The wolves respawned on a six-minute cycle.
I timed them down to the second.
I stood at the edge of the Ashfall perimeter, watching the forest flicker as the system re-seeded mobs. To ordinary players, it looked like immersion — wind in burnt leaves, distant howls, ambient fog.
To me, it looked like wireframe skeletons snapping into place.
Lines. Nodes. Bounding boxes.
Hitbox radii bloomed in faint translucent spheres. Aggro cones projected like pale searchlights.
My HUD still read:
**[ Level: NaN ]**
**[ Status: Undefined ]**
**[ Process: Unknown (Running) ]**
That last line pulsed once.
I ignored it.
"Pull left first," I muttered.
I stepped into the forest.
---
### Controlled Farming
Three wolves.
Two would aggro naturally. The third would chain if I mispositioned by even half a meter.
I blinked.
The wireframe view overlaid reality — the world reduced to geometry and latency values.
I stepped exactly 0.2 seconds before the server confirmed wolf #1's aggro. The animation lagged behind my movement.
Desync.
The wolf lunged at where I had been.
I stabbed.
Critical.
I shifted slightly — not to dodge, but to force the second wolf's pathfinding to collide with the corpse model of the first. For 0.4 seconds, its movement vector jittered.
Another stab.
I didn't grind like a player.
I harvested inefficiencies.
Three wolves down in fourteen seconds.
No damage taken.
I checked loot.
Ashfang Pelt ×2
Minor Feral Core ×1
Rusted Fang (Common)
The Fang flickered oddly in wireframe.
A small tag appeared next to its item ID.
**\
My pulse slowed instead of spiking.
Interesting.
I opened the marketplace interface and listed it at triple market value.
Someone bought it in six seconds.
---
### Observation
"You're farming strangely."
I didn't turn.
The voice came from my blind spot. Intentional positioning.
I exited wireframe.
A tall armored player stood against a charred tree, guild crest glowing faintly on his shoulder.
IronVeil.
I finally turned.
The man's nameplate read:
**[ Vance — IronVeil Vanguard ]**
"You blink before they commit to aggro," Vance said. "You path them into collision points. You don't react — you pre-empt."
I shrugged. "Practice."
"Practice doesn't create predictive movement inside server tick windows."
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Silence.
I kept looting.
Vance stepped closer.
"Your level isn't visible."
"Privacy settings."
Vance's gaze didn't shift.
"You're not flagged properly."
There it was.
Not curiosity.
Diagnosis.
My HUD flickered.
**[ External Scan Attempt — Suppressed ]**
I didn't move.
Vance frowned slightly.
"For a second," Vance murmured, "your data returned null."
I smiled faintly. "Buggy UI."
"Maybe."
Vance sent a party invite.
It appeared in my interface.
Then something strange happened.
The invite window distorted.
The accept/decline buttons blurred, then re-rendered.
**[ Party Sync Attempt — Failed ]**
**[ Invalid State: Target Undefined ]**
Vance's expression hardened.
"You just rejected a system-level handshake."
"I didn't touch it."
That part was true.
---
### Unknown Process (First Action)
My internal temperature spiked briefly.
A soft pressure behind my eyes.
Then:
**[ IronVeil Scan Log — Access Redirected ]**
**[ Source Masked ]**
I did not initiate that.
I was certain.
Vance's comm crystal chimed.
He glanced down.
For a fraction of a second, confusion flashed across his face.
"Huh."
"What?" I asked.
"Nothing."
But it wasn't nothing.
Vance stepped back.
"You're interesting," he said finally. "IronVeil values interesting."
A beat.
"Think about it," Vance continued. "Players who don't fit the system either rise fast…"
His eyes narrowed slightly.
"…or get corrected."
Then he left.
---
### Micro-Failure
I re-entered wireframe.
I pulled another wolf pack.
Blink.
Lag.
For 0.3 seconds, nothing happened.
The wolf's hitbox connected.
Pain flared across my ribs.
I stumbled.
That had never happened before.
The world stuttered.
**[ Warning: Sync Deviation Exceeds Threshold ]**
Second wolf aggroed early.
Chain pull.
I pivoted sharply, forced them into a narrow tree gap to manipulate collision physics.
One wolf clipped through bark for half a frame.
I stabbed.
Second stab.
Health dropped to 18%.
The chip behind my ear burned.
Heat spike.
Then—
**[ Sync Realigned ]**
The wolves slowed.
Not visually.
Mathematically.
Their animation rate dipped below normal tick speed for less than a second.
I capitalized.
Two clean kills.
I stood breathing lightly.
18% health. The number sat there and didn't move.
I hadn't taken damage yesterday. Not once. I had built an entire working model on the assumption that the desync was reliable — that I could time my position to the server's lag and take zero hits indefinitely.
The model was wrong.
Or rather: the model was right until the chip's sync deviation exceeded a threshold I didn't know existed, at which point the desync stopped being a tool and started being a liability.
I didn't know what that threshold was.
I didn't know how often I'd hit it.
I opened my stats.
No regen. No recovery mechanic at low health that I could see. I'd need to wait or eat something.
I sat down against a burnt tree and ate the one piece of starter bread still in my inventory from the tutorial reward bag.
It recovered 12 HP.
I was at 30%.
Still low enough that another chain pull would probably finish me.
I closed my inventory.
That delay hadn't been random.
The failure came first.
Then compensation.
But the compensation hadn't been mine.
---
### Marketplace Anomaly
I returned to Ashfall's edge and opened trade logs.
The Rusted Fang sale log had been edited.
**[ Buyer ID: System Archive Node 4 ]**
That wasn't a player.
I checked recent purchases.
Three other items with **\
Testing.
Someone — or something — was tracing undefined artifacts.
I closed the interface.
The Unknown Process line pulsed again.
**[ Resource Allocation Adjusted ]**
I felt it.
Not in the world.
In my head.
Like something had reached in and moved furniture.
Not painful. Not dramatic. Just — different, suddenly, in a way I hadn't chosen and couldn't undo.
I sat with that for a moment.
The exploit was mine. The chip was mine — technically, legally dubious, but mine. Beta was mine in the sense that it came with the hardware and answered to my prompts.
This wasn't mine.
This was something that had decided to adjust my resource allocation, and it had done it the same way I'd been exploiting the wolves — without asking, because asking wasn't in the process.
I thought about that for longer than I intended to.
Then I updated the spreadsheet.
*Unknown Process: active. Performing actions without input. Nature: unclear. Current action: apparently helpful. Do not assume this continues.*
I underlined the last sentence.
Twice.
---
### Escalation
A whisper cut across local chat.
"Target located."
I froze.
Two IronVeil scouts appeared at the treeline.
They weren't aggressive.
They were triangulating.
One activated a detection glyph.
A translucent grid expanded outward.
When it reached me —
It bent.
Not visibly.
But the wireframe warped.
Like space rejecting measurement.
The scout frowned.
"Reading unstable."
Vance's voice crackled through proximity channel.
"Stand down."
The scouts lowered their glyph.
I remained still.
Vance stepped back into view from the ridge.
"We don't force anomalies," he said calmly. "We study them."
I tilted my head. "Is that a threat?"
"It's policy."
Vance's eyes held steady.
"You're not glitching by accident."
I said nothing.
Vance continued:
"If you are exploiting something outside system tolerance, IronVeil can protect you."
A beat.
"Or report you."
The forest felt tighter.
---
### Final Trigger
As IronVeil withdrew, I reopened wireframe one last time.
For a brief moment —
The entire Ashfall forest rendered differently.
Not as geometry.
As layered code segments.
Mob spawn scripts. Loot tables. Aggro parameters.
And beneath all of it —
A black process thread weaving through everything.
I focused on it.
The thread noticed.
My HUD updated.
**[ Unknown Process: Privilege Escalation — 3% ]**
**[ Developer Attention: Pending ]**
I stared at that for a long time.
*Privilege Escalation.*
Not a bug descriptor. Not a player status. An infrastructure term — the kind that appeared in security reports, in breach documentation, in the kind of incident logs that resulted in server rollbacks and account terminations.
Something in the game's architecture was escalating its own access level.
Through me.
I was at 30% health. I had one piece of bread left. A guild had just run a triangulation scan on my position. And a process I couldn't identify had adjusted something inside my head without permission and was now climbing toward higher server access using my account as the ladder.
The logical thing — the correct thing, the thing a person with working self-preservation instincts would do — was to log out. Report the anomaly. Wait for a patch.
I looked at my spreadsheet.
Gold earned today: 340.
Rent due: nine days.
I closed wireframe.
I was not going to log out.
But I was going to be considerably more careful about what I assumed I controlled.
---
*[ END OF CHAPTER 2 ]*