Their leader, a man named Vane, possessed eyes that were entirely replaced by sleek, silver cybernetic implants. Beneath the holographic projection of a dirty cloak, he wore completely sound-dampened, non-reflective shadow-mesh armor.

Vane tapped his neck comms. "Target location confirmed. We are descending into the lower intestines of the leviathan."

"Do not underestimate the Anomaly, Vane," Saint Jin’s synthesized, humming voice echoed strictly in his earpiece. "The Iron Disciples were completely eradicated. The Glitch possesses reality-bending parameters."

"The Disciples were mindless fanatics who charged down a hallway screaming," Vane replied coldly, his voice barely a whisper. "We are professionals. We don’t fight anomalies. We execute them while they sleep."

The five assassins slipped into the dark, dripping access pipes that led down into the sewers. They moved with absolute, terrifying silence. Their feet didn’t splash in the toxic sludge. Their armor didn’t clink. They were ghosts.

They navigated the labyrinth of the lower bowels with practiced ease, following the massive spike of localized mana that Sebastian had generated when he dumped the World Cores onto the table.

They reached the end of the tunnel.

Blocking their path were the heavy, reinforced blast doors of Corbin’s bunker. Flanking the doors were two massive, Level 85 Juncture Enforcer cyborgs, their red optical sensors sweeping the area.

Vane didn’t order an attack. He just held up a hand.

The squad stopped perfectly still.

The red scanning laser of the right cyborg washed over Vane’s cloaked figure.

BEEP.

[Scan Complete. Entity: Unregistered Slum Merchant. Threat Level: 0.]

The cyborg ignored them, its primitive AI entirely fooled by the high-tier Masquerade artifact provided by the Saints.

Vane signaled his team. Two assassins moved forward, pulling small, glass vials from their belts. They didn’t try to hack the heavy biometric locks on the blast doors. They simply poured a few drops of hyper-concentrated, Level 80 Void Acid directly onto the heavy steel hinges.

HSSSSS.

The acid didn’t explode. It just quietly, rapidly ate through the metal. In less than thirty seconds, the massive hinges dissolved into useless grey sludge.

Vane and his men gently caught the heavy steel door before it could fall and make a sound. They carefully lowered the multi-ton slab of metal to the floor with their synchronized, high-level physical stats.

They stepped into the bunker.

The emergency red lights cast long, sinister shadows across the room.

Vane’s cybernetic eyes instantly scanned the environment. He saw Corbin the code-smith asleep at his desk, drooling onto a keyboard.

He saw Gwen the smuggler sitting on the ruined leather couch, her chin resting on her chest, a kinetic pistol loosely held in her lap.

They were exhausted. Their guard was entirely down.

Vane ignored them. They were collateral. The bounty was for the Glitch.

He pointed two fingers toward the heavy iron door at the back of the room. The localized mana signature was practically screaming from behind that door.

The five assassins fanned out. They drew their weapons. They weren’t standard daggers. They were long, thin stilettos forged from pure, condensed Void glass, designed specifically to bypass magical barriers and sever a player’s digital soul from their physical vessel.

They stacked up outside the bedroom door.

Vane held up three fingers. Two. One.

He kicked the door open.

The five Level 80 assassins surged into the small, cramped room, their Void blades raised and ready to plunge into the sleeping Anomaly, ready to claim the three-planet bounty and end the Holy Crusade before it even began.

They froze.

The tiny cot was empty. The stained sheets were pushed aside.

There was no Sebastian. There was no sleeping target.

"Target is not in the room," Vane hissed into his comms, a sudden, cold spike of genuine panic piercing his professional calm. "I repeat, the room is empty. It’s a—"

CLANG!

The heavy iron door of the bedroom violently slammed shut behind them. The deadbolts aggressively snapped into place.

The Silver Hands were trapped.

The cramped bedroom of the bunker was plunged into absolute darkness as the heavy iron door locked shut.

"Breach the door!" Vane barked, dropping the stealth protocols entirely.

The five Level 80 assassins didn’t hesitate.

They spun around and drove their Void-glass stilettos directly into the metal. The blades sparked and hissed, the high-tier weapons struggling to bite into the heavily reinforced, lead-lined iron.

It didn’t yield.

"Comms are jammed," one of the assassins reported, his voice tight with rising panic as he tapped the side of his helmet. "The localized network is completely isolated. We can’t reach the flagship."

"He knew we were coming," Vane realized, his cybernetic silver eyes rapidly scanning the pitch-black room on thermal imaging.

But the thermals showed absolutely nothing.

The room was freezing cold.

"You guys really think you’re the only ones who know how to use stealth?" a voice echoed from the corner of the room.

It wasn’t a normal voice. It sounded like grinding metal, static, and the overlapping chorus of three different audio files playing simultaneously. It was a sound that made the digital bones of the assassins physically ache.

Vane whipped around, his Void blades raised.

In the corner of the room, the shadows began to violently shift and tear.

Sebastian hadn’t been sleeping. He had felt their localized mana signatures the moment they stepped into the sewer tunnels. He was the Sovereign of Laws. His [True Sight] didn’t care about their expensive Masquerade artifacts. To him, they were just five glowing red targets walking directly into his trap.

He hadn’t run. He had just opened his [Code Compiler] and decided to dress up for the occasion.

The air warped as Sebastian dropped his active camouflage. But the figure that materialized in the corner of the room wasn’t the ragged Drifter in the black leather coat. It wasn’t the pudgy Vanguard Gunner.

It was "The Glitch."

Sebastian had forcefully activated his hidden Title: [Enemy of the System]. He had used the sheer volume of his glitched compiler to overwrite his physical rendering.

He stood eight feet tall. His limbs were completely elongated, composed entirely of jagged, shifting black static and deep, glowing green error codes. He wore a long, tattered cloak of pure shadows that seemed to actively absorb the ambient light in the room.

But the most terrifying aspect was his face.

He wore a smooth, pristine porcelain mask. It was cracked perfectly down the center. From the empty, pitch-black eye sockets, thick streams of black, oily digital blood wept continuously, dripping onto the floor with a sickening sizzle.