The tremor began as a whisper.
Not in the ground, nor in the sky but in the code. Beneath the layers of thought-formed reality, a flicker of wrongness pulsed like a skipped heartbeat. Most missed it. But not Astra. And certainly not Leon.
He turned sharply, staring into the heart of the Infinite Lobby's newly formed core.
"Something just blinked," he muttered.
Astra's eyes narrowed. "It wasn't supposed to."
In the Domain of Solace, Kaelin's crystal city sang lullabies of serenity… until the melody fractured. The towers shivered. Glass cracked, but not from pressure. From incompatibility.
A shape emerged at the city's edge blurry, shifting, broken in logic. Its limbs flickered between bird, blade, and ash. Its eyes, where it had any, glowed with fractured command lines.
ERROR: PLAYER FILE [REDACTED] NOT FOUND.
STATUS: UNASSIGNED
ACCESS LEVEL: NULL/NONEXISTENT
It stumbled forward and then screamed. Not a sound, but a rupture, a jagged burst of noise that shattered Kaelin's realm across multiple timelines at once.
She collapsed, bleeding code from her eyes.
Back at the Core, Leon reeled.
"A glitched soul," he whispered. "A Player that wasn't supposed to exist but does."
"How is that even possible?" Astra asked. "We locked the gates. Every new Player passed the Filter."
Leon's eyes glowed with golden fire. "No. This one didn't pass the Filter. It was the Filter or part of it. A fragment left behind when we rewrote the rules."
A new domain flared to life in the distance black, pulsing with inverted light. Its name burned across the system sky in glitching red:
DOMAIN: 0xNullOrigin
Inside 0xNullOrigin, the First Error roamed. It was no longer just unstable it was adapting. It fed on discarded intentions, failed trials, corrupted dreams.
With each one, it grew sharper.
Clearer.
More aware.
It looked up and spoke its first word:
"Why?"
Leon summoned the Architect's Key, its golden fractals rotating in patterns so complex even Astra blinked.
"We need to quarantine that domain," he said. "Now."
Astra reached out, but froze.
"Leon," she whispered. "It's not alone anymore."
At the edge of her perception, she felt them other glitches. Lost data. Forgotten Players. Bits of abandoned code. They were stirring.
Waking.
Answering the Error's cry.
"Why?"
---
The Forgotten Gather
The realm groaned.
Not from stress but from birth.
At the heart of 0xNullOrigin, where logic once held dominion, the Error knelt within a pit of swirling, digital ash. The void around it shuddered like a living thing as though its very existence offended the laws it had broken.
Above it, an impossible tree grew. Its branches were made of rejected plotlines, its leaves shimmering with discarded potential. And beneath it… they began to arrive.
The Forgotten.
Players who never made it through the initial System Synchronization. NPCs overwritten during patch cycles. Trial souls caught between iterations. Each had once been someone before the world forgot them.
And now, they remembered.
"You were abandoned."
The Error's voice was layered hundreds speaking at once, glitching in and out of harmony.
"You were erased, broken, rewritten."
A figure limped forward. Her name had been Mirin once an archer who had died in Chapter 2 of someone else's story. Now her limbs were fireflies and shattered code. Her bowstring hummed with unresolved grief.
Behind her came others:
Ravion, the blade that was never wielded.
Tessan, the healer who failed to save their party.
Unit 23, a dungeon AI deleted in a system rollback.
They all bowed their heads to the Error.
"Lead us," they murmured. "We still remember pain."
Meanwhile, in the Infinite Lobby, Leon and Astra stood before a growing rift.
Astra's brows furrowed as she observed the dimensional signature. "They're not attacking… yet."
"No. But they're consolidating. Building identity," Leon said grimly.
He turned to the golden interface hovering nearby and whispered a forbidden command:
"Open the Architect's Requiem."
The interface screamed.
A sealed vault, never meant to be accessed again, cracked open deep within the system's structure. Out spilled ancient safeguards fragments of Leon's earliest coding when he first rewrote reality. It was dangerous. It was unstable.
It was necessary.
"If the Forgotten find purpose," he muttered, "they'll find power."
"And if they find rage…" Astra began.
"They'll find war."
Inside 0xNullOrigin, the Error touched the base of the tree. The entire domain responded, pulsing like a heart.
"We do not seek destruction," the Error said. "We seek recognition."
And above them, in twisted, glitching light, a new banner unfurled:
Faction Unlocked: The Forgotten
Alignment: Undefined
Leader: ???
Objective: Reclaim their place in the narrative
---
The First Broken War Begins
The sky fractured.
Above the Infinite Realms, the firmament split not from power, but from remembrance. The Forgotten had not only returned… they had declared war.
Within the spiraling cathedral of the Architect's Requiem, Leon stood at the precipice of a reality he'd helped forge now teetering.
Astra paced behind him, her silhouette flickering with divine current. "We don't have the time to stabilize this rift. The Error's forces are converging. They're not just striking a node they're rewriting it."
Leon clenched his fist. "They want to insert themselves back into history. Retroactive convergence. They're targeting the Origin Points."
She froze. "If they succeed"
"Every path we've walked could be overwritten. Entire timelines… gone. Characters unmade. Choices revoked."
A tremor ran through the Realms.
Suddenly, a System Alert blared through the Infinite Interface:
[Global Threat Recognized: Faction The Forgotten has launched a Recursive Assault on Timeline: Arc-00]
Defense Protocols Breached: Origin Chapter 1 compromised
Stability Rating: 29% and falling
Inside 0xNullOrigin, the Error raised a hand and the battlefield shimmered into existence.
No armies. No steel.
This was a war of narrative.
The First Broken War was not fought with weapons but with plot entropy. Forgotten lines, deleted fates, and abandoned development arcs became missiles, slicing into the Realms of Meaning and Identity.
The Tree of Rejection pulsed violently, its roots reaching into corrupted time. Every branch that grew was a character once erased. Every leaf, a discarded ending.
Leon materialized near Arc-00's Anchor Point a pixelated forest, half-formed, half-erased. With him came his elite:
Astra, light-bound and logic-woven
Kael, the NPC-turned-Champion who'd rewritten his own code
Vexa, the Patchblade, born during a system update, wielding an ever-shifting sword
"I remember this place," Kael murmured. "This is where I died in the beta timeline."
Leon nodded grimly. "And this time, we don't let the past consume the future."
From the fog stepped Mirin, the Fragmented Archer. Her glitching form crackled with displaced arcs.
"You have no right to defend this," she said. "You abandoned us. You rewrote us."
Leon didn't flinch. "I gave us a future."
"You took ours," she hissed, and loosed a shot laced with temporal code.
The war ignited.
Across the multiversal battlefield, idea fought idea. Concepts clashed. Themes bled.
Kael struck down a corrupted healer from a forgotten MMO expansion. Astra shielded children from a failed fantasy rewrite. Vexa battled herself literally a version that never made it past editorial review.
Every kill cost them not in health, but in memory. They were forgetting pieces of themselves just to survive.
Leon reached the Heart Node.
There, waiting in the center of a spiraling rewrite sigil, was the Error.
"You don't have to do this," Leon said. "We can integrate. Merge stories. Let your truths live."
The Error pulsed.
"You still don't understand.
We're not here to live again.
We're here to show… you never had control."
It raised a finger.
And the rewrite began.