Code of Suffering

CHAPTER 3 - Debugging the Impossible

Ethan's ribs still ached from the bandits' beating. Every breath sent knives through his chest, and every step was a reminder that he had once believed "realistic pain thresholds" were a brilliant idea.
Lyra floated at his shoulder, humming softly. "You're quiet."
He managed a weak laugh. "Trying not to die again."
"You're bad at that," she said cheerfully. "Most Forsaken die within a day. You've lasted two."
"Encouraging."
She twirled in the air, examining his face. "You're not like the others."
"Because I made this place," he muttered.
"What?"
He shook his head. "Nothing. Forget it."
They passed through the slum's market square — a tangle of tents and cobbled stalls where desperate NPCs traded worthless scraps. Ethan had written them all: the old woman selling broken armor, the child pickpocketing travelers, the priest begging for coin to "repair the church."
Every one of them had been a few lines of code once. Now they breathed.
He stopped at a wall covered in glowing script — graffiti written in the runic system of Eclipsera's dev language. Only he could understand it.
"Property Paths — Subclass Overrides."
His heart quickened. That's part of the old debug network.
If it still functioned, it could give him limited control — perhaps access to hidden commands, or data strings embedded in the environment.
"Lyra," he said slowly, "do you know what this means?"
She tilted her head. "Old magic. The runes of the Makers."
He smiled faintly. "Yeah... you could say that."
He touched the wall. The code pulsed faintly beneath his fingers. A line of text shimmered:
Command Entry: Restricted. Authentication Required.
He focused, whispering, "Vale.Ethan — Developer Key 1A93Z."
Nothing.
Then a flicker. The letters shifted.
Partial Access Granted. Warning: Memory Corruption Detected.
The wall dissolved into a swirl of blue light. Inside the data stream, he saw fragments of himself — bits of code he had written months ago: class hierarchies, weapon scaling tables, skill scripts.
He reached in mentally, searching for anything that could help him survive.
Then he saw it:
Deprecated Class: Debug Skill — "Code Pulse."
"Perfect," he whispered. He triggered it.
Pain seared through his arm. The wall flared, then exploded in a shockwave of light. Lyra shrieked and darted behind his shoulder as Ethan collapsed, clutching his hand.
When the light faded, a faint icon hovered before him — like a semi-transparent HUD.
NEW SKILL UNLOCKED: [Code Pulse] — Manipulate environmental scripts at minor risk to self-integrity.
He laughed despite the pain. "It worked."
Lyra peeked out from behind him. "You nearly erased yourself!"
"Worth it," he said, inspecting the faint digital aura now circling his hand. "I can rewrite parts of this world. Even if it kills me."
***
That night, he tested it in the ruins beyond the slum — a place filled with broken constructs and corrupted creatures. He extended his hand toward a cracked statue and whispered, "Code Pulse."
The stone glowed, briefly reverting to its original, majestic form — a knight of Eclipsera's first age. Then it shattered.
Lyra gasped. "You brought it back... even for a moment."
"Every object here still remembers what it used to be," Ethan said softly. "I can tap into that memory. Rewrite it. Restore it."
"And yourself?"
He smiled grimly. "Working on that part."
Hours passed as he practiced. He learned to "patch" broken weapons, to disarm traps by rewriting their trigger logic, to glitch through damaged barriers. Each success drained him, leaving static in his vision and blood in his mouth. But each failure taught him more.
By dawn, his ragged tunic was replaced by reforged armor plates from scavenged code fragments — crude, unstable, but his.
When he caught his reflection in the metallic pool nearby, Kael's hollow eyes looked different now.
Still haunted. But burning.
***
On their way back to the slums, Lyra asked, "Why keep pushing? No one else would."
Ethan stared at the city's distant towers — where the noble classes lived above the clouds.
"Because I built this place to make people suffer," he said quietly. "Now I have to see if I can build something better."
A faint smile touched Lyra's lips. "Then maybe you're not Forsaken anymore."
He laughed softly. "Not yet."
But when he turned, the faint glitch of his code flickered again — a red error string in his vision:
WARNING: Integrity at 92%. Unauthorized rewriting detected.
The world was watching him now.
And something — someone — wasn't pleased.