FALLEN ANGEL: MARRIED TO THE DEMON KING
Chapter 127: THE CLOSURE OF THE VOID (3)

Chapter 127: THE CLOSURE OF THE VOID (3)

Arella watched as the Law of the lands was invoked, and they began to glitch violently, spasming as the Law rejected them on a fundamental level. However, it was taking too long. The Law was supposed to take place immediately.

That was when a realization smacked Arella straight in the chest. "They are constructed beings." She muttered, "that is why they do not bleed."

"What do you mean." Varziel, beside her, was holding steady even as his power was reaching its final reserves.

"I mean that whatever brought them here is not governed by the Law of the natural world."

The Law of Return was one that deduced when a being crossed over to their world mistakenly, and it worked to send those not of their world out of it.

However, there was nothing about it dealing with constructed beings. That is why it had not worked as it was. Now, thanks to them invoking it, it had recognized that the invaders were not truly alive, and were not of their world. It was doing what it did best, purging those that did not belong.

The cracks in the sky hissed and sizzled, as golden lightening lanced through them, severing what root hold they had over the firmament. The circling rune from Arella and Varziel pulsed one last time.

The vortex let out a roar, as a storm of green fire exploded outward. Its last attempt at destroying everything nearby in a final death throe. The eight pillars that Varziel and Arella had erected pulsed back, hitting back at the green fire and disintegrating into motes of light upon contact.

Then, it was like a door slammed shut from the other side as the rift snapped close.

The sky went still.

The golden messages dissolved into motes of rectangular light.

Arella collapsed mid air and her staff disappeared, as the strength left her. Just as her body began to spiral downward, Varziel caught her with one arm, holding her trembling form close.

She was pale, her twin halos dim, but she was breathing.

Below them, Castiel’s dome flickered out.

He flew, held upright by Lady Darvia. His eyes met Arella’s as she and Varziel floated down to their level. His robes were singed and his aura, which Arella had gotten used to being so bright, was no more than a flicker.

Still, his lips pulled up in a rare smile. "You did it Ella."

Arella opened her mouth to speak, but then froze. She could feel something up in the sky.

She turned her head just in time to see the air around where the rift had been shimmering with those golden motes of light.

Instinctively, she materialized her staff in her hand, ready to fight more.

A black slit blinked open mid air, no larger than the size of her palm. A pair of eyes peeked from the slit. They were a deep shade of green that stared at the world from above the sky.

Arella’s pulse thundered in her ears as she probed inwards into her body. She did not have enough power to fight longer. She needed to use the little power she had to heal Castiel.

It was held back by the Laws of the Land. She had to believe that her power had worked.

The eyes blinked once.

Twice.

Then disappeared.

Arella breathed a sigh of relief. They had done it.

-------

The lights in the dev lab flickered slightly, not enough to be worrying. It was just the sort of thing that happened at 6AM when you had been crunching numbers and codes for 3 weeks straight, substituting sleep with caffeine, ramen and stolen one hour naps here and there.

Creating an MMORPG game which would be used together with a vr headset and immersion pod was more difficult than any of them had thought.

The game developers had spent hours daily fixing bugs in preparation for the release of their new game, Dominion Reign.

They had even sent over close to two hundred pods and headsets to early purchasers so that they would be their beta users to help them fix any issues the pod might have.

And by god there were a lot of issues.

The first week of beta testing had been brutal.

Server drops. Neuro-link sync delays. One tester even claimed that she could still hear the wind from the game after logging out. Another reported nausea that did not match any normal feedback loop, many reported being attacked by the npcs from the game.

And then there was the firewall breach that was not technically a breach, just a weird feedback loop between the pod’s deep sleep interface and the game’s memory system. The engineers chalked it up to untested neural echoing and slapped a patch on it to fix it.

Mostly.

The patch seemed to stop the memory bleed issues, but it did not explain the new problem that cropped up.

Several testers, different pods, different cities, started reporting the same thing, NPC’s talking back.

They were not just delivering quest lines or canned voice overs. No, they were talking back, improvising, reacting, remembering.

At first, the devs were thrilled.

The AI they had used was one of the best in the market. It was built to learn patterns and simulate natural conversations.

But this, this was different.

One tester swore that one of the demons he fought even remembered him from a previous game.

"Did I not kill you three times already?" He had said in her bug report voice note. "and that was before he killed me in game."

The logs showed no such line in the dialogue database.

Another swore that they had been cursed in game by one of the npc’s. She had then later left the game and was hospitalized later for bleeding from all orifices.

At that point, the dev team begun to split.

Half of them thought that they were experiencing a once in a lifetime emergent behavior from an AI. It was the birth of a new AI. A miracle in itself.

The other half though that something was wrong.

Very very wrong.

But with one word from the higher ups, they still pushed forth with the beta testing.

Today was supposed to be the day all beta testers entered the game to try and conquer one of the first start points in the game.

A fortress city at the edge of the Vortex expanse. It was designed to be a brutal early raid that was a real test of teamwork and coordination. High stakes, and higher prizes to be won. Just the sort of thing that would generate viral clips and leaderboard rivalries once Dominion Reign went public.

At 7pm, all hundred and ninety active pods registered synchronized login, and everything was going well. The players who had been playing for a week had leveled up a little, and were able to fight the npc’s quite nicely.

However, half an hour into playing, one of the npc’s cut away from the others and attacked the sky. Some players tried to stop the npc, but it was stronger than what the devs had anticipated. It hurled its weapon straight into what should have been a background skybox that only served the purpose of transporting the users into the game.

The visuals glitched, and they watched as green cracks tore through their skybox.

The devs had worked to stop the glitch, and had successfully managed to stop the cracks from spreading further.

Now, they had watched in shock as none of the planning and preparation they had done stopped the npcs from attacking the skybox, and worse, breaking.

It was not just a visual glitch anymore.

The skybox, which should have been a static, non-interactive part of the environment, basically the game’s wallpaper, was never meant to be touched by players, let alone npcs.

However, whatever the npcs had done had struck the digital barrier and pierced through it.

At first, the devs thought it was just a rendering bug, a shader issue perhaps. Even maybe a corrupted asset. That was something that they were used to.

But no, the logs did not show any render errors.

Instead, their monitors flickered. Server logs spiked with unreadable strings of 1 and 0. Clacking of keys filled the room, accompanied by the beeping of the monitors.

Finally, the screens came back online, only to display words that appeared and disappeared in three second intervals.

’ERROR: SYSTEM MALFUNCTION.’

’ERROR: SYSTEM MALFUNCTION.’

’ERROR: SYSTEM MALFUNCTION.’

’UNAUTHORIZED INTERFERENCE DETECTED.’

’ATTEMPTING TO REDIRECT.’

’ERROR: SYSTEM MALFUNCTION.’

’REDIRECT FAIL.’

’ERROR: SYSTEM MALFUNCTION’

’404 NOT FOUND.’

’ERROR: ATTEMPTING TO RESET.’

’CONNECTION RESET FAIL.’

’ATTEMPTING TO TROUBLESHOOT.’

’TROUBLESHOOT UNAVAILABLE.’

’ERROR: TROUBLESHOOT FAIL.’

’ATTEMPTING TO RETURN.’

’ERROR: SYSTEM MALFUNCTION.’

’SYSTEM FAILURE.’

Finally, strings of code referencing functions none of them recognized filled the screen.

Entire blocks titled ’ANCHORING PROTOCOLS: PLANE DEFENSE-LAW OF RETURN INVOKED’ filled the screen.

Then came the pulse. It was loud, but did not crash the system. It just ... hit, like a soundless pressure wave. The lights in the dev lab cut out for exactly five seconds.

When they blinked back on, every screen was black, except for one blinking message on the central monitor.

’RETURN ENFORCED.’