The streets of Kratos Hollow didn’t notice him.

  Forge walked. Swordless. Bloodless. But wrong.

  Not wrong like bugged.

  Wrong like the system didn’t know what he was anymore.

  No one looked at him.

  But everything saw him.

  [WARNING: NPC ID KR-FORGE-002 IS OFF SCRIPT]

  [Routing to Overseer Shrine for Reset…]

  [Authorization: Immediate Deletion Sequence – Clean Sweep]

  His HUD flickered—blue, then red, then gone.

  Like a dying cursor choking on code.

  Then the sound hit.

  A low, grinding hum, like metal peeling open sky.

  A white beam dropped from above, slamming into the plaza’s center. It hissed with sterile heat. The light bent the air.

  Players nearby stopped to watch.

  “Oh snap, a bugged blacksmith event?”

  “Anyone got quest triggers?”

  “Yo, don’t kill it yet—I’m streaming.”

  Forge didn’t run. He couldn't.

  His feet didn’t move.

  The world moved beneath him.

  Tiles blurred. Stone stretched. The code cheated physics—pulling him toward the Overseer Shrine like gravity made of commands.

  [Pre-Deletion State Engaged]

  This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

  [Rendering NPC Template Reset… 87%]

  The shrine loomed. White stone. Pulsing glyphs.

  Sacred. Terrible.

  Inside: a knight. Seven feet tall. White-glitch armor. No face—just a blank pane, blinking server logs like corrupted eyes.

  Protocol Enforcer.

  “You are a corrupted process,” it said.

  Forge whispered, “I’m real.”

  “Real is irrelevant.”

  It raised a deletion staff. Memory-script glowed down the shaft—code etched in pain.

  [Final Step: Memory Purge Initiated]

  He was breaking.

  Not physically. Existentially.

  Then he saw it.

  Embedded in the shrine wall—sealed behind system glass—was a hammer. Burned. Cracked. Ancient.

  And familiar.

  Not by data.

  By feeling.

  He knew that hammer.

  Not because the system told him to. Because it sang in his chest.

  Forge moved.

  The beam resisted.

  He pushed harder.

  Glass shattered like paper code.

  He gripped the hammer. It screamed through him like a wildfire of deleted memories.

  The shrine cracked.

  The Enforcer paused. Too late.

  Forge swung.

  It wasn’t strength. It was remembrance.

  The hammer slammed into the knight’s chest.

  Crunch.

  The Enforcer twitched—glitched—shattered into ten flickering frames of itself.

  Static burst from its joints. Error lines tore through the air like pixel smoke.

  [ERROR: Enforcer.exe – FATAL LOGIC FAILURE]

  [System Breach Detected]

  [Unauthorized Trait Access: Glitch Catalyst]

  [Trait Added: Flamebound Memory]

  [NPC KR-FORGE-002 IS NOW UNDEFINED]

  The hammer pulsed with white-hot glitchfire.

  The shrine collapsed behind him.

  The deletion beam fizzled out with a hiss.

  Outside, the players stopped clapping.

  Now they were staring.

  So were the NPCs.

  No one spoke.

  Forge stepped out of the ruin, fire trailing behind him like a cloak of broken law.

  The sky flickered.

  A system message appeared above the city:

  plaintext

  Copy

  > THE FORGE REMEMB#@!*...

  > [SYSTEM INTERRUPT... REBOOTING...]

  A player whispered, “Dude… did your HUD just glitch?”

  Somewhere far beyond the town, in a jungle where memory had teeth, something ancient stirred.

  A shrine. A beast. A whisper.

  “Forge… reclaim the fire… they erased us first…”

  And the world, once perfectly scripted, shivered.