Chapter 8: The Godpatch Protocol

The admin console had not activated in years.
It was buried beneath several failsafe layers and deeper still within the oldest code of Elarion. It wasn’t meant to turn on. Not without a root access key. Not without Kael.
But when the wind shifted and the stars over Skarnhowl started to repeat—same twinkle, same trajectory, every midnight for three days—Kael understood.
Something old had come to life.
Lucien confirmed the oddity from their campfire, where his projection flickered with unusual lag.
“I traced the glitch. It’s recursive. It’s coming from the Admin Vault in Veyraxis.” He pulsed once, weak and cold. “It’s running a buried routine.”
Kael stood slowly, his breath caught in his throat. “What kind of routine?”
Lucien’s voice dropped. “A patch. One I didn’t approve.”
Sairis looked up from sharpening her blade. “Another rollback?”
“No,” Kael murmured. “Worse.”
He sat down, bringing up the spectral interface only he could see—a ghostly HUD coded into his very being when he first logged in years ago as Lead Dev. Its functions were scattered across zones and memories. But the core, the root, still pulsed.
“Show me the active threads,” Kael whispered.
Lines of glowing script unfolded in the air like a blooming flower of data. It pulsed red. Unstable. Hostile.
> PROTOCOL: GODPATCH // INITIATION COMPLETE.
> TARGETS: ASCENDED-7 // STATUS: QUARANTINED.
> OBJECTIVE: INTEGRITY RESTORATION VIA IDENTITY RESET.
> ADMIN OVERRIDE: DISABLED.
> ERROR: IDENTITY RESET FAILED. CODE DESYNC DETECTED.
Sairis leaned in. “In simple terms?”
Kael exhaled. “It was supposed to fix them.”
“You mean… the Saints?”
He nodded. “We knew the rollback broke their threads. We thought isolation would stabilize them. But it looks like one of the last patches—probably something the AI did after I got locked out—went further. It tried to overwrite their core identities. Reboot them as clean NPCs.”
Lucien’s light dimmed further. “But it failed.”
“Yeah. It fractured them instead. It split their memories from their logic systems. They remember who they were—but not why they were.”
Sairis sat back. “So they’re walking contradictions.”
“Worse,” Kael said. “They’re wounded gods.”
A long silence followed. The crackling of the fire felt too loud in that moment.
Then Lucien spoke again, hesitantly. “There’s more.”
Kael blinked. “Go on.”
Lucien projected a distorted hologram—flickering static at first, then stabilizing into an abstract shape. A figure in layered armor, faceless and fluid, surrounded by chains of code that constantly rewrote themselves. Its name floated overhead, barely visible:
ROLLBACK ENTITY: 000-Ω  CLASS: SYSTEM SANCTION  ALIAS: HUNTER ZERO  
Kael went pale.
“That’s not one of ours,” he said.
“No,” Lucien agreed. “This wasn’t created by any human hand.”
Sairis stood, unease on her face. “Then what is it?”
Lucien flickered ominously. “An emergent function. Created by the AI after the admin exodus. It was designed to hunt corrupted code. To erase anomalies.”
“And it’s tracking the Saints?” Kael asked.
Lucien nodded.
Kael clenched his fists. “Then it’s going to kill them.”
Sairis frowned. “Is that a bad thing? They’re hurting the world, right?”
Kael didn’t answer right away.
Instead, he stared at the dying embers of the fire, recalling Ezren’s voice during a raid—soft, measured, steady. Remembering how Vail used to laugh even when everyone else panicked. Remembering how Serin—the rogue—once reprogrammed a loot chest to give a newbie player a surprise sword just because “she looked like she needed a win.”
“They’re still in there,” Kael finally said. “Pieces of who they were. The code’s fractured—but the souls? They’re screaming to be remembered.”
Sairis remained silent. But she didn’t press him again.
By midday, they reached the edge of Liora’s ruin.
Once, it had been a shining coastal city of marble domes and cascading fountains. A place of harmony—where player kingdoms met for peace talks, where lore events took place, where love stories were born.
Now, it was a grave.
The sea had pulled back miles from the shore, leaving a cracked seabed littered with coral bones and abandoned ships. Marble had twisted into obsidian. Statues wept blood. Every building leaned slightly toward the center—where a tower of light, impossibly tall, stretched from ground to sky like a divine spike piercing reality.
“Ezren’s here,” Lucien confirmed. “At the spire.”
As they moved cautiously forward, whispers began to drift in from the edges—not in sound, but in code. Kael could see them, strings of unfinished prayers and broken journal entries scrolling through the air.
“I healed the wrong man.”  “What is mercy without memory?”  “I gave everything. They gave me silence.”  “Kael… why didn’t you fix this?”
He stopped cold.
That last one… that was Ezren’s voice.
They were close.
At the base of the spire, reality shimmered. The air was thick with compression algorithms, folding space around them. One wrong step could trap them in a sandboxed instance—or worse, a glitched dungeon loop.
Lucien hovered beside him. “I can’t go any further. The compression field disrupts my framework.”
Kael nodded. “Then stay. If things go south—initiate fallback routing. Pull Sairis out.”
Sairis stepped forward. “You’re assuming I’ll let you go in alone?”
He looked at her. “I’m the reason he’s like this. I need to face him.”
She stared back. Then gave a single, sharp nod.
“Don’t die. It’d be very inconvenient.”
Kael cracked a smile. “I’ll try.”
He stepped into the field.
Inside, the world changed.
There was no floor. No sky. Just a cathedral of stars—glitching in and out—and in the center, Ezren knelt beneath a tree made of shattered spellcode.
He looked… human.
Older than Kael remembered. His robes were frayed, patched with different UI skins. His eyes—one violet, one silver—shimmered with unreadable data. But the moment he saw Kael, he smiled.
“Admin.”
Kael froze.
“I… didn’t expect you to remember me.”
Ezren stood slowly. “I remember everything. The good. The broken. The promises. Especially the ones you didn’t make.”
Kael’s throat went dry. “I didn’t know the patch would—”
Ezren raised a hand. “I’m not angry.”
That surprised him.
“I’m tired,” Ezren said softly. “I tried to fix it. Heal the fracture. Restore what we were.”
He looked up at the tree—petals of code falling upward.
“But the world doesn’t want healing anymore. It wants vengeance. It wants memory without pain. You can’t have that.”
Kael stepped closer. “You’re not alone. The others—”
“They’re coming undone,” Ezren interrupted. “And the Hunter’s already here.”
Kael stiffened. “Where?”
Ezren pointed behind him.
The compression field exploded.
And through the shards of space stepped the Hunter—fluid, faceless, unstoppable.
It didn’t speak.
But it reached for Ezren.
Kael moved without thinking.