Vasco stared at the pulsating orb in Nuncio’s palm, then at his friend’s expectant face. It glowed with a pure, unblemished light, almost too perfect to exist. His Beta UI, however, remained stubbornly silent, offering no prompt, no tutorial pop-up for ‘Accept Creator Deity’s Core’. Inesca watched the core with held breath, her lips parting as if before an altar, while Vasco assumed Nuncio had finally pulled up an admin-tier quest item. “Nuncio,” Vasco said, his voice a low rumble. “Are you… sure?” Nuncio shrugged, his smile a little too wide, a little too casual. “Sure. It’s not like I’m using it for anything important right now. Mostly just keeping the cosmos from unraveling, you know. Standard Sunday stuff.” He jiggled the core slightly. “Take it. We’ve got a maniac to stop, remember?” Vasco carefully took the core. It felt warm, impossibly light, and hummed against his skin, a vibration that resonated deep within his bones. A strange sense of completion bloomed in his chest. Inesca leaned closer, her breath brushing his ear. “The ritual… it needs this. It will anchor you, Vasco.” “Then we go,” Vasco stated, his gaze hardening. “To the Nexus,” Vasco said, assuming the grandmaster had simply triggered a scripted dungeon event. They hurried from the archives. The former demon lord stepped out from the pillars, his makeshift evening suit impeccably pressed, though his claws rattled against a heavy brass doorknob. “Master, the Imperial Leyline Nexus. It is fouled by void bile, if my senses do not deceive me.” “Lead on, Xal,” Vasco said, tossing the warm sphere like a coin. Gilded corridors slipped past, their painted banners fluttering as distant shouting bounced off marble vaults. They reached the Nexus chamber beneath the central spire, where crystalline pillars pulsed with raw current. Now those conduits leaked a bruised violet glare. Fleshy, polyhedral growths choked the quartz ribs. Hovering above the floor hung the head scholar. The frail administrator had swollen into a grey hulk plated in jagged calcified ribs. Compound facets burned across his brow. “Rellano!” he bellowed, the sound rattling the flagstones. “You insolent bumpkin! You think you can patch this? I will unravel every leyline, and you along with it!” [ERROR: Entity_Valerius_AbyssalLord_01 – Model corruption exceeds parameters. Render state unstable.] Vasco merely squinted at the floating wireframe error. Inesca drew a copper stylus from her sleeve, her fingers stiff. Nuncio, munching on a pocket biscuit, merely sighed at the floating brute, while the suited fiend beside him leveled a silver salver like a buckler. “Grandmaster,” Vasco chided, flourishing his pine branch. “You picked the wrong build to grief.” Vasco darted in, swinging the wooden branch. The mutated scholar swung back with talons leaking purple smog. Stick met claw with a screech like tearing sheet metal. Strips of iridescent, semi-adhesive light wrapped the grandmaster's forearms, cinching the leaking textures together. The beast bellowed, ripping at the spectral bindings. “Inesca, drop the anchor!” Vasco called, ducking beneath a purple spray that pitted the pavers. Inesca traced geometric runes onto the floor with steady sweeps of chalk. Nuncio flicked pastry crumbs at nearby tendrils, dissolving the stray sludge on contact. Xal-Gharat batted away a lunging tentacle using his polished silver tray, his velvet coattails snapping crisp against the masonry. Vasco whacked each contaminated conduit with his stick to reset their logic tables. Streams of phosphor-green glyphs flushed the violet blight away, restoring clean quartz hums. Yet the monstrosity slammed an elbow into Vasco's shoulder, rattling his collarbone with force that felt uncomfortably tangible. The creature howled as the branch clipped a shoulder spur, knocking loose a burst of pixelated soot. “Insolent tool! You will witness the end, Rellano! And your idle mascot falls first!” Pivoting on his warped heel, the monstrosity aimed a condensed lance of black plasma straight toward Nuncio. The slumping youth looked up mid-chew, crumbs dusting his chin. A flash of charcoal wool cut the path. The former archfiend stepped between them, his posture rigid as the projectile pierced his lapels and plunged through wool, vest, and sternum. The ancient dreadlord coughed once, his jaw dropping. Nuncio gasped, dropping his biscuit. “Xal!” He dropped to one knee, tarry black fluid soaking his pleated shirt front. “Master… Nuncio… apologies… for the mess…” Vasco stared at the pool of dark fluid pooling beneath his butler's knee. That was supposed to be a scripted minion, an ornamental companion piece. Not this. “Xal!” Vasco shouted. The blue status box before his retina exploded in crackling static, the interface peeling away in jagged scanlines. [CRITICAL ERROR: Soul_Tether_001 – Stability_Integrity: 0%] [WARNING: Core_System_Meltdown – Dimensional_Anchor_Failure_Imminent] [UNAUTHORIZED PROTOCOL: Source_Code_Injection – Activating Emergency_Override_Protocol_Omega] [EXECUTION: TERMINATE_THREAT – PRIMARY_TARGET: Entity_Valerius_AbyssalLord_01] A cascade of raw instruction syntax spilled from Vasco’s stick. Glowing strings of base logic crashed into the bloated grandmaster. The hulking form dissolved from the waist down, pixels decoupling into blank grid lines until his lower torso evaporated into nothingness. The remaining torso screeched and disintegrated into floating wireframe scraps that winked out. Vasco lowered the stick, his chest heaving, the small orb burning hot against his fingers. “Master… the interface…” the wounded butler rasped, pointing a black-tipped finger. “Your… clock…” Vasco looked down. His Beta UI was gone, but etched into his very being, burning into his vision, was a single, stark number. [00:00:00] [ERROR: Soul_Tether_001 – Disintegration_Sequence_Initiated] A stiff numbness crept through Vasco's wrists. His fingers grew translucent, the skin breaking into pale, floating voxels that dissolved toward the vaulted ceiling.

Source Code and Ruined Tuxedos