"Don't. They're watching."

From the corners of the white room, shapes emerged. Not enemy players. They were entities made of pure error—jagged polygons, missing textures, limbs that bent backwards. Their nametags were not usernames. They were IP addresses. MAC addresses. Hard drive serial numbers. And above each one, a status: .

But power, especially stolen power, has a gravitational pull.

The terminal filled with lines of code—his code. The Phantom-ECC source code. But it was being rewritten in real-time. Functions were being inverted. Variables renamed. Then the terminal spat out a sentence:

Leo ripped the power cord from his surge protector. The screen went black. For a moment, he breathed. Then his monitor flickered back to life, powered by nothing—just the residual charge in his GPU. The terminal reappeared.

"You cannot alt-F4 reality, Leo."

The first sign something was wrong was the silence.

But he didn't disappear.

Then, a voice. Not in-game text chat. Not voice comms. It came through his actual speakers, layered over the Windows chime.

"Good choice, Leo. Game on."

He reinstalled Eternal Crusade . His new username: "Sorry."

One night, a new patch dropped. Version 4.2.1. The patch notes were boring—"fixed texture streaming, adjusted hitbox registration on the Reaper-class." Leo yawned, launched Phantom-ECC, and logged in.

"You are not a player. You are a vulnerability. Patching you now."