GLiTcH

Back in the guild hall, days later, the world was still glitching. The aurora never stopped flickering. NPCs spoke in broken lines. Entire zones warped and reset without warning.

Atlas paced, restless. “You’re famous now, Tanuki. Half the server’s calling you a hero. The other half’s calling you a curse. But Arsenyx… he’s the one who has it now.”

NV leaned against the wall, arms crossed. “That’s worse. He already had power. Now he has the unknown.”

Tanuki stared at the Deck of Echoes. The “???” Tarot was gone, ripped from him the moment the duel ended. But its absence was almost louder than its presence had been.

I touched it. I drew it. But he owns it now.

The duel was over. Arsenyx had won. But the victory was overshadowed by something far larger.

The “???” Tarot had entered the world. The glitches and oddities it unleashed were permanent. And the most dangerous player alive now held it in his hands.

The duel ended, but the world did not reset.

Normally, the Lunar Coliseum would return to pristine crystal, the aurora smoothing into its endless dance. But this time, the cracks remained. The aurora flickered. NPCs in the stands looped their applause, their mouths moving without sound.

And then the reports began.

Within hours of Arsenyx being awarded the “???” Tarot, players across the MMO noticed oddities:

In the Verdant Expanse, quest‑givers repeated lines out of order, sometimes speaking words no one had coded. In the Iron Marches, monsters spawned in impossible combinations, a wolf with the model of a wyvern, a wyvern that dropped quest items from a completely different zone. In the Sunken Archives, entire rooms flickered between states, sometimes pristine, sometimes collapsed ruins.

At first, players thought it was a bug. But when patches failed to fix it, when the oddities spread instead of shrinking, they realized the truth.

The world itself had changed. Objects, locations, materials. Even people.

The great guilds of the MMO convened emergency councils. The Obsidian Pact, a PvP powerhouse, declared the glitches an opportunity. They began experimenting with corrupted spawns, farming impossible loot combinations. The Dawn Accord, a lore‑focused guild, treated the anomalies as prophecy. They scoured the world for signs, convinced the “???” Tarot was a hidden expansion no one had announced. The Merchant’s Guilds panicked. The economy destabilized overnight as glitched mobs dropped items that shouldn’t exist, flooding markets with rare mats and crashing prices. And through it all, one name dominated every discussion: Arsenyx.

He had won the duel. He had claimed the nameless card. And now, he held the most dangerous artifact in the game.

It wasn’t just players who noticed. NPCs began to act… differently.

A blacksmith in the starter town looked Tanuki in the eye and said, “You shouldn’t have drawn it.” Then reset to his normal dialogue loop. A quest‑giver in the desert zone offered a mission titled [NULL], with objectives that shifted every time a player opened the log. In one city, guards patrolled in reverse, walking backward along their routes, their animations rewinding.

Developers insisted it was “visual instability.” On the official forums, moderators locked threads about the “???” Tarot within minutes. Patch notes ignored the glitches. Customer support gave canned responses: “We are aware of visual inconsistencies and are working on a fix.”

But no fix came.

Behind the scenes, rumors spread: that the “???” Tarot wasn’t a bug at all, but a piece of code buried deep in the MMO’s architecture. Something no one had meant to surface. Something that had been waiting. 

Tanuki became infamous almost overnight, his name occupying the air of streets of Geminus to the walls in the hub of Aries, Arium.

Some hailed him as a player of interest, the one who had drawn the card, the one who had revealed the truth of a flimsy online virtual reality. Others cursed him, blaming him for the instability, for the broken quests, for the economy’s collapse.

But Tanuki didn’t have the card. Arsenyx did.

And that made Tanuki something worse than a villain. It made him irrelevant.

Arsenyx did not flaunt the “???” Tarot. He didn’t boast, didn’t taunt. He simply carried it, silent, patient. But wherever he went, the world warped more violently.

In dungeons, bosses froze mid‑animation when he entered. In raids, loot tables collapsed, dropping items from expansions that hadn’t even been released. In PvP, his opponents reported lag spikes, their avatars stuttering as if the system itself bent around him.

He didn’t need to use the card. His possession of it was enough.

The duel in the Lunar Coliseum had been a spectacle. But in hindsight, it was only the prologue.

The “???” Tarot had entered the world. The glitches and oddities it unleashed were permanent. Guilds scrambled, economies collapsed, NPCs whispered, and developers stayed silent.

And at the center of it all stood Arsenyx, the invincible and unfelted king who had claimed the nameless card, the player who now carried the weight of a world that no longer obeyed its own rules.

The MMO was no longer just a game. It was something else. Something unstable. Something alive.