smell.
It wasn't the rot of the rats or the rust of the pipes.
It was sharp and bitter, like pennies and burned plastic. Something sharp and chemical underneath—ammonia, maybe.
Green fog started seeping from the floor vents, rolling thicker and thicker—like someone turned the gas from "minor poke" to "instant kill."
It wasn't just a visual filter. It was real fog—thick, physical, filling the room.
Heavy and dense, it rolled low across the ground.
My HP bar ticked.
[-10 HP]
"HP drain?" I checked my status. No.
[DEBUFF: POISONED]
[SOURCE: UNKNOWN PRIME]
Prime. The word hit like ice water. The system reserved that tag for apex threats—boss-tier, minimum.
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