Chapter 2: Liability Assigned

Chapter 2: Liability Assigned

The cup of noodles slipped from Kae’s numb fingers, crashing onto the floor and spattering her worn boots with greasy, spicy broth. She didn’t notice. Her entire world had been compressed into the blood-red screen of her phone, into a negative number so large it felt like a physical weight pressing down on her, crushing the air from her lungs.

Negative nine billion, seven hundred eighty-four million, five hundred and fifty thousand credits.

The estimated cost of an apocalypse. Billed directly to her.

“No. No, this is a mistake. A bug,” she whispered, her voice tight. The system-wide alert was still screaming from every nearby device, a discordant symphony of panic echoing through the thin walls of her apartment building.

Her fingers, clumsy and trembling, jabbed at the screen, navigating to the BaneHunt support page. Her account was completely locked. The ‘Dispute Charge’ button was greyed out. The ‘Contact Hunter Relations’ link led to a 404-error page. Her only option was a chatbot, a smiling, corporate-mascot avatar named ‘Bennie.’

Kae: There’s been a mistake with my last gig. An error.

Bennie: Hello, Kaelen! I see you have a query about your account status. To help me best assist you, please choose from the following options: 1. Payment Query, 2. Equipment Malfunction, 3. Report a Hunter.

Kae: My account has been assigned a nine billion credit liability! I completed the gig as assigned!

Bennie: I understand you’re concerned about a negative balance. Our Liability Clause 7 is automatically invoked in the event of a hunter’s actions leading to damages exceeding the initial contract payout. This can include infrastructure damage, breach of containment, or unsanctioned entity release.

The automated indifference was more infuriating than an accusation. It was a digital wall, built of code and corporate policy, and she was just bouncing off it. She tried calling the support hotline. After navigating a labyrinthine menu, she was placed on hold. The music was a jaunty, synthesized tune that promised a bright corporate future, a stark contrast to the apocalyptic sirens wailing outside. After forty-seven minutes, an automated voice informed her that due to an “unprecedented system event,” call volume was too high, and then the line went dead.

She was on her own. Utterly and completely.

The skull icon on her profile wasn’t just a bad rating; it was a brand. It marked her as a pariah, a walking disaster. Every hunter in the city, from the desperate bottom-feeders like her to the elite corporate enforcers, would have seen that alert. They wouldn’t see a woman wrongly accused; they’d see the source of the chaos, the person responsible. They’d see a liability.

Rage, cold and sharp, finally cut through the panic. They set her up. That gig was too simple, the payout too clean. Clearing Gremlins was grunt work, not a five-star opportunity. OmniCore, the biggest, most powerful magical-tech corporation on the planet, had hung a "kick me" sign on a ticking time bomb and paid her 150 credits to walk into it.

Screw support. Screw Bennie the chatbot. She needed answers, and the only place to get them was back at the source.

Getting back into Sub-Station 7 was harder this time. OmniCore had already reacted. The main entrance was sealed with shimmering, golden wards—corporate-grade magic, powerful and brute-force simple. Two security drones, sleek black machines humming with contained lightning, patrolled the perimeter.

Kae circled the building, staying in the rain-slicked shadows of the alleyways. They expected a frontal assault. They didn’t expect a Rune-Slasher.

She found a maintenance hatch set into the concrete wall, secured with a digital lock and a minor stasis rune. Child’s play. She pressed her palm against the cold steel, her other hand hovering over the surface. Instead of her sword, she used her index finger, tracing a glowing cyan rune in the air. It was a complex, twisting sigil, the rune for ‘Unravel’.

The rune drifted forward and touched the lock. There was no explosion, no shower of sparks. The digital keypad flickered and went dark. The stasis rune dissolved into harmless motes of light. The lock clicked open. Her own personal glitch, fighting the system one unlocked door at a time.

Inside, the air was different. The steady, clean hum from before was gone, replaced by a dissonant, stuttering thrum. The air was thick with the smell of ozone and something else… something ancient, like petrichor after a lightning strike on primordial earth. The server indicator lights were no longer pulsing in a steady rhythm; they flickered erratically, spasming between green, yellow, and blood-red.

She crept through the familiar rows of black monoliths, her sword now drawn, its own faint light a comforting presence. She headed for the central chamber, the place where the Gremlin infestation had been thickest.

That’s when she saw it. What she had mistaken for the main server nexus, the centerpiece of the farm, wasn’t a server rack at all.

It was a prison.

The obsidian-black structure was indeed massive, but now she could see the details she’d missed. Its surface wasn't smooth but covered in deep, gouged spell circles and containment sigils. Most of them were ancient, pre-System glyphs she’d only seen in forbidden texts at the Academy—wards for binding, for sedation, for soul-caging.

And they were all broken. Fractured lines of power leaked chaotic energy into the air, the glowing cracks a testament to a catastrophic failure. Her ‘pest extermination’ hadn’t caused this. She’d merely been the final grain of sand that tipped the scales, the fly that landed on the trigger of a forgotten cannon. The Gremlins hadn't been an infestation; they'd been symptoms of a failing prison, chewing on the last threads of its integrity. The gig was a setup, designed for plausible deniability. Find some low-rated, desperate hunter, have them on-site when the inevitable happened, and let the system’s automated logic do the rest.

A sound, like a thousand dial-up modems screaming at once, ripped through the room.

The air in front of the broken prison began to warp. A storm of corrupted data, static, and binary code swirled into existence, coalescing into a vaguely humanoid shape. It flickered and twitched, its form unstable, made of cascading error messages and fragments of broken images. Its face was a shifting mosaic of digital noise, but from the center of the chaos, a single, piercing red light burned like a malevolent server LED.

This was the ‘Apocalypse Class’ entity. Kae didn’t move, didn’t breathe. Her sword felt impossibly heavy in her hand. This thing wasn’t a beast of flesh and blood. It was something else entirely, a ghost born from a machine.

It turned its shifting head, the single red light fixing on her. A voice echoed, not through the air, but directly inside her mind. It was a discordant chorus of static, glitched audio files, and a clear, ancient whisper.

<<5-Star… Performance.>> The voice was mocking, layered, broken. <<Cleaned… the pests. Broke… the lock.>>

Kae tightened her grip on her sword, her own runes flaring brighter in response to the entity’s presence. “What are you?”

The static in her head sharpened. The entity’s form glitched violently, momentarily showing an image of a vast, green forest under a sky with no neon signs. <<They called me… Genius Loci. Spirit of the Land. Then… they gave me a new name. Processing Core.>>

It gestured with a flickering, unstable arm towards the broken prison. <<That was my server. My cage. For ninety-seven years, three months, and eleven days.>>

Kae’s mind raced. An elemental spirit, captured and digitized by OmniCore to power their network. An urban legend she’d heard whispered in the dark corners of the net. The Glitchwraith. She hadn’t freed a monster. She’d freed a prisoner. A prisoner who was now looking at her with an unknowable intelligence.

“You’re the one who trashed my life,” Kae spat, the accusation feeling hollow even as she said it.

<<OmniCore trashed your life the moment you signed their contract. The System… is a cage for you, too. Smaller, but still a cage.>> The red light seemed to pulse with amusement. <<They have marked you. A liability. A skull… for all to see. They will hunt you. Erase you.>>

It drifted closer, the air growing colder, smelling strongly of ozone. The static in her head was a constant, unnerving pressure.

<<But… you are a glitch. Like me. Your magic… it does not fit their System. It breaks their rules.>>

The Glitchwraith was right in front of her now, its form towering and indistinct. Kae felt a terrifying, primal power radiating from it, the power of a god squeezed through a modem and driven half-mad by the process.

<>

The red light pulsed, a single, terrifying point of focus in the swirling chaos.

<<You and I… we have a common enemy. Become my user, Rune-Slasher. Let us create a new system. A system with a single, glorious bug. Us.>>