I reached the Undercroft entrance at 8:14 AM.

The permit clerk, the same thin man who worked every day and whose life seemed to be defined by his daily grind, looked up from his notebook as I laid my D-rank tag on the counter.

"Floor 3 again?"

"Floor 3 again."

He stamped the permit without hesitation. The clerk and I had an arrangement; he didn’t ask me what a D-rank with the physique of a supply runner was doing taking down Floor 3 monsters, and I didn’t tell him I was driven by rage and the wisdom of the wiki alone.

Functional relationship.

I went down.

The point about the Undercroft was that there was a logic to it if you learned it. Floor 1 was madness. It was chaos, with skitterers in every corner, inexperienced adventurers making rash decisions, stoneback beetles wandering into the main thoroughfare and causing panic. Floor 2 was quieter but more deadly. Floor 3 was serene if you ignored the fact that everything in it could murder me within a couple of seconds.

I stopped caring about that part.

South passage was clear upon my arrival. I made my way down with the shortbow held in my hands, an arrow loaded but not drawn; that was something I’d learned how to do on the third attempt to get it done in an emergency situation. The Pattern Recognition II program analyzed everything in the background; it didn’t need to be activated manually by me, it gave out all kinds of information like peripheral vision does.

Patrol timing. Time gaps. Movement vectors.

I made my way into the south passage and got into position there.

Thornback Runner showed up at 8:31.

---

*+14 EXP — Thornback Runner (Weak Point Kill)*

---

The next one appeared about half a minute later. They would always appear in timed bursts while following this patrol pattern, so I knew when to expect it.

---

*+14 EXP — Thornback Runner (Weak Point Kill)*

---

547 EXP.

I advanced further into the passage.

What I hadn’t said to anyone, even Daren, was that floor 3 lower loop no longer felt threatening the same way it once had. Not because it wasn’t, with a base STR 12 meaning one good hit from the Ironback Crawler would be enough to bring me down without using figurative language, but because I had done it enough times that fear was now irrelevant. Calculation was king. The dungeon didn’t care about killing me per se; it was simply a process of cause and effect that needed to be learned.

Almost.

I located the first Crawler near the lower loop entrance. Sixty-two feet out, good angles, room with enough headroom for the trajectory of the shot not to be an issue.

Drew. Held. Released.

---

*+55 EXP — Ironback Crawler (Weak Point Kill)*

---

602 EXP.

Reloaded and continued.

It’s funny how spending too long in a dungeon, isolated from society, with only one’s own mind and a wiki not entirely trusted for information can have certain side effects.

Thoughts started to form.

Vorn’s flag had been niggling away at me ever since the alley. The wiki wasn’t perfect; I understood that, had known it since the wiki first started generating incomplete entries. The wiki was based on canonical game data, and I had broken the canon badly enough that the generation algorithm was operating on empty and pure guesswork. Even Lyra’s reset had most likely made three or four entries down the line invalid.

But a flag marked as redacted was not the same as an empty one. The former was an indication that there were facts somewhere in the database that had been deliberately hidden. An error in the game’s design. A private memo between developers. Or an Easter egg not intended for the player base at all.

None of which I particularly cared for.

The second Crawler was waiting in the curve. I’d come to recognize how to adjust for the curvature in the corridor — forty feet seemed like fifty, and the shot always wanted to drift leftward, so you aimed slightly right off center on the joint.

Drew. Adjusted. Released.

---

*+55 EXP — Ironback Crawler (Weak Point Kill)*

---

657 EXP.

343 EXP left.

---

CURRENT STATS

STR: 12

AGI: 17

INT: 20

Skills: Friendly Conversation / Moral Support / Observe / Evasion I / Throwing I / Fast Learner / Precision Shot II / Enemy Analysis I / Pattern Recognition II

EXP: 657/1000

Rank: D

---

I located a rest node near the midpoint of the lower loop — a carved recess in the rock face with rune magic still active, one of the special spots the dungeon designers had included for players needing thirty seconds’ worth of not moving. I leaned against the rock and accessed the wiki.

Vorn’s entry came up.

Most of it I knew. A-minus rank. Patient. Four flags activated. Contact with Daren continuing at 128 and counting. Lyra on suspension. Kai — opposition confirmed. Direct confrontation completed; next steps to be determined.

I navigated to the flags page.

Flag 1: Lyra — SUSPENDED

Flag 2: Daren — ACTIVE

Flag 3: [generating]

Flag 4: [REDACTED]

Flag three was new. Or more new. Hadn’t even existed previously, as far as I could tell. Now it was at least admitting its own existence, which counted as information in much the same way that an infection admitting its presence counts as information. Informative, certainly.

I looked down at the redacted one.

This wasn’t just random redaction. I’d done my homework by now and knew how the wiki worked — blanks were blanks, question marks meant uncertainty, generating indicated an active process. Redacted was a category.

Meaning if Vorn had any secret fourth flag, the game itself wouldn’t let anyone see what it was coming.

I closed the wiki.

Waited another ten seconds.

Then I got back to work.

Third crawler down in the narrow path, twenty-two feet, low roof, the tricky angle that took me by surprise when I first attempted the run. By now, I’d figured out that when dealing with low roof shots, you needed a flatter trajectory compensation, and in a twenty-two feet narrow tunnel, it always seemed like ten thanks to wall psychology.

Drew low. Flat release. Joint hit, clean.

---

*+55 EXP — Ironback Crawler (Weak Point Kill)*

---

712 EXP.

I was about to complete the bottom loop when the wiki popped up again, even though I hadn’t opened it.

Something new was happening here. Never seen anything like this before.

---

WIKI — UNSOLICITED ALERT

New entry detected — generating

Category: External Variable

Tag: [NON-GAME ORIGIN]

Status: Incomplete — 12%

Preview: Subject arrived Ashveil [DATE REDACTED]. Origin: [REDACTED]. Classification pending.

Warning: This entry does not match any existing game character template.

---

I gazed upon this information far too long for anyone standing within a dungeon hallway.

Non-game origin.

Not an NPC. Not a player character. Not Vorn, not Daren, not Lyra.

A figure which wasn’t a template of an existing game character.

A figure which was present in Ashveil.

Mentally running through the checklist, Vorn was native to the game; Daren was native to the game. Each and every other character I had met was tagged appropriately, Role, Rank, Relationship meters, everything as standard. Whatever was creating this entry didn’t have that kind of tagging.

Either the game had introduced some new character class I hadn’t yet had wiki information about.

Or there was another person here, one who had gotten dragged into the game like myself.

I stood in the hallway for six whole seconds, which is six seconds more than what’s considered acceptable in the loop, before starting off again because standing in enemy territory in the middle of a crisis of identity is a good way to become dead and receive your next spawn point notice.

Fourth Crawler. End Chamber. Sixty feet. Clear line of sight. Done this eleven times already.

Drew. Held two beats. Released.

---

*+55 EXP — Ironback Crawler (Weak Point Kill)*

---

767 EXP.

---

WIKI — ALERT UPDATE

Entry: External Variable

Generation: 19%

New data: Subject is female. Arrived [DATE REDACTED] — estimated 3 days prior to current date. Current location: Ashveil. Contact with game characters: CONFIRMED. Identity: [REDACTED].

---

Female. In Ashveil since three days ago. Already made interaction with game characters.

Three days ago would have been two days before Lyra was reset. And only a day after Vorn had started making his narrowed window assessments. Around the same time as Daren had mentioned — in his usual off-handed manner, at the Broken Crown, in how Daren mentioned things — that there was an adventurer that showed up at the guild asking about the Undercroft map layouts and already seeming to know the answers before he was done describing them.

I’d dismissed this as background noise.

But now, I revisited it in a new light.

Somebody asking questions for which they already knew the answers. Inside a game world. Not matching any template listed in the wiki.

Only one person came to mind, and I was staring him straight in the face.

I continued on down into the end chamber, took my bounty marker off the ground rune, and began my trip back to the surface level.

287 EXP left.

One variable, non-game, unidentifiable somewhere in Ashveil.

And Vorn’s flagged redaction still unexplained.

There was an inkling that the coming days would be anything but peaceful for me compared to the lower loop.

---

CURRENT STATS

STR: 12

AGI: 17

INT: 20

Skills: Friendly Conversation / Moral Support / Observe / Evasion I / Throwing I / Fast Learner / Precision Shot II / Enemy Analysis I / Pattern Recognition II

EXP: 767/1000

Rank: D

WIKI — ALERT UPDATE

Entry: External Variable

Generation: 31%

Status: Ongoing

Identity: [REDACTED]

Location: Ashveil — confirmed

Threat classification: Pending

Note: Subject displays foreknowledge outside of NPC or normal player template parameters.

---

I came up at 11:47 AM.

The Ashveil before me was indistinguishable from the usual Ashveil. The market area bustling with activity, the cloth area open, and the swinging sign above the Broken Crown Inn by the canal.

Somewhere in the midst of Ashveil, there existed another stranger.

I tightened the bow strap across my shoulder and got myself some food before figuring out what to do next because, let’s not forget, I was human too.

Then I’d figure out the rest.