Dungeon King: The Hidden Ruler-Chapter 39: [The Silent Duel Begins 3] - Rookie’s First Glimpse

While Adrian idled in-game, quietly offloading gear to the game market to avoid attention, someone else was logging into a very different interface.

Not a dungeon. Not a raid.

A desk, a badge, and a company onboarding glossy doors.

Elara’s first day at Titan Corp had begun.

The Titan Corp headquarters was exactly what she imagined—and not at all what she expected. Rows of glowing monitors, hushed conversations over project timelines, developers with energy drinks and tired eyes. It was a digital hive.

Elara clutched her lanyard badge a little tighter as she stepped through the security gate and into the open-floor workspace. Her desk was already set up with a dual-monitor terminal, a company-branded headset, and a small sticky note that read: "Welcome to the madhouse."

She smiled to herself. Alright. Time to make a difference.

Then she noticed the posters. One banner on the wall above her terminal: "Customer Happiness is Our Success." Another played on a loop in the corner of her monitor: a slick onboarding video narrated by a warm, smiling executive. "Here at Titan Corp, we strive to build immersive worlds where players feel empowered, respected, and heard. Because every epic begins with trust."

Elara grinned. That part? That still made her believe.

She hummed happily as she put down her bag neatly on her side, ready to start her dream job.

Logging into the internal system, she skimmed through the welcome messages and update memos. Her inbox pinged.

[QA Ticket Assigned]

Ticket ID: EB-7215

Assignment: Verify abnormal behavior in Emberstone Burrow

Focus: Phase 2 PvP disruption and boss mechanics

"Huh... PvP complaints? In a dungeon?"

Her curiosity flared. Primordial Abyss dungeon is always a PvPvE zone—players fight not only monsters but each other. But even then, the environment followed strict AI scripting. For guilds to complain, something must’ve gone off-script—something big.

Probably tied to that Chain Phantom drama going viral on streamer forums.

She leaned back slightly, amused. What’s so important about a mere ganker?

"Elara."

She looked up. A man in his late forties stood a few desks away—neatly pressed shirt, sharp eyes, and the calm exhaustion of someone who managed crises for a living. He gestured her over without urgency, like a formality already overdue. Her manager, apparently. Not quite dev. Not quite HR. Somewhere in between. Definitely not a gamer.

"Hey, Elara," he said briskly. "Quick context on your ticket. That report came through one of our sponsor channels."

She stood quickly. "Yes, sir. I saw the ticket just now—"

"The reporting guild, Ebonreach Covenant, is a branch of Stormveil—a major promotional partner for our Q3 campaign. Which means this report didn’t come through the proper QA flow—it came through sponsorship. So if something’s broken, fix it quietly. If it looks weird, make it look normal. And if you do find something messy, you route it through PR, not dev. Usually things as sensitive like this won’t go to new employees but all of our staff in your division are busy, so you handle it. Got it?"

Elara hesitated. "Sir, just to clarify—if there’s something wrong—"

"We don’t get to ’investigate’ our advertisers, Elara."

"But sir," she began carefully, "shouldn’t I at least look into the case properly first—"

He held up a hand. "No. We don’t investigate the people who cut the checks. We don’t make the people paying our salaries look stupid. That’s not QA—it’s suicide."

She blinked. "But what if it’s real? What if there’s something the company should know—"

"Then our AI will catch it. That’s what it’s there for. We don’t need heroes poking around and finding things that make our sponsors nervous."

He leaned forward slightly, his tone dropping to something both sharper and more tired. "Look, I know you’re fresh out the gate, and maybe you came here thinking we’re making magic. But this? This is PR triage. You slap a sticker on it, make it sparkle, and push it out the door. You go home, satisfied with job well done, receive your paycheck. That’s how you do it."

He make sure he emphasize the part of ’receive your paycheck’ before pointed to her screen. "So—make it look like we took it seriously. Smooth it over. Close the case."

He paused just long enough to make sure it sank in.

"And make damn sure the sponsor doesn’t look like an idiot for escalating it in the first place. That’s your job—understood?"

Behind him, the glossy banner from earlier still hung above his workstation.

"Every Epic Begins with Trust."

But now it looked like a joke.

Hollow.

Decorative.

Elara sat back down slowly, the fluorescent buzz overhead a little sharper than before. This wasn’t about player happiness. It was about optics. And profit.

She nodded slowly, stunned.

She used to think games were about fun, balance, giving players a good time.

Now? Her first real assignment was making sure a guild leader’s ego didn’t get bruised.

She turned her attention to her PC, pulse high, confusion heavier.

With a sigh, Elara dove into the logs.

Phase 2. Emberstone Burrow.

Player deaths logged in steady intervals. No attacker IDs. Just system timeouts and revive flags.

She checked the AI tree—nothing corrupted. Environmental hazards—all behaving normally. Status effect markers—vague but within scope.

No red flags. No bans. No anomalies.

If someone had used a script, she thought, Titan’s digital guard would’ve caught it. The system flags everything—behavior spikes, injection attempts, abnormal packet drift.

She pulled up the affected players’ records. Nothing odd. No exploits. No flagged macros.

Meanwhile, she remembered a recent bug report from a small guild—players stuck in a broken cutscene for two weeks. The thread was buried, the ticket untouched.

Yet here she was—responding to a sponsored guild within 24 hours.

Her fingers hovered over the keyboard.

The hierarchy wasn’t logic-based. It was money-based.

She typed up the summary and scheduled a placeholder patch—empty, cosmetic, seem harmless.

Can’t let the big rich boys get their feelings hurt, she thought, as she clicked through the form.

She leaned back in her chair, eyes narrowing. That thought crossed her mind again, like an itch that won’t go away.

Then how did they die like that?

She rewound the kill logs, watching the time gaps shrink. The healer team got picked off first—clean, staggered, isolated. Then the rest of the party crumbled. Not chaotic. Surgical.

Some weird stealth class? A trap?

She bookmarked the timestamps. Something wasn’t adding up. The pattern was too perfect. Unless, of course, every healer from both sides spontaneously agreed to dive into the lava pit within the same ten-second window.

She chuckled at her own joke.

Her job was technically done. The report showed no anomalies, and a symbolic patch could be pushed to make it look like action was taken. But something gnawed at her.

That kill pattern. Too efficient. Too clean. Too deliberate.

No one dives into lava by accident—let alone in perfect sync.

She hesitated for a long moment. Then curiosity won.

She logged the internal review as closed. Quietly. Then pushed back from her desk and made her way toward the company’s dev capsule room—a long, glass-paneled hallway lit by sterile lights.

It felt more like a hospital than a workplace. Cold tile. White lights. Vacuum silence.

As she passed the first pod, she noticed a nameplate blurred out with developer-access coding. The screen pulsed softly, reading: [ACTIVE – ISOLATED TESTING SESSION].

This was a dev capsule. She remembered from orientation—reserved for AI system sandboxing, behavior loop replay, and exploit reproduction. The game version inside wasn’t public. It was stripped raw, unstable, and unmoderated. Used for investigating edge cases too dangerous to test live. And when a test ran, access was sealed.

Through the fogged glass, she saw another dev re-checking another issue from another ticket in simulation. Still, she picked up her pace.

Another pod. This one idle.

She suddenly wasn’t sure if she was supposed to be here. No one stopped her. But that only made it worse.

Each capsule room whispered secrets through sealed glass.

Elara swallowed.

She lingered just a moment longer in front of the sealed pod, eyes flicking between the blacked-out warning light and the pulsing screen. The deeper she walked into Titan Corp’s testing wing, the clearer it became—this wasn’t a studio filled with dreamers building worlds. It was a maze of quietly humming machines built to contain them.

The slogans, the banners, the corporate smiles—they weren’t lies. But they were distractions. Smoke for the fire.

She had wanted to make games. Improve AI. Help balance systems and shape experiences. But her first job had been to bury a report and shield a sponsor’s pride. And now she was peering through a fogged glass wall into the belly of something that didn’t want to be seen.

Somewhere in the back of her mind, something cracked. Not loudly. Not a scream. Just the soft, unmistakable splinter of a worldview under pressure.

Maybe this was how it started. Not with orders or malice—but with acceptance. With one closed report. One skipped question. One button pushed that made the truth go away.

She touched the edge of the capsule’s panel.

Just a look, she told herself again.

But her hand trembled when she said it.

Elsewhere, Adrian Voss sat in his apartment, staring at the auction interface.

One item sold. Then another.

He leaned back in his chair, the light from his monitors casting faint reflections across the room. He popped the lid off a new can of energy drink.

Elara’s voice replayed in his head. "QC and AI Audit!"

He exhaled through his nose, almost amused.

If Titan’s still predictable... the audit starts today.

He pondered whether he should go to the capsule cafe to log back into the dungeon.

He just watched the market tick forward, his expression unreadable.

"Let’s see what kind of dev they’ve sent me."

He didn’t need to guess. Not really.

Adrian had seen this playbook before—back when he still wore the Titan badge.

First, they’d gaslight their own QA. Then they’d overwork her. Burn her. Make her part of the machine.

Give it a few weeks, and Elara would stop asking questions. She’d learn to smooth bugs over instead of fixing them. She’d tell herself it wasn’t her call. Just the process.

He watched another item sell on the market.

"They always rot," he whispered, "right before they break."

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