The Anti-Virus

Three guards went out to meet him.

They were 2-Blues, and Gesbiek had personally deleted their aggression an hour ago, so they walked toward the glowing human at the gate with their weapons down and their heads tilted, in the manner of creatures encountering something new and having no framework for it.

One of them raised a hand. Not a threat. A question.

The Knight did not slow down. He tapped his sword hilt once, the kind of thing a body does out of habit while the mind is elsewhere, and turned on his heel.

White light went round in an arc.

The blade passed through all three of them at once, and they did not bleed and they did not scream. Three numbers rose into the air above where they had been standing.

[-9999]
[-9999]
[-9999]

Their bodies came apart into light and scattered, and three small bags dropped onto the stone and hung there, waiting to be collected.

Gesbiek stepped back from the projection.

There had been no malice in it, and that was the part he could not get past. Every creature he had ever known that hurt another had wanted something out of it: dominance, a meal, an audience. Snarl had enjoyed it. Grolm had built a philosophy out of it.

This had been housekeeping. Three goblins with names and histories and a confused hand raised in greeting had been objects with health bars standing in a doorway.

* * * *

Gesbiek raised a hand and put every drop of an infinite pool behind it.

[FREEZE]

The command crossed the map as a wave of grey and struck the Knight, and a blue hexagonal shield flared into being and absorbed it the way sand absorbs water.

[RESISTED]
[TARGET IMMUNE: PLAYER CHARACTER]
[ADMIN TOOLS INEFFECTIVE ON PLAYERS]

He tried the other thing. The one he had not used yet, because until this evening there had been nothing worth using it on.

[DELETE UNIT]

The command hung for a moment, processing.

[ERROR: CANNOT DELETE EXTERNAL USER]
[PERMISSION DENIED]
[AUTHORIZATION REQUIRED FROM HIGHER AUTHORITY]

Gesbiek looked at his own silver hands.

Higher authority.

He had climbed to a hundred. He had eaten a god and taken apart a warlord with a slider and rebuilt a settlement out of nothing in four minutes, and there was a level above his, and it had been there the whole time.

He had spent two years believing he was climbing toward being a god.

He had been climbing toward being staff.

* * * *

The Knight moved into the camp.

The goblins did not run and did not fight, because he had removed both. They sat in the open, full for the first time in their lives, around crates of food that had come out of the air within the hour.

The Knight ran a short circular path through them, which pulled them after him out of simple curiosity, twenty of them clustering in behind.

One of them did not follow.

Meska was on the plaza edge with a crate open in front of her and her hand still inside it, watching a man in gold armour walk in a circle and collect goblins behind him like a hem gathering dust.

Gesbiek saw her work it out. She had spent her whole life reading what was about to go wrong with something.

She turned and started shouting, and Gesbiek could not hear a word of it and did not need to.

Nobody moved. He had taken the running out of them himself, ninety minutes ago, with a menu.

Then he stopped in the middle and raised his sword, and a column of white fire came up out of the stone twenty feet across.

[-9999]
[-9999]
[-9999]

He waved one hand, the loot came to him, and he walked to the next group.

[POPULATION: 431... 408... 377... 349...]

Gesbiek watched the number go down and understood exactly what he was looking at.

He had taken away their hunger, and their hunger had been the thing that made them get up. He had taken away their aggression, and their aggression had been the only defence four hundred goblins had ever possessed. He had put them on clean flat stone in the open where they could be gathered conveniently.

He had spent five minutes building a paradise, and it had taken thirty seconds to become a farm.

Down on the plaza, Meska was still shouting at people with no capacity left to hear it.

He tore open the clan settings and went for the aggression parameter.

[ERROR: COMBAT IN PROGRESS]
[CANNOT MODIFY SETTINGS WHILE UNDER ATTACK]

He tried again from a different menu and got the same six words.

[POPULATION: 287... 251... 219...]

Somewhere around two hundred and eighty, he noticed the silence.

For two years, since a rock ledge and a goblin called Rill, every death he caused had come up into him through a route he could never close.

Four hundred goblins were ending on the stone below him at a rate of one every second and a half, and nothing was arriving.

He reached for it deliberately, the way you press a tooth to find out whether it still hurts, and there was nothing there to reach for.

The chrysalis had taken it, along with everything else it had no use for.

He had wanted it closed for two years.

He stood in a repaired throne room with the counter falling and understood that he was the only thing in this mountain not feeling any of it.

Meska was down there somewhere, the one who had not knelt.

One every second and a half.

He found her on the map at two hundred and nineteen and she was still there.

He found her at one hundred and ninety and she was still there.

He did not find her at one hundred and sixty.

* * * *

The Knight stopped in the middle of what had been a settlement and looked up.

His head tilted with no neck involved in it, at exactly the right angle, straight at the Throne Room entrance through fifty feet of rock.

Text appeared over him.

[Sir_Alaric: found the boss room. omw.]

Gesbiek read it three times.

No punctuation. Abbreviated. The tone of somebody telling a friend where they had got to.

That was the thing that finally arrived properly, worse than the damage numbers and worse than the population counter. Four hundred goblins had died in eleven minutes and it had not been an atrocity. It had been a Tuesday.

The Knight pointed his sword at the mountain and began to run, and the pathing was perfect, every obstacle avoided without a single wasted step.

Gesbiek looked down at himself.

Silver skin. White eyes. Robes made of code that did not move in the air.

He understood, with total clarity, what he was in this transaction.

Not a villain. Not a rival. Not a person with five years in a sludge pit.

The final boss of a goblin camp, recommended for levels fifteen to twenty. An obstacle between a customer and better equipment. A container with a good drop in it.

Something cold went through him that was not rage, because rage has heat in it, and this did not.

He was not going to be loot.

* * * *

He could not touch the Knight. That had been established twice.

He could touch everything else.

[WORLD EDIT: ACTIVE]
[SAFETY LIMITS: DISABLED]

"Too easy," Gesbiek said, to the pristine room he had tidied an hour ago.

The floor around the dais dissolved and magma came up to fill it, and he left sixty-three stepping stones across it at irregular intervals. Three of the paths reached the throne. The others did not, and some of the stones were built to sink.

He put spikes in the ceiling, keyed to anything above fifteen feet, and twelve floating crystals along the walls, each one a turret. He doubled the gravity, not enough to be obvious, enough that a jump would come up short.

And last, quietly, he corrupted the physics: friction slightly inconsistent from stone to stone, hitboxes a few inches off from where things appeared to be.

Nothing dramatic. Nothing a professional would notice as an attack.

Just enough to make a body that had done this a thousand times stop trusting itself.

* * * *

He needed data before the thing arrived, and he had one item left in inventory.

[ENTITY SEARCH: GROLM]

He was in the tunnel, forty feet in, curled against the wall in the position Gesbiek had spent five years perfecting.

Gesbiek made some temporary edits.

[ROLE: MINIBOSS (TEMPORARY)]
[HP: 50,000 | ARMOUR: HEAVY | SIZE: LARGE]
[AI: AGGRESSIVE (FORCED)]

Grolm came apart and reassembled fifty feet from the tunnel entrance at eight feet tall in spawned plate, holding a club he had not asked for, his body dropping into a combat stance his mind had no part in.

His mind was entirely intact. He was awake in there, and none of his limbs belonged to him. Gesbiek made the walls transparent, and watched.

The Knight came round the corner and did not break stride. The sword came out mid-run with light already on it.

First swing, horizontal, through the spawned plate as though it were not there.

[-25,000]

Second swing, vertical, with no pause between the two.

[-25,000]

The temporary body dissolved and what was left of Grolm dropped out of it and did not get up.

Total duration, first contact to finish: one point eight seconds.

* * * *

Gesbiek read the numbers as they came in.

Twenty-five thousand a swing. Eight tenths of a second between them, which meant recovery frames, which meant gaps.

Divine protection. Blessed weapon. Righteous fury.

Status effects. Fields with values in them, with cooldowns attached: ten seconds on one skill, thirty on another, sixty on the wings.

Level 12, the tag said, and none of the numbers coming off him were a Level 12's. Somebody far above him had lent him the kit for an evening.

Not a god. An extremely well-equipped account.

Something that could be fought, if the goblin doing the fighting was dishonest enough.

* * * *

But nothing he had would land on somebody with immunity written into what they were. He needed something that did not respect the rules.

Gesbiek reached past the surface of the room, past the geometry and the lighting and the physics, down into the thing underneath all of it.

The foundation was full of failures.

Centuries of them, never cleaned: null references, missing textures, broken collisions. Every mistake the world had ever made about itself, sitting in the dark under everything, doing nothing.

He gathered it in both hands and compressed it.

The blade that formed was wrong to look at. The surface was a purple and black checkerboard, which is what a thing wears when nobody has told it what it should look like. Its edges did not agree with geometry. Parts of it clipped through other parts of it. Sections were simply absent, gaps in the world shaped like a sword.

[ADMIN BLADE (CORRUPTED)]
[QUALITY: ERROR | DAMAGE: UNDEFINED]
[IGNORES ALL ARMOUR]
[BYPASSES PLAYER IMMUNITIES]
[TREATS PLAYER AS NPC]
[WARNING: MAY CRASH LOCAL REALITY]

Gesbiek held it up and the air around it pixelated.

A weapon made out of the world's mistakes.

He had been one of those. A grey shard where a colour should have been, an error the clan had wanted removed before it spread. He had eaten a piece of metal that had not belonged here and had spent two years walking through gaps that nobody else could see.

It was, on reflection, the only weapon he had ever been entitled to.

* * * *

The footsteps stopped.

The Knight came into the entrance and looked at sixty-three stones over magma, twelve turrets, a ceiling full of spikes, and a three-foot goblin standing in the middle of it holding something that hurt to look at.

[Sir_Alaric: lol nice gimmick]

He stepped onto the first stone, activated something that made the doubled gravity irrelevant, and started forward.

Gesbiek did not attack him.

He edited the stone under the Knight's foot instead.

[FRICTION: 1.0 > 0.0]

The boot went out from under him. Momentum did the rest, and for about a third of a second the perfect frame pacing came apart entirely and a man in mirror-polished plate flailed over a lake of magma like anybody would.

He burned a cooldown on it. Wings of gold came out of his back, caught him, and put him back on the stone.

Gesbiek watched him spend it and made a small note.

Twelve turrets opened up at once, and the Knight crossed the last stones through the beams and came up onto the dais, twenty feet away, and raised the sword.

Gesbiek raised the other thing.

[BOSS FIGHT INITIATED]
[ENTITY: GESBIEK (LEVEL 100)]
[DESIGNATION: FINAL BOSS]

He let the tag stand. It was the last thing anybody would get right about him tonight.

"You think this is a game," Gesbiek said, in three voices.

The blade in his hand flickered out of existence and came back.

"Let me show you the bugs."

* * * *

The Knight came in with the economy of somebody who had done this a great many times.

Gesbiek let him commit, and then edited the dais under his lead foot, and the friction went out from under him for the second time in a minute. This time the wings did not come, because the wings were on sixty seconds and Gesbiek had watched him spend them.

The sword went wide.

He put the Admin Blade into the seam between breastplate and pauldron, which the blade did not need and would have gone through the plate regardless.

It went in.

[-2,847]

The blade had done exactly what it was built to do. It was also not enough: two thousand eight hundred out of a bar with considerably more in it than that.

He pulled the blade out and moved, because a thing that has been cut usually does something about it.

The Knight did not.

Gesbiek came off the dais at full Agility, put twelve feet between them, turned, and found a man checking his health bar. The face had not changed. He glanced at a number in the corner of his own vision, made an assessment about it, and re-set his stance.

Hurt a thing and it wants to stop. That was the rule under every rule, the whole language Gesbiek had been speaking since the Sludge Pits, and he had just put four inches of blade through a shoulder and the shoulder had reported it as an accounting entry.

There was nothing in there to discourage. He was going to have to take it all the way to zero.

* * * *

So he stopped fighting the man and started fighting the numbers.

Eight tenths of a second between swings. Wings on sixty seconds, already spent. A shield on thirty. Two thousand eight hundred a cut, out of a bar the blade had now put a figure on: a little over nineteen thousand. Seven cuts, if every one landed clean.

None of them would land clean against a body that had done this a thousand times.

He did not try to make them. He gave ground instead, a step at a time toward the edge of the dais, and let the Knight come after him in that smooth perfect pathing, and on every third step he moved the stone under the lead foot a few inches left of where it appeared to be.

The Knight did not fall. He was too good to fall. But he corrected, every time, and every correction cost him a sliver of the eight tenths, and the gap between swings opened by a hair and then by another hair.

Gesbiek cut into the hairs.

[-2,811] off the hip. [-2,904] across the back of the knee as the man turned. The shield went up on the third and ate it whole, and Gesbiek started counting thirty in his head, and did not know he was doing it under his breath until he heard himself.

One count. Two count.

The sword came down through the space where his head had been and took a corner off the dais. [-2,760] through the gap under the arm. Then the shield was back, and he ran the stones until it was spent.

The bar went under half. The face did not change. The text over the Knight's head did.

[Sir_Alaric: wtf is this hitbox]

It was the first thing the man had said that sounded like a person, and Gesbiek did not have time to feel anything about it.

* * * *

It came down to the chestplate.

He had been cutting at the plate all fight, because the plate was where the body appeared to be. It was not. The plate had been built for a much larger man and it rode high and loose, and the body inside it sat a hand's width lower and further back than the steel said. Every cut he had landed had found the edge of the man, never the middle.

A goblin who has spent his life under larger creatures learns exactly where they actually are.

The heavy stroke came. Gesbiek set the friction under the Knight's back foot to nothing, and the stroke went wide by the length of a forearm, and for a quarter of a second the man was up on his toes over the lake with his arms high, and the loose front of the plate lifted, and Gesbiek saw where he really was.

He went in there, a hand's width below where the steel said the heart should be.

[CRITICAL HIT]
[-9,999]

The bar went red, and then it went empty.

The Knight did not fall. He stood for a moment with the sword still raised, looking at the corner of his own vision, and Gesbiek stood under him with both hands on the grip and the air around them breaking into small purple squares.

Then the gold began to rise.