Chương 51: The Debug Skill

The march was eighteen kilometers of dark. They didn't talk much. Domrek set the pace and Kaito matched it, the same rhythm as the Greywood run, covered ground in the before-dawn quiet while the scrubland gave way to drier grass and the secondary track wound northeast. The first sun came up an hour in, which helped. The second followed thirty minutes later. The third, smaller and more distant, climbed on its own schedule from the east. Kaito kept one part of his attention on the Compact's threads as they walked.

Main road, parallel, maybe two kilometers west through the broken terrain. Moving north, same direction, similar pace. He didn't push his read hard enough to attract notice. Just a light check, every fifteen minutes. They were there. They were moving. The junction appeared around a bend at roughly hour three. He felt it before he saw it — a density bump in the System as the secondary track rejoined the main road. The waypost at the junction was visible from forty meters out: a stone column with directional markers.

Halvard, north-northwest. Velhen, northeast. A smaller marker pointing south toward the Greywood region they'd just come from. And the Compact's threads, fresh on the waypost logging data, eight minutes old.

'They're at the junction waypost,' he said quietly.

'Eight minutes ago.'

'Main road?' Domrek said.

'Yes. Moving.' He checked.

'Still moving, past it now. They didn't stop.'

'They didn't need to stop,' Domrek said.

'They just needed to pass close enough to log it. The post flagged all recent traffic on the northeastern branch.' He looked at the marker.

'They know we went northeast.' He was right. The thread-marker in Kaito's class notation was muffled — but a waypost at junction density logged class type regardless. A Wanderer on the northeast branch, timed eight minutes ahead of the Compact's passage. That was enough for a professional to work with. He kept moving past the waypost on the far side of the road, not touching it, staying out of its direct logging range. Domrek did the same without being told.

Twenty seconds at a brisk walk and the post was behind them.

'Now they have a direction,' Kaito said.

'They had a direction before,' Domrek said.

'Now they have confirmation. Doesn't change our objective. It changes their certainty.' Kaito followed. The junction fell behind them. Ahead, the northeast road was visibly more traveled — better-packed, wider, occasional stone markers at the side. The political succession traffic had worked its way out this far. They were not the only people heading toward Velhen. That was, at least, something.

By midmorning the road was busy enough that two people with packs and no identifying house colors were unremarkable. Soldiers, merchants, the occasional wagon flying a minor noble's banner. Everyone moving with purpose, nobody making eye contact they didn't have to. The kind of road population that existed when the people on it were all going somewhere important and all worried about the same things.

Domrek moved through it with the ease of someone who had spent his adult life among crowds that required careful navigation. Kaito had gotten better at it. Fifty days ago he'd moved like a man who expected everyone to look at him. Now he moved like a man going somewhere specific. He was reading the road traffic's System values in passing when the level notification arrived. [Level 35 reached.] Standard white text. Standard bracket format.

The level gain pushed through his awareness in the way they all did — a slight settling, as if something that had been slightly misaligned corrected itself. His Observation sharpened, incrementally. His Pattern Recognition updated. And then the skill gain. [Skill gained: Architect's Sight — Tier II. Passive. Read System architecture at Substrate depth within thirty meters. Previous reading was Surface-only. Upgrade: structural readings now include error states, suppressed values, and deep registration data. Rarity: Purple.] He blinked at the purple text for a moment. That was a significant jump — [Improvised Solution] had started at grey, evolved to green with [System Patch]. Purple was a tier he hadn't seen assigned to his own skills before. He pulled up his Sight and tested it immediately, reading the road surface, the waystone at the bend, the System-logged markers on a passing merchant's badge. Sable was right. It was deeper.

He could see further into the architecture than before, could read the structural layers underneath a registration rather than just the surface output. He could see where the data came from, not just what it said. Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.

'New skill,' he told Domrek.

'Good one?'

'A significant upgrade to how I read the System.' He kept moving.

'Useful.' He was still processing the upgrade when the second notification came. Not in white. Not in green or purple or any color he could name from the rarity table. It arrived in the old thin font — the font of the silver-border quests, the font of the party bond authorization, the font of the Architect's Directive — and it was the color of something that had no business being in his skill list. Black. [Skill gained: Debug: World Instance — Tier II. Active. Identify and manually flag System errors in a fifty-meter radius. Errors flagged may be repaired, exploited, or reported. Rarity: Black.] He stopped walking. Domrek, three steps ahead, looked back.

Kaito was standing in the middle of the road reading a black-rarity skill in a font that wasn't AXIOM's and that the System had no legitimate mechanism to deliver at his tier, which was Level 35, which was Mortal-class, which was nowhere near the power level where a Tier II active skill with the word 'World' in the name should be appearing on anybody's interface. He read it again.

'Identify and manually flag System errors,' he said.

'What?' Domrek said.

'The description.' He read it out loud, low, for Domrek's benefit and his own.

'Identify and manually flag System errors in a fifty-meter radius. Errors flagged may be repaired, exploited, or reported.' He let that sit for a moment.

'That's — I can see errors. And then I choose what to do with them.'

'Sable,' he said. She'd been quiet since before dawn. Now her voice arrived carefully.

'I see it.'

'The color.'

'Black rarity. Yes.' A pause.

'Kaito. That's not a Wanderer-class skill. That's not a Mortal-tier skill. The rarity Black has appeared in Eirath's skill registry exactly three times in ten thousand years, and all three instances were granted by AXIOM personally to individuals at the Divine tier or above.' Another pause.

'This skill was not granted by AXIOM. I can see the routing. It came through the same deep-layer channel as the Architect's Directive.'

'From the Original Layer.'

'From the Original Layer,' she said.

'Yes.' Domrek had come back to stand next to him and was watching his face with the patient expression that meant he was reading a situation he couldn't fully hear.

'What does it do exactly,' Kaito said.

'In practice.'

'If you activate it,' Sable said, 'your Sight would scan the fifty-meter radius for any instance where the System is running contrary to its own foundational rules. A dungeon that AXIOM has suppressed beyond its natural parameters. A class assignment that's been overridden. A skill that's been blocked by an external command.' She paused.

'There are more of those than the average adventurer knows. AXIOM's administration of this world involves a significant number of quiet suppressions.' Another pause, and this one felt different — tighter.

'The word "exploited" in the description is what concerns me most. That means you can use those errors. Not just see them. Use them.'

'A skill that shouldn't exist,' Kaito said, mostly to himself.

'At my level.'

'At any level,' Sable said.

'What AXIOM assigns is bounded by the System's intended architecture. This skill exists outside that architecture. It's operating at a function layer that AXIOM treats as inaccessible.' She was quiet for a moment.

'I think we should be very careful about whether you—' The world went off. Not dark. Not quiet. Just — off. His System interface vanished. All of it. The status display, the Sight output, the class notation, the Directive, the new skills. Gone. The ambient System density that he'd been reading constantly for fifty days, that low-level background awareness of the world's registration layer — gone. Sable's voice: gone.

The thread-marker in his class notation, muffled or otherwise — gone, because the class notation itself wasn't registering. He was standing on a road in bright morning sunlight. He could see the road. He could feel the pack on his back and the ground under his feet. He could hear wind and the distant movement of a wagon further ahead. Domrek was next to him, completely visible, frowning at something in the middle distance where his own System panels had been a moment ago.

'What—' Domrek started. Three seconds. Then everything came back at once. The interface, the Sight, the class data, Sable's channel — all of it arriving together in a sudden density that made him grab Domrek's arm without meaning to.

'Kaito.' Sable's voice was different. A register he hadn't heard before.

'Kaito, I need you to listen to me.'

'I'm here,' he said.

'What just happened.' She was quiet for a beat that was one breath too long.

'Oh,' she said.

'Oh, that's going to be a problem.' He looked at the road around them. The merchant wagon had stopped thirty meters ahead — the driver looking at his own interface with the expression of a man who'd just lost something and wasn't sure it was back. A pair of soldiers had halted in the road. One of them was checking his weapon's System registration with the specific focus of someone confirming it still worked. They hadn't been the only ones.

'How widespread was that,' Kaito said. Sable didn't answer immediately. When she did, her voice was flat in a way he recognized as her processing more information than she had a clean way to present.

'That was the first System blackout in Eirath's recorded history,' she said.

'Three seconds. Global.' He stood on the road with his pack and his new impossible skill and looked at the merchant who was still checking his interface two hundred meters north, and thought about the dungeons. About the adventurers inside them when every status screen, every enemy-tracking feed, every dungeon-door mechanism cut out at once. Three seconds was a long time in a dungeon. His interface updated. In the standard bracket format, white text, no preamble: [Architect. A function layer has been accessed. This incident is noted.] That was all. No threat. No order. No explanation. AXIOM had seen exactly what happened. And it had decided to let him know that it saw.