The fire had burned down to coals by the time Aaron stood, stretching his arms overhead with the theatrical groan of a man whose back had opinions about forest floors.
"Perimeter check," he announced to no one in particular, already moving toward the tree line. "Set some snares earlier. Want to see if anything walked into them."
He hadn't set any snares.
The forest swallowed him in three steps—the Safe Haven's ambient dampening field cutting off behind him like a door closing, and suddenly the full acoustic weight of the old-growth pressed back in. Bark and rot and something faintly mineral, like wet stone. The canopy overhead was a ceiling of interlocked shadows, the moon reduced to a smear of diffuse silver that barely reached the ground.
Aaron walked sixty meters before he stopped pretending to look for traps.
He'd clocked the node on the way back from the Sap-Vine incident. Hard to miss once you knew what to look for—a faint luminescence in the bark of a downed hemlock, pulsing at roughly two-second intervals in a frequency range just below visible light. His eyes wouldn't have caught it. The Null Phone had, logging it automatically the moment its passive scanner swept past.
He crouched beside the hemlock now, pulling the phone from the interior pocket of his vest. The screen stayed dark until his thumb found the physical button sequence on the chassis—three short, one long—and the hidden terminal bloomed open in a wash of dim green text that he angled toward his chest, away from camp.
Spawn Node: [Forest Wisp, Common] | Capacity: 6/6 | Cycle: 4hr | Status: ACTIVE
Six wisps, already at capacity, drifting in lazy orbits around the hemlock's root cluster. They looked like soap bubbles that had learned to hold a grudge—translucent, faintly iridescent, trailing threads of cold light that evaporated before they reached the moss. Harmless at this tier. Barely worth the XP.
Which made them perfect test subjects.
If the duplication protocol is even present in this build, Aaron thought, fingers moving across the terminal's touchscreen keyboard, it'll show up on a low-capacity node. Too much load on a high-tier spawn and the error gets swallowed. Small pool, small stakes, clean signal.
He navigated to the debug injection layer—three menus deep, behind a submenu that the System's UI framework didn't acknowledge existed—and pulled up the entity duplication query he'd drafted two nights ago in the margin of his mental notepad. It was a simple probe. Barely invasive. A single-line command that asked the node's local instance handler: can you run two copies of the same entity ID simultaneously?
The answer was almost certainly no.
He wanted to see what "no" looked like in the error log.
Aaron entered the query. Hit execute.
For one second, nothing happened.
Then the wisps stopped moving.
All six of them, simultaneously, in whatever loose orbits they'd been tracing—just stopped, suspended in the air like decorations someone had forgotten to take down. The hemlock's pulse stuttered. The ambient mana-bleed Aaron had learned to associate with active nodes went briefly, completely silent, the way a room goes silent when everyone in it hears the same unexpected sound.
Then the node lurched.
The six wisps became twelve. Became twelve with the same six underneath them, stacked, overlapping, each duplicate offset by roughly a centimeter in three-dimensional space so that the whole cluster became a shimmering, strobing mass—a lantern shaking in a high wind, throwing light in six directions at once. Aaron's vision blurred at the edges trying to track the interference pattern.
Three seconds. He counted them.
On the third, the duplicates collapsed. Snapped back into their source entities with an almost physical thud of displaced air pressure that Aaron felt in his sinuses more than heard. The wisps scattered—not in their usual lazy drift but in genuine alarm, dispersing in six separate vectors through the undergrowth, their light trails guttering out one by one until the forest was dark again and the hemlock sat cold and inert.
Spawn Node: [Forest Wisp, Common] | Capacity: 0/6 | Cycle: RESET | Status: COOLING
Aaron exhaled slowly through his nose.
His phone screen flickered. The terminal's green text dissolved, replaced for two full seconds by a cascade of raw output that scrolled too fast to read—and then froze on a single line:
[ERR_7743-GHOST: Entity instance conflict. Duplicate reference detected in sector 7-NW. Anomaly flagged. Logging source query for review.]
The cold arrived in his stomach before the thought finished forming.
Logging source query.
Not discarding. Not null routing. Logging.
Aaron stared at the error. The forest pressed in around him, very dark, very quiet.
Someone is going to read that.
The query result was still scrolling across the Null Phone's screen when the treeline exploded.
Not metaphorically. Not with the dramatic rustle of something large moving through underbrush. The trees simply stopped being trees for a half-second—their geometry flickering, their bark textures dropping to flat gray polygons—and then the wolf was already through them, already past the point where physics should have registered its mass against the wood.
Aaron's first instinct was to look at his phone. The error log was still open, the source query flagged in blinking amber, and now there was a new line appended beneath it in a color he'd never seen the system use before. Not red. Not orange. Something between the two, like a warning sign designed by someone who'd run out of standard warning sign colors.
ENTITY SPAWN: CORRUPTED. AGGRO TABLE: NULL. ORIGIN: DEBUG QUERY [ERROR SIG: AXB-0017].
Oh, he thought. That's my fault.
The wolf hit the clearing at a velocity that made no aerodynamic sense. It wasn't running—it was skipping, its body stuttering through space in discrete half-meter increments, like a video file with every third frame deleted. Where its paws should have churned the leaf litter, there were instead small rectangular voids, patches where the forest floor briefly forgot what it was supposed to look like. Its fur—if the word even applied—was a shifting mess of overlapping textures: grey wolf, static, a brief flash of something that looked like server rack error code, then wolf again.
Its maw was the worst part. The jaw geometry had clearly failed to load correctly. The lower half kept trying to render, kept cycling through three or four different positions simultaneously, leaving behind the visual impression of a mouth that was also a wound, a glitch, a question mark made of teeth.
Keal was closest to the treeline. The wolf passed him without a flicker of acknowledgment—not a growl, not a glance, not even the predatory micro-adjustment that any natural animal would make when registering nearby prey. Its aggro table was null. Keal didn't exist to it. Nothing in the camp existed to it except the fire.
Except Lara, crouched beside the fire.
She had a stick in her hand, was nudging a coal back toward center, and she looked up at the sound of the wolf's corrupted footfalls with an expression that moved through confusion, recognition, and terror in the span of about a quarter-second. The stick fell. She didn't run. Aaron suspected her legs had simply filed a formal objection and were waiting for the brain to resolve the appeal.
"Behind me."
Kael's voice didn't rise. It didn't need to. It came out with the flat, load-bearing certainty of someone who had already made every calculation required and was now simply announcing the result. His sword was in his hand—Aaron hadn't seen him draw it, which meant either Kael was genuinely that fast or Aaron's attention had been catastrophically misallocated for the last two seconds. The blade's mana-infusion pulsed, that blue-white light running up the fuller in a slow, deliberate wave, like the weapon itself was taking a breath.
"Now!"
Lara scrambled backward. Keal was already moving, circling wide to put Kael between himself and the wolf's trajectory. Aaron's feet had carried him three steps toward the fire before he consciously authorized the movement, his body apparently having decided to participate in the emergency without consulting him.
The wolf's pixelating form locked onto Kael's stance the moment he stepped between it and the fire. Something in its corrupted code recognized the obstacle—not as a threat, not as prey, but as an object requiring resolution. Its stuttering movement pattern shifted. The skipping, frame-dropping locomotion smoothed out for one terrible moment into something almost fluid, almost real, and Aaron saw the muscles in its haunches—where the texture had loaded correctly—coil with a mechanical precision that had nothing to do with hunger.
It was going to leap.
Aaron's thumb was already moving across the Null Phone screen, pulling up the entity log, looking for anything—a handle, a flag, a legacy parameter he could yank—but the error signature was still blinking that impossible between-color amber, and the query field was locked, and his Debug Points balance read zero, and the wolf was already in the air.
Its maw cycled through its broken render states one final time—jaw here, jaw there, jaw nowhere, jaw everywhere—and it came down toward Kael's raised blade like something that had forgotten it was supposed to be a predator and remembered only that it was an error, and errors needed to be resolved, and resolution meant contact.