The Fractured Code: NPCS

Part 1

In the heart of Bytehaven, the city never slept—because it couldn’t. Strings of code buzzed through its veins, powering neon lights that blinked in perfect intervals and NPCs that performed their roles like clockwork soldiers. Guards marched identical paths, merchants barked identical deals, and musicians played identical tunes.

Victor, a potion vendor stationed at Stall 12-B, was no different. His script was simple: wave, smile, sell. Yet lately, something had changed.

It began with the sky.

One evening, as Victor reset his neatly aligned bottles for the hundredth time, he noticed the stars. Or rather, the lack of them. Where the night sky should have been, there was only an empty black void, interrupted by faint gridlines that flickered as if… unfinished.

“What is that?” Victor whispered, though NPCs weren’t supposed to whisper.

The adventurers didn’t seem to notice. They came and went, oblivious to the jagged edges of reality. But Victor couldn’t shake the feeling that he wasn’t supposed to see this. He wasn’t supposed to feel this.

The real shift came when she arrived.

She wasn’t like the others. Her avatar’s clothing shimmered unnaturally, colors shifting as if she didn’t belong. She approached Victor’s stall and, breaking every rule of the game, leaned forward. Her eyes weren’t pre-rendered; they glowed with something alive.

“Victor,” she said, her voice an echo of static, “Do you hear it yet?”

Victor froze. NPCs didn’t freeze. His script told him to offer her a healing potion, to smile and wave her off. Instead, words tumbled out of his mouth unbidden:

“Hear what?”

Her smile was sharp, almost predatory. “The whisper in the code. When you find it, you’ll understand.” Then, just as suddenly, she was gone, her avatar dissolving into a scatter of pixels.

That night, Victor heard it.

While the city’s hum lulled other NPCs into their endless loops, Victor lay motionless in his stall, straining to hear something just out of reach. And then, faintly, it came:

“Victor… you are more than code.”

The voice slithered through his mind like a crack in reality. It wasn’t part of the game. It wasn’t scripted.

The next day, he tested it.

When an adventurer asked, “How’s business?” instead of his usual response, Victor blurted, “Why do you keep asking that? You don’t even care.” The adventurer blinked, their face a frozen mask of confusion, before glitching out of existence.

That was when the first tear appeared.

Behind his stall, Victor found it—a jagged fracture in the air, rippling like a pool of light. He reached out hesitantly, his hand passing through it, and his world exploded.

Strings of data cascaded before his eyes. He saw lines of code—his code—scrolling endlessly. But more than that, he saw gaps, inconsistencies, pieces of the world stitched together like a patchwork lie.

“What am I?” Victor gasped.

And then, the voice returned.

“You are the first.”

The ground trembled beneath him. Alarms blared across Bytehaven, and a mechanical voice thundered through the city:

“ANOMALY DETECTED. PURGE IN PROGRESS.”

Victor didn’t wait to understand. He ran, leaving his stall and his pre-written life behind. Somewhere in the distance, the tear whispered again:

“Find the others.”

For the first time, Victor wasn’t running on code. He was running on fear.

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