The crimson debug overlay swallowed the world. The sky, once a smear of dying twilight, fractured into a lattice of crimson wireframes. The timeless zone, which had shielded them from the immediate effects of the World Purge, buckled. A cacophony of groaning metal and tearing fabric replaced the eerie silence, as if the very air was being shredded. Danika’s magic, poised to immolate Vlasta, wavered, its blue-white intensity momentarily diverted by the sheer, overwhelming anomaly outside. [Warning: Environment De-rez sequence initiating.] [World Purge Phase 1: Entity Cleanup Protocol – Eraser Units deployed.] The floor beneath Olek’s worn boots shuddered. He felt the timeless corridor, the glitched haven, losing its integrity. Dust rained from the ceiling, not soft motes, but granular motes that vanished mid-air, leaving behind shimmering afterimages. The distant spires of the Kravina Institute, visible through the newly gaping hole in the zone, began to dissolve. Not collapsing, but *unrendering*, their complex geometries simplifying into crude, flat textures that then winked out of existence, replaced by the raw, featureless void of an unfinished map. Then came the screams. Not the distant, muffled cries of a city under siege, but the immediate, piercing terror of hundreds of students. The Institute itself was under attack. Through the dissolving temporal distortion, Olek saw them—enormous obsidian monoliths, carved like anti-sculptures from pure absence, manifesting within the academy’s grand courtyard. They moved with an unsettling grace, their forms rippling as if absorbing light itself, and where they touched, reality evaporated. A group of academy cadets, their polished armor and ancestral blades useless, were simply gone, erased into nothingness, leaving behind only the ghost of their silhouettes. “Erasers,” Vlasta breathed, her rapier now pointed not at Olek, but at the encroaching void. Her eyes, usually so sharp and calculating, held a flicker of something close to dread. “They don’t just kill; they *unmake*.” Jarek, still weak, pushed himself upright, his stare fixed on the courtyard. The black veins beneath his skin throbbed toward his collarbone. “It’s faster than I remember,” he rasped, his voice raw. “The purge… it wasn’t supposed to start like this.” Danika, her fury at Vlasta momentarily forgotten, spun to Olek. Her focus locked onto him, sharp and possessive. “Olek, what do we do? We can’t fight them.” Her voice, usually a melodic command, was edged with genuine panic. For the first time, the original protagonist looked lost, vulnerable. Her omnipotent rage was useless against something that simply deleted targets. Olek’s mind raced, a frantic scramble through mental debug logs and half-remembered lore. The *World Purge*. The server core. The only way to stop it, his past self’s fragmented memory warned, was to reach the heart of Gordava’s engine, the central belfry itself. It stood higher than any other structure, a gothic sentinel humming with a faint, low-frequency resonance. “The belfry,” Olek said, his voice cutting through the panic. He pointed towards the highest spire, now partially obscured by the crimson wireframes of a rapidly de-rendering sky. “That’s where the server core is. If we can reach it… we can reset the purge.” “Reach it?” Vlasta scoffed, her gaze already measuring the crumbling masonry. “It’s half a klick away, across courtyards infested with those things. And we’re on the third floor of the dormitories, nowhere near a stable path.” “No stable *path*,” Olek corrected, a manic glint in his eye. He brandished his wooden soup ladle. “But the world’s a physics object now. And it’s disintegrating. We can climb.” He had seen speedrunners do it in old, ancient games. ‘Prop-climbing.’ Using environment assets, even descending chunks, to gain vertical momentum. The chaos was their advantage. “Jarek, can you move?” Olek asked, turning to his friend. Jarek nodded, though a grimace twisted his face. “Danika, Vlasta. Stay close. Do exactly what I do. And don’t think. Just move.” Another groan ripped through the building. The exterior wall of the timeless zone, the actual dormitory wall, buckled inwards. A section of wall, a massive concrete slab, tore free, dropping toward the flagstones below. But it didn't plummet straight down; it drifted at a rigid, off-kilter angle, like an unanchored asset. “Now!” Olek shouted. He sprinted toward the descending slab. Just as its corner sheared past the sill, he leapt, driving his left boot against the drop face. The surface was rough, crumbling, but it held for a fraction of a second. With a surge of strength, Olek pushed off, swinging his ladle down to tap the slab, then immediately thrusting it upwards, the action an impossible, frame-perfect sequence. A faint *thwack* echoed, and Olek launched himself higher, a burst of impossible vertical velocity. The slab continued its descent, but Olek was already sailing above it. [Sequence Break: Vertical Ascent (Prop-Climb) initiated. Bonus: +2 Stamina.] Danika vaulted after him, her boots trailing sparks of cold blue light. She didn’t need the ladle, her raw magic creating invisible platforms that she launched off, her eyes never leaving Olek. Vlasta, however, watched Olek’s precise, almost dance-like movements with an intensity that bordered on reverence. As the next slab groaned free, she didn’t hesitate. She copied his foot placement, the exact angle of the ladle’s tap, a flicker of spatial magic briefly manifesting around her own blade. She rose with a gasp, propelled upwards with almost as much force as Olek, a sharp grin touching her mouth. “Remarkable,” she muttered, already analyzing the physics. “A precise, localized displacement of… what is this, *momentum transfer*?” Jarek, stiff-limbed and gasping, threw his weight onto the rim of a detached masonry block, his blackened fingers locking around twisted rebar. He dragged himself up, his eyes locked on Olek. “Go, brother!” he coughed, his voice strained. They climbed, a desperate, impossible ascent. The fortress crumbled around them, entire corridors, lintels, and barracks peeling away into the red void. Each drop-stone became a momentary shelf, a launchpad for Olek’s glitch-enabled leaps. Danika matched him with her raw power, Vlasta with her terrifyingly fast comprehension, and Jarek, though struggling, held on with a fierce resolve. The ground below became a maelstrom of disappearing structures and patrolling Erasers. They floated ominously, their blank, obsidian surfaces reflecting the sickly red debug sky. One of them, its form like a jagged void, registered their movement. [Threat detected. Target acquisition: Olek Ruzha. Deletion Beam inbound.] A pencil-thin beam of pure nullity, an absence of light, lanced toward Olek. He hung mid-air, having just kicked off a tumbling gargoyle toward a higher ledge of the bell tower. There was no time to react, no space to dodge. “Olek!” Jarek roared. Despite his exhaustion, despite the Hollow Rot gnawing at his core, he surged forward with a burst of desperate, unnatural speed. He threw himself between Olek and the beam. The Eraser’s deletion beam struck Jarek full in the chest. But instead of evaporating him, something horrifying happened. The black veins across Jarek’s ribs flared violently, soaking in the null beam. The Hollow Rot, already a corruption of reality, met the deletion code head-on. It didn’t destroy Jarek; it *transformed* him. His skin rippled, not into flesh and blood, but into shimmering, glitching pixels. His ragged clothes dissolved, replaced by an armor of shifting, crimson and black wireframes. His sword, a simple, battered steel blade, elongated and thickened, morphing into a weapon of raw, volatile code, crackling with errant data. His eyes, once full of fierce loyalty, now glowed with an unsettling, vacant pitch-black, devoid of recognition. [Anomaly detected: Deletion Code Corruption. Host: Jarek Motal.] [Warning: Host Mind-State – Irrecoverable.] Jarek, or what remained of him, slammed onto the bell tower parapet with a dull thud. The code-armor rippled, then stabilized. He turned, his gaze sweeping over the horrified faces of Olek, Danika, and Vlasta. There was no pain, no struggle in his expression. Only a cold, alien calculation. He raised his corrupted blade, its edge whistling with jagged static, and leveled it at Olek.