The birth of the first Error-Grade Construct did not trigger a server-wide announcement. There was no grand system text splashed across the screens of Yggdrasil's millions of active players, nor did a world boss health bar anchor itself to the top of the user interface.
Instead, the game manifested its panic through structural rot.
Across the human realm of Asgard and the bustling trade sectors of Álfheim, regional chat logs began to stutter. The latency bars of entire player factions plummeted into the red, and the ambient physics engines governing the movement of clouds, water, and wildlife froze in place. The hard-coded reality of the Nine Realms was struggling to calculate the spatial existence of a Level 95 entity that had been woven entirely out of illegal parameters and devoured World-Class data.
Within the collapsing cavern of Niflheim, Draze and the remaining members of World Searcher found themselves pinned to the frozen floor. The black mist that had stripped them of their stamina and mana left them completely paralyzed—not by a standard crowd-control debuff like Stun or Freeze, but by a total disruption of their character action strings. Their UI panels flickered violently, displaying endless loops of NullReferenceException warnings.
"Draze... my logout button is grayed out," the rogue whispered, his voice coming through the party's external voice software, completely decoupled from the game's broken audio engine. "What kind of build is this guy running? This isn't PvP... this is a system crash."
Draze couldn't answer. His eyes were wide, tracking the gargantuan silhouette of Construct C01 as it moved toward the mouth of the cavern.
The entity was a towering, asymmetrical nightmare. Its core was a churning engine of violet null-matter that pulled the ambient snowfall directly into its mass, instantly converting the digital ice into streams of raw, unformatted code. Four massive, segmented arms—each forged from the corrupted data of Nazarick's defensive golems—dripped with a volatile cocktail of plasma: crackling yellow lightning, blistering volcanic magma, absolute-zero frost, and a highly corrosive, emerald poison that dissolved the very ground it stepped on.
The construct raised one of its massive, elemental appendages and struck the frozen ceiling of the cavern.
The mountain didn't just cave in; it shattered. The solid permafrost and ancient glacial rock of Niflheim dissolved into a cloud of shimmering, violet data particles, exposing the frozen sky above. With a single, earth-shattering leap that bypassed the game's gravity constraints, the construct launched itself out of the canyon, hurtling directly toward the nearest regional capital defense grid.
The Command Center of the World Tree
In a sterile, hyper-advanced monitoring station completely disconnected from the player-accessible realms, a flashing red alarm illuminated the faces of three system administrators.
"We have a localized server cluster collapse in Niflheim!" one of the engineers shouted, his fingers flying across a physical keyboard as he pulled up the live rendering logs. "The memory leak is expanding exponentially. It's eating through the zone's asset pool!"
"Did a guild trigger an unmapped World Quest?" the supervisor demanded, leaning over the console. "Check the active instances. Who is in that sector?"
"That's the problem, sir. The automated tracking system is reporting that the zone is occupied by... nothing. The player count is registering as zero, but the data output is equivalent to a forty-man raid firing off Super-Tier magic simultaneously."
The supervisor's eyes narrowed as he stared at the live rendering screen. A massive, pixelated distortion was moving across the map of Niflheim, leaving a trail of absolute code erasure in its wake.
"Bypass the automated anti-cheat engine," the supervisor ordered, his voice cold. "Deploy a manual tracking packet directly onto that coordinate. If it's a hacker using a packet injector, I want their hardware ID blacklisted before they can log off."
"Deploying now... wait. The tracking packet just bounced back." The engineer blinked in disbelief, staring at the terminal output. "The system is rejecting the command. It's saying the target entity... is a hard-coded asset of the game itself."
"What?!"
"Look at the object signature, sir. The system isn't recognizing it as a player or a modified NPC. It's reading the entity as an internal system error that has been assigned a level modifier and a hostile tracking script. The game thinks the server is trying to delete itself, and it's treating the deletion process as a level 95 boss fight."
The Vanguard of the Iron Sovereign
The regional capital of Niflheim, a massive, fortress-like city carved out of a singular, colossal iceberg known as The Frost Citadel, was currently occupied by the Iron Sovereign guild—one of the top five human-centric mega-factions on the server. Over two hundred heavily armed players patrolled the high crystalline walls, confident that the city's divine-tier defense barrier, which neutralized 90% of incoming elemental damage, made them entirely invincible.
The guild master, a Level 100 Paladin named Reinhardt, stood on the central watchtower, his golden armor gleaming despite the perpetual twilight of the realm. He was listening to the frantic reports coming from his scouts on the outer perimeter.
"Sir, something is coming from the northern wastes," a scout's voice cracked through the guild channel. "It's... we can't get an appraisal on it. It's moving too fast!"
Before Reinhardt could issue an order, the horizon erupted.
A tidal wave of absolute-zero frost, supercharged by the primordial authority Yuki had devoured from the Ice Dragon Heart, swept across the plains. The divine-tier defense barrier of The Frost Citadel flared to life, its golden runes shining brightly as it attempted to absorb the elemental strike.
But Yuki's construct didn't fire standard elemental magic. The frost was carrying the mechanical weight of [The Error].
The moment the frost touched the golden barrier, the barrier's data parameters were forcefully rewritten. The protective field didn't shatter; it turned into a massive, volatile explosive payload.
[System Alert: Defense Grid Error]
Property inversion detected: [Absorb Damage] ➔ [Multiply Damage]
"What is happening to the shield?!" Reinhardt roared as the golden barrier turned an unstable, blinding violet.
BOOM.
The resulting explosion tore the entire front half of The Frost Citadel out of existence. The massive iceberg split down the center, sending millions of tons of ice collapsing into the dark abyss below. Hundreds of high-level players were obliterated instantly, their avatars dissolving into data dust before they could even draw their weapons.
From the smoke of the explosion, Construct C01 descended onto the ruins of the central plaza. Its four elemental arms raised toward the sky, channeling a massive, combined vortex of fire, thunder, and poison that began to rain down upon the surviving players like the wrath of a dying god.
The Shadows of Nazarick
Deep within the pristine, hidden layers of the Great Tomb of Nazarick, Momonga sat at the head of the round table, his skeletal hands resting heavily on the table's edge. Beside him, the translucent projection of the server's global event tracker was showing the total, catastrophic destruction of The Frost Citadel.
"It took less than ten minutes," Momonga murmured, his crimson eye sockets flickering with deep, calculating intensity. "A top-tier guild's capital fortress... erased from the map by a single, unmapped entity."
"The human factions are going completely insane on the public boards," Peroronchino said, leaning forward with an uncharacteristic expression of serious concern. "They are blaming the developers, claiming it's a broken world event meant to force a server roll-back. But look at the composition of that monster, Momonga."
Momonga nodded slowly. "The elemental output matches the dragon cores... and the structural movement mimics our own Golem security framework. The information we traded to the Snow Merchant."
Touch Me crossed his arms, his metallic armor reflecting the dim light of the tomb. "He didn't use that data to optimize his own build, Momonga. He used it to create a weapon capable of destabilizing the entire server balance. The Code Paradox crystal he gave us... it's a masterpiece, but it's also a warning."
"A warning?" Momonga asked.
"He proved to us that he can manipulate the hard-coded limits of this world," Touch Me stated grimly. "If he can turn a pile of dead soil and our own NPC archives into a Level 95 city-killer... what happens if he decides that Nazarick is his next market opportunity?"
Momonga remained silent for a long moment, his gaze locking onto the shimmering violet energy radiating from the crystal Yuki had traded them, which was now embedded directly into the tomb's central defense matrix. The power it provided was undeniable, but the shadow it cast was longer than any valley in Helheim.
"We continue our expansion," Momonga finally declared, his voice carrying the absolute, unyielding authority of the Guild Master. "We optimize our custom NPCs using the data he provided, and we fortify our lower boundaries. If Mysteries is the error in the system... then Ainz Ooal Gown will become the absolute rule that overwrites it."
Far above the burning, frozen ruins of Niflheim, standing on a floating platform of unformatted null-matter that the game's rendering engine couldn't fully draw, Yuki watched the destruction of the city below. His featureless grey face was completely illuminated by the brilliant, chaotic fireworks of his creation's multi-elemental wrath.
His experience bar was surging, his character sheet rewriting its parameters with every piece of data his construct devoured from the fallen human players.
[Your Construct has eliminated: Player 'Reinhardt' (Lv. 100)]
[Devour Feature Triggered via Proxy]
Extracting raw data...
[You have Leveled Up! Level 80 ➔ Level 84]
Yuki slowly raised his hand, letting the cool, chaotic wind of the collapsing realm flow through his fingers. The simulation was breaking exactly according to his calculations. The players were fighting the monster, the developers were fighting the code, and he... he was finally holding the pen.
"The prologue is finished," Yuki whispered into the void of the dying sky. "Let's begin Chapter One."