Error State

The boss didn't walk.

It descended.

The mist curled like a dying code string as gravity broke. The skybox above flickered red—then black—then a rotating error icon as if the system couldn't decide what kind of terror to render.

It settled on a glitch dragon.

No wings. No symmetry. Its body rippled like corrupted data—jagged geometry, exposed polygons, and flashes of red script that weren't in any language Ji-Hoon recognized. One of its eyes spun like a loading wheel.

[BOSS ENGAGED – CORRUPTED CACHE ENTITY: NULL.DRAGON]

Class: E-Rank (System Unstable)

HP: ???

Combat State: ERROR

Behavior: Unlocked

Danger Level: Escalating

The temperature dropped. His breath fogged instantly.

Ji-Hoon's hand tightened around the hilt of his training knife.

["System Trace not compatible with boss-level entities. Attempt override?"]

✦ Risk: High

✦ Outcome: Unknown

He grinned. "Hell yes."

✦ System Trace – Forced Override Activated

WARNING: Trace breach may result in mental feedback

Target: NULL.DRAGON

Accessing corrupted memory tree...

Brute forcing behavior shell...

Adapting local processor...

["...This isn't a scan anymore,"] Ji-Hoon whispered. ["I'm hacking it."]

The flood hit him like a freight train.

Every nerve flared. His vision cracked with data overload. Fragmented kill routines, broken subroutines, warped combat loops—all of it slammed into his consciousness. The dragon's thoughts weren't linear. They were a looping cascade of murder logic stitched together with fragments of game code and primal hunger.

But inside the chaos, he saw something.

Timing. Vulnerability. A reset pattern.

✦ Weakness Identified: Frame Drop Sync – 1.2s lag every 17.5 seconds

✦ Core Instability Detected: Central Node (inside mouth) opens briefly on transition

✦ Corruption Modifier: Immune to all physical damage — EXCEPT via internal system crash loop

["Then I won't attack it..."] Ji-Hoon exhaled. ["I'll crash it."]

The NULL.DRAGON roared.

It lunged—not like a creature, but like a game asset forcibly dragged forward. There was no physics. Just momentum. And error trails.

Ji-Hoon dodged, barely. His training knife scraped harmlessly across its flank. Sparks flew—none of them real.

He dove behind a broken pillar, panting. Timer: 04:18

✦ False Echo – Ready

This time, he didn't create just a copy.

He used the timing glitch.

As the dragon reset into its next movement cycle, Ji-Hoon sent the Echo through its error sync. It phased—literally phased—into the same corrupted code space the dragon occupied.

The illusion passed through the dragon's mouth as it opened.

✦ ERROR: Foreign data injected

✦ Source: UNKNOWN

✦ Executing rollback…

The boss screamed. Its body spiked in all directions—geometry fragmenting, wings it didn't have suddenly appearing, then vanishing.

Ji-Hoon sprinted up a debris ramp, leapt, and drove his blade into the nearest node—a flickering orb of data pulsing like a CPU core on fire.

✦ CRITICAL STRIKE

✦ Internal Integrity Breached

✦ Boss state: CRASH LOOP INITIATED

The dragon glitched. Flickered.

Its roar cut off mid-pitch.

Then—

✦ SYSTEM ERROR 0xB00TC0DE

✦ ENTITY "NULL.DRAGON" REMOVED

✦ Gate Stability Restored

Everything fell silent.

Ji-Hoon dropped to one knee, panting, ears ringing. The temple around him began to disintegrate, polygons unraveling into light.

[Gate Cleared – Solo Victory Achieved]

✦ Gate License: GRANTED

✦ Combat Log: Submitted

✦ Reward Calculations In Progress…

✦ Alert: Anomalous Skill Use Detected

✦ Flagged for System Review...

He barely noticed.

The moment his hand unclenched, he finally felt how bad he was shaking. Not from fear, but from something else.

Raw data high.

The Recode class wasn't about overpowering enemies. It wasn't even about outsmarting them.

It was about understanding them—and then tearing them apart from the inside.

["You survived a Tiered Entity using unstable code, Ji-Hoon."]["The system noticed. Others will too."]["Be ready."]

The light swallowed him.

He returned to the real world… with a new tag hovering above his head that no one else could see:

✦ USER STATUS: OBSERVED

✦ RECODE CLASS: ACTIVE

✦ ACCESS LEVEL 2 – UNLOCK CONDITIONS APPROACHING…

And somewhere, in the deeper layers of the game's buried source code…

Something else woke up.