Dungeon King: The Hidden Ruler
Chapter 40: [The Silent Duel Begins 4] - Ghosts in the Logs

Chapter 40: [The Silent Duel Begins 4] - Ghosts in the Logs

Elara sat alone in the QA dev capsule room, the blue glow of the monitor screens casting faint rings beneath her eyes as she opened the dev mode.

Outside the glass walls, Titan Corp buzzed with life—casual conversations, keyboard clacks, vending machines humming with apathy.

But inside this sealed space, she wasn’t just a rookie employee. She was a forensic analyst piecing together the data trail of a perfect crime.

The Emberstone Burrow incident. Phase 2.

She scrolled through combat logs, filtering by timestamps and death events. The pattern made her skin crawl. The PvP sequence didn’t fail due to skill or timing. It collapsed like a soufflé in a wind tunnel.

[21:16:08] Ebonreach.Healer_Sora begins casting [Resonant Mend]

[21:16:08.510] SYSTEM: Cast Input Confirmed

[21:16:08.030] SYSTEM: Target inactive – action failed

[21:16:08.031] Sora: [Logout]

"Input confirmed... but almost half a second before the logout," she muttered. She checked the node latency. Normal. "Why the delay then? Why cast too late?"

No status effects. No lag. But something had slowed the player’s reaction. Not system delay—something deeper. Behavioral interference?

She kept digging.

[22:16:03] CrimsonBlades.Healer_Areth casts [Mass Rejuvenation]

[22:16:03.002] SYSTEM: Input received

[22:16:03.823]SYSTEM: Action delayed – Execution timestamp mismatch (Δ +0.8s)

[22:16:04.621] SYSTEM: Action failed – Target already inactive

Then something caught her eye as she scrolled up for a little bit.

[21:15:58] Player: CrimsonBlades.Mage_Liora enters [Confusion] status

[21:15:08] Source: Unknown

Her brow furrowed. Status tags were always clean. If it came from a player, it listed their ID. If it came from the environment, it showed the zone hazard. This one just... existed.

She ran a filter for Confusion.

[21:15:58] Player: Ebonreach.Healer_Sora enters [Confusion]

[21:15:58] Player: CrimsonBlades.Rogue_Yan enters [Confusion]

[21:15:58] Player: Ebonreach.BuffMaster enters [Confusion]

And more, all 30 of them. At the same time.

"That’s weird," she said quietly.

Why were multiple players entering Confusion?

Normally, player-cast illusions were tight and localized. Small AOE bursts—you hit one group, then have to reposition to hit another. That was just how player range worked. Limited. Flooded the backlog with lines of repetitive action.

But this?

It just happened.

One moment they were fine—

The next, the raid was staggering.

No casting. No movement.

It felt less like a player spell... more like a dungeon boss mechanic.

Wait, what was this dungeon again? This could be that the player miscalculated boss skills....

She opened the dungeon profile.

[Dungeon: Emberstone Burrow]

Type: Environmental | Hazard: Fire | AI Model: Aggro-based | Mid Boss Damage Type : Burst. | Final Boss Damage Type : Burst, Damage Absorption

"Wait, what?" she looked at the screen in confusion. Read it with frowning.

"Fire damage? So where this damn illusion comes from?"

She kept scrolling—past a flood of system logs, thousands of lines deep—until three small entries caught her eye.

Buried in the noise. Ordinary-looking. Easy to miss.

[21:16:23] SYSTEM: Event flagged. [encrypted] detected at Frame 24813

[21:16:23] Action: Auto-trimmed

[21:16:23] Protocol: Behavioral Cleanup Routine 22b-PhantomTrigger

Her stomach tightened.

Auto-trimmed?

She tried to retrieve the full backlog.

The system returned a soft chime:

[The Emberstone Burrow incident. Phase 1 Not Available].

[Partial Data Available – Retention Limit (72h) Applied]

Only the last 23 minutes were intact.

Elara leaned back. "Of course. Three-day cap. Standard load-balancing policy."

With three hundred million users, storing full combat logs forever would crash even Titan Corp’s absurd infrastructure.

But that meant—the initial breach, the opening silence, the first confusion spike?

Gone. Even tomorrow if she wants to open this backlog again, it will already be auto deleted by the system.

She stared at the terminal. Then pulled the raw death sequence.

Thirty players. No assist logs. No damage tags. Just logout flashes and memory bleed. The kill feed read like an obituary written by a ghost.

And yet—it wasn’t noise. It was a pattern. Healers. Buffers. Stragglers.

As if someone knew the playbook. Not just the mechanics, but the human behavior behind it.

She opened a private memo file.

Incident: Emberstone Phase 2 - Hypothesis

Unknown hostile actor eliminated 60% of raid composition without system recognition.

No damage attribution.

AI behavior not bypassed, but utilized.

Cleanup protocols engaged automatically, implying incident falls within system logic.

Conclusion: Whoever did this didn’t cheat. They simply understood the system better than the system understood itself.

She stared. Then deleted the memo.

Not out of fear. Out of necessity.

Because a shadow that intelligent wouldn’t leave evidence.

If it was just a mob glitch, it’d be a routine fix. But if it was a player? The sponsors would demand drastic action—player deletion, class purge, maybe more.

She had to choose one angle.

And that was the problem—even she wasn’t sure what this was.

If she blamed the AI, she’d be pointing fingers at the company’s crown jewel—its prized autonomous system.

If she blamed a player, she’d be accusing someone who hadn’t broken any rules. No hacks. No scripts. Just silent manipulation wrapped in system logic.

Worse, if she was wrong, that player could file a lawsuit. Claim defamation, wrongful ban, reputation damage.

She couldn’t afford to look like a fool. Not on her first assignment.

As a new employee, she’d be the easiest scapegoat if things blew up. A clean sacrifice to protect corporate reputation.

She took a deep breath.

Her mind flicked back to college—back to her final AI ethics seminar. They used to talk about how algorithms needed interpreters, not enforcers. She remembered standing in front of a classroom, presenting her capstone project on combat AI and player agency.

She even quoted her professor at the end: "Systems should never exceed human understanding."

She had believed that.

Now she wasn’t sure she even understood the system—let alone who was interpreting it.

Everything seems different from theory in the classroom.

Okay, one last check.

Before the AI_GhostTrace, she tried something desperate: an old, half-deprecated protocol flagged in developer wikis—AI_VoidEcho.Scan().

The terminal blinked.

[Access Denied – Diagnostic Level Not Authorized]

She hesitated. Entered her dev clearance. Override accepted.

She pulled up a fresh command line and sighed."Okay... maybe the script is broken. Or the AI just glitched out or something."Her fingers hovered over the keyboard. She typed quickly, then paused before hitting enter."Come on... show me something the system missed."

The terminal processed.One blink. Then another.

Nothing.Not an error. Not even corrupted data.

Just blank.

"No footprint. No trace," she whispered. "Like you were never even written."

Not NULL. Not corrupted. Just blank. Like time had been erased.

She swallowed. "You’re not hiding. You’re unwritten."

[21:17:01] AI_GhostTrace.Run()

[21:17:01] Return: NULL

Of course.

"You didn’t leave a footprint," she whispered. "Just what the hell are you? A mob glitch, hacker, or a player?"

She lingered at the desk, eyes lingering on the NULL return.

Maybe it was a script. A third-party mod. Something injected that shouldn’t be there.

She ran a script integrity trace. Checked for packet drift. Looked for unauthorized mod signatures. Even ran Titan’s prebuilt anti-exploit crawler through the entire Emberstone server instance.

Clean. Clean. Clean. All too clean.

"Oh, come on..." she muttered.

No triggers. No overlays. No third-party injections. No signature tampering. Nothing was tampered with.

She tapped her pen against the console.

No one hacked the system. No one altered the packets. This wasn’t brute force.

It was elegance.

That made it worse.

Because if no one injected code...

Then someone used the code already there.

The capsule room felt different now. Cold, too clean. The hum of the monitors wasn’t comforting—it was clinical. The walls breathed nothing but silence.

She looked around. One of the nearby pods had scuff marks at its base. Another had a plastic case left open beside it, tools inside still warm to the touch. The place was used. Alive. But it felt like a morgue.

This isn’t where bugs die, she thought. This is where questions go to sleep.

For a second, she considered writing a new memo. Flagging it. Building a proper paper trail.

But no—if the system cleaned it once, it’d do it again.

She sat quietly for a moment, staring at the scroll of logs like someone staring at a crime scene that cleaned itself. A thousand pieces of information and not a single fingerprint.

A whisper in her brain offered a single possibility.

What if it wasn’t a mistake? What if the system wanted it cleaned?

As she stepped out of the dev capsule room, her phone buzzed.

[Nice job keeping the sponsors happy. PR’s all smiles. Let’s not overthink it—tie a bow on this one and get ready for this month Throne Wars. Your fix will be included too. We’ve got whales to feed and numbers to spike.]

A second message followed, less official:

[PS: Don’t go chasing ghosts. You’re on a fast track. Don’t lose the plot.]

She smiled.

Bitter.

Empty.

She caught her reflection on the glass door before it closed behind her. Pale. Tired. The eyes of someone who had already started to understand that truth and protocol weren’t teammates.

She raised her phone. Took a screenshot of the log interface. Didn’t save it. Just stared.

Sometimes, ghosts don’t haunt you. They recruit you.

Across the city, Adrian Voss stirred his tea and watched a trade window blink on his HUD.

Payment confirmed.

Another item sold.

As always, he’d routed the transaction through his preferred blind crypto wallet—no banks, no e-wallets, no paper trail. Just clean profit flowing through the shadows, one untraceable packet at a time.

"Not bad for a day’s work. All money, everything clean," he whispered with a meaningful smile before taking a slow sip.