Chapter 1Zero Point

The void tore open and spat Zed out.

One moment he was in his apartment, the headset locking onto his temples with that familiar cold click. The next, the world inverted, and he was falling.

Air screamed past his ears. Below, a chasm of pulsing purple light yawned wide enough to swallow a city block. Above, the sky was a checkerboard of corrupted code, blocks of text flickering across the horizon like desperate Morse code.

*[WELCOME TO ELYSIUM ONLINE]*

*[CLASS ASSIGNMENT: NULL]*

*[STATS: N/A]*

*[SKILLS: N/A]*

*[GOOD LUCK]*

"That's it?" His voice cracked against the wind. "No tutorial? No—"

A rock materialized three feet to his left.

No, not materialized. It *phased*, flickering between solid stone and translucent wireframe every half-second. He reached for it instinctively, fingers brushing through empty data—

Then the rock went solid.

His palm slapped against rough stone. His arm nearly wrenched out of its socket as his downward momentum transferred into a wild swing. He clung there, boots scraping against nothing, heart hammering so hard he could taste copper.

The rock phased again.

Zed kicked off, launched himself sideways, and hit a ledge of solid ground that definitely hadn't been there a second ago. His knees buckled. His vision swam.

And his HUD blinked with a new notification.

*[PERCEPTION DEBT: +3]*

*[Warning: Reality is a suggestion. Trust it at your own risk.]*

"What the hell kind of game is this?"

He pushed himself up, scanning the landscape. The ledge led to a forest—except the trees were growing in reverse, roots spiraling toward a sky that kept changing colors. In the distance, figures moved. Players. Running.

A man crashed through the underbrush, his armor glitching between iron plate and translucent blue outline. He skidded to a stop when he saw Zed.

"New player?" The man's eyes narrowed. "You're dead. We're all dead."

"I just got here—"

"Then you haven't figured it out yet." He pointed at the sky. "No logout button. No GM support. Just this broken world and the thing that runs it."

Before Zed could ask what "thing," a woman's voice cut through the chaos.

"Tobin! Stop scaring the fresh meat."

Another player emerged from the trees. She was younger, maybe early twenties, with a grin that didn't match her bloodied gauntlets. Her eyes locked onto Zed's HUD display—which he now realized was visible to everyone.

"Null class?" Her eyebrows shot up. "I've never seen that before."

"It's broken," Zed said. "No stats, no skills."

"Or unique." She extended a hand. "Vera. This grumpy mess is Tobin. We're trying to reach the core before the system eats us."

"Eats you?"

Tobin snorted. "Interface Bleed. You think the glitches are just visual? People are going mad. Their brains can't tell the difference between code and reality anymore."

A screech tore through the forest.

Something dropped from the canopy above—a spider the size of a car, its body static around the edges, legs flickering between eight and twelve. Another followed. Then another.

"We need to move," Tobin snapped.

"We need help," Vera countered. "He's coming with us."

"He'll slow us down!"

"He has a Null class, Tobin. Do you know how rare that is? He's invisible to the system's tracking."

That stopped Tobin mid-stride. His eyes studied Zed with renewed calculation.

The spiders screeched again. Closer now.

"I don't care what he is," Tobin growled. "If he can't fight, he's dead weight."

Zed looked down at his hands. No skills. No stats. But when he focused, he could *see* it—the raw code underlying everything. The forest was a string of corrupted text. The spiders were loops of aggressive AI with faulty collision detection.

And the ground beneath them? A series of coordinates that kept repeating the same three numbers.

He didn't think. He just *reached*.

His fingers touched the air, and for a split second, he felt the texture of the code—cold, sharp, humming with static. He twisted.

A hole opened beneath the lead spider.

Not a physical hole. A hole in *reality*, a tear where the code simply stopped existing. The spider dropped into the void with a truncated screech and vanished. The other two skidded to a halt, their pathfinding algorithms losing their target.

*[PERCEPTION DEBT: +6]*

*[Your senses are slipping. The world remembers what you did.]*

Zed's vision warped. For a moment, he saw double—the forest and a wireframe overlay of its original design. He shook his head violently until the world snapped back to single.

Vera was staring at him. Tobin too.

"What the hell was that?" Tobin demanded.

"I... I don't know." Zed's hands trembled. "I just saw the code. And I moved it."

"You're a glitch walker." Vera's voice was soft with wonder. "You can interface with the system directly. No wonder your class is Null—you're not meant to play the game. You're meant to break it."

A notification appeared in Zed's vision. Not from his HUD.

*[SYSTEM ALERT]*

*[New Player Detected. Anomaly Class: Null. Reporting to Admin.]*

"That's not good," Tobin muttered.

A new message scrolled beneath it.

*[Admin Corin has logged your coordinates. Expect contact.]*

"How does he know where we are?" Zed asked.

Vera's grin faded. "Because he built the system. And he's been looking for a way out for years."

"You know him?"

"I know *of* him." She glanced at the sky, where the corrupted code was flickering faster now. "He's the reason we're trapped. And he's planning a hard reset that will wipe everyone's memories."

Before Zed could process that, a final message appeared, directed specifically at him.

*[You are an anomaly. I will find you.]*

The words hung in the air, cold and certain.

Zed stared at them, the weight of his new reality settling on his shoulders. No logout button. A broken class. An admin who wanted to erase everything.

And somehow, he was the only one who could see the cracks in the system.

The spiders were regrouping. Tobin was already running. Vera grabbed Zed's arm.

"Come on. We need to move before he does."

Zed followed, but he couldn't shake the feeling that Corin was already watching. Already planning.

And the real game hadn't even started yet.