The brass teeth of the counterfeit key sheared off inside the lock with a dull, wet snap. Rain hammered the slate eaves of Ostravár, running off the gargoyles in thick, oily ribbons that reeked of tallow and furnace soot. Olek wiped filthy water from his eyelashes, spat into the gutter, and pulled out his wooden soup ladle. The maple bowl was charred black along the rim from three winters of burned turnip broth in the low-town slums. He didn't need the lock anyway. The door was just window dressing for tourists. He backed three paces into the sodden alley, squaring his spine against the damp masonry of the apothecary across the lane. The seam between the fifth and sixth course of river-stone had never been properly welded to the world. If you struck it at fifty-four degrees while interrupting a heavy swing, the universe forgot where your hips ended and the stone began. Olek swung the ladle with full force, snapping his wrist back halfway through the motion to reset his grip. His elbow drove into the mortar. [Warning: Physics state unregistered.] [Collision query returned NULL at chunk_id 0x4B2.] The stone gave way like lukewarm lard. Olek fell backward into absolute void. The rain vanished, replaced by the humming whine of unrendered void space—a flat gray abyss beneath the geometry of Ostravár where unfinished staircases dangled over a bottomless drop. He tucked his knees, tapped his heels twice against an invisible collision plane, and kicked off into the developer buffer. He popped through the cellar ceiling of the Chasm Codex vault, landing boots-first on polished malachite tile. No bells rang. No ward-glyphs triggered. He had bypassed two miles of sewer mazes, three packs of chained mire-hounds, and the scripted slaughter of twenty-four city guards that Danika Moroz was supposed to cut through during her grand awakening. In the center of the vault, floating on a column of frozen vapor, sat the Chasm Codex. It was bound in flayed vellum, its pages twitching like insect legs. Olek stepped up, his teeth grinding, and grabbed it with his bare hand. The chill burned straight into his bone marrow. [CRITICAL EXCEPTION: Quest target acquired out of sequence.] [Error: Fate path altered.] [Integrity compromise: 0.04%] [Deploying Patch_01.] The air behind him tore open with the sound of snapping bone. A creature unfolded from the seam in the room—not flesh, not ghost, but an impossible mass of jagged, untextured polygons that flickered between matte gray and screaming magenta. It had six jointless limbs that slid across the floor without walking cycles, its mouth an open, unshaded hole that hissed white noise. Patch_01 lunged. Olek hurled himself toward the decorative pillar on the left. The beast hit the floor where he had stood, flattening the stone into fractured wireframes. Olek didn't run for the sealed vault doors. Instead, he shoved the Codex into his rucksack, jammed the soup ladle into the corner where the malachite wall met a decorative urn, and jumped repeatedly into the seam. The world stuttered. The camera of his perception snapped outward, showing him his own shoulders from three feet away as the collision box squeezed him through the boundary. [Entity displacement: Forced re-anchor.] The void snatched him, turned him upside down, and spat him back out into the freezing rain of the alleyway behind the pig market. He landed on his hands and knees, skidding across rotten cabbage leaves and cold mud. He was gasping, his knuckles scraped bloody, clutching the pack against his ribs. The Codex throbbed inside the canvas like a stolen heart. "Olek?" A hand caught his collar, pulling him upright beneath the drip of a sagging awning. It was Jarek. His tall, lanky frame was wrapped in a patched wool cloak, his dark hair plastered to his forehead by the storm. He held a rusted iron cudgel in his left fist, his knuckles white. "You're alive," Jarek said, pulling Olek close. "I heard the bells near the harbor. The whole watch was shouting about a breach, and I thought—" The sentence died in his throat. A violent spasm racked his chest. He doubled over, grabbing his knees, and vomited onto the cobblestones. It wasn't bile. It was thick, iridescent black liquid, boiling with microscopic violet sparks that hissed against the rainwater. Olek grabbed his friend's shoulders, hauling him back against the wall. He tore open the damp linen collar. Running up the side of the exposed throat, branching toward the ear like cracked glaze on an earthenware pot, were black, necrotic veins that leaked a faint gray mist. "The rot," Olek whispered, his voice cracking with hot, sudden rage. "You said the cough was just coal dust. You lied to me." Jarek wiped his mouth with the back of his sleeve, smearing black residue across his chin. He forced a twisted grin, though his hands shook uncontrollably. "It's fine. It's just the low-town damp, Olek. Don't look at me like that. You don't have to carry every miserable bastard in this city." "You're dying, you idiot!" Olek shouted into the rain, his temper breaking like dry wood. He slammed his fist into the brick beside Jarek's head. "And you hid it from me!" Before Jarek could speak, the shadows at the mouth of the alley pooled together, dense and cold. A figure stepped into the drizzle. She wore no cloak against the downpour. Fine silver embroidery lined the cuffs of her dark blue tunic—the uniform of a high-tier prodigy from the Kravina Institute. Her pale hair clung to her cheekbones, and her eyes burned with an unnatural, unblinking azure glow that lit the rain falling between them. Danika Moroz stared straight at the rucksack on Olek's chest. "You took my burden," she whispered.

The Out-of-Bounds Heist