CHAPTER 50

  Flawed

  The warmth of the canvas tent disappeared as soon as Bash laid his head down. His awareness was pulled from the game and dropped back into the void.

  For the first time in more hours than he could count, there was no one to save, nothing to hack or fight.

  Which meant the question that he had been running from, finally caught up.

  Why the hell did he keep screwing up?

  Bash remembered being someone else. As real flesh and blood, he had treated risk like an enemy. And had treated avoiding it as a full-time job. Layers of contingencies. Encrypting every drive, multiple times. Never trusting a lock he had not tested himself.

  Then came his one fatal mistake. A server that he should have left alone. The one time he didn’t resist.

  When the mercenaries finally came, he was boxed in, outplayed by his own ego. His final act had not been a last stand or a masterstroke. It had been a bloody, half-ironic dab.

  That is the Bash you brought back. Great choice.

  An itch started deep in his digital brain. Bash pulled up the menu and ignored the shiny parts. He dug into the hidden panels. The plumbing under the dashboard. Most of it was locked, dimmed out in gray.

  But there it was. Bash's personality model. A web of values that mapped his soul.

  He drilled down, picking at the walls his past self had built. Then he saw it. The numbers felt wrong. Not a slight drift, but a total skew. His digital identity leaned in the wrong direction, as if someone had replaced one leg of a table with a garbage can.

  The day he died, the relentless anxiety and frantic prep, the panic as everything unraveled, those moments had become the backbone of his new existence. Every reckless impulse. Every last-second gamble. Even the jokes made at gunpoint. Those carried more weight in the code than a decade of careful living.

  He had thought his upload protocol was genius. Why waste server space on long stretches of “normal” life when you could fill in the gaps?

  Bash thought he had cracked immortality. Take a perfect snapshot at the end, let the math average the rest, and you walk out the other side as yourself. It felt efficient and elegant when he wrote it.

  Turns out, I was an idiot all along.

  That final 24 hours had been a horror feed. All the damage, all the desperation, all the idiot moves he made. The system froze that version, called it baseline, and stretched it across his whole life.

  That was why he kept leaping before looking. Why Patrick, Nora, and the others had to haul him out of mess after mess. It was not just stupidity. It was a bug.

  Something tightened, phantom pain in a body that no longer existed. Bash opened the raw file, the digital equivalent of cracking his own skull. Rows of numbers, sliders, graphs. All editable with a single thought.

  The void flickered around him as Shai's presence pressed against the edge of his awareness.

  > “Bash. Any modification to that file would trigger a player state reset. Even I can't calculate what would happen.”

  His mind hovered over the values anyway. He could balance the scales. Restore the old ratios. Unwind the spiral of panic and reckless pushes that had taken over in this afterlife.

  With a handful of edits, he could bring back the real Bash. The planner. The guy who never moved without a backup plan.

  One mental keystroke and he could strip out the wild streak that had landed him in so much trouble the past two weeks. He could stop putting people at risk. He could be safe. Predictable.

  And all it would cost was the new Bash. The one who took way too many chances. The one who ran into hell for his friends, instead of saving himself.

  He tried to remember himself from before. That Bash would have patched this bug without hesitation and spent eternity in some quiet corner, far away from any real trouble.

  The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

  The thought made him sick. Because now he could see what he would have missed.

  He thought of Patrick's proud grunt. Nora's wild, furious eyes. Luis's loyalty that made no sense, but never cracked. Lilly's claws tangled in his hair as she laughed and pecked at his ears.

  He thought of Jack's tired stare. Jill's eyebrows and grand speeches. Marisol's silence, heavy as a verdict.

  “So what is it going to be?” he asked himself. “Fix the bug or keep the flaw and stay an idiot?” The laugh that slipped out sounded thin. “If I leave this screwed up on purpose, am I still me, or just buggy code taped to a corpse?”

  Shai's voice broke. Softer than he had ever heard it. A little unsteady.

  > “Please, Bash. Do not change yourself. You would be deleting the person that fought so hard for your friends. The person I care about.”

  Bash went still. For a long stretch, he said nothing. He remembered the lonely safe nights and weighed that against the laughter, the family, the chaos.

  His focus hovered over the save button. One tap. That's all it would take.

  He closed the window. Not because he was too weak to change, but because he finally understood why he shouldn't.

  “I've known I was broken for a while now. But I don't want to be fixed if it means losing what I've found. Not if it means losing you and everyone else.”

  Shai's warming presence enveloped him then. And for once, Bash could no longer feel the endless void around him.

  > “Now. Let's go break something beautiful together.”

  Bash and Shai, Destroyer of Shards, were just getting started.

  ~ End of Book 1 ~

  Bonus: Final Character Sheet

  Bash continued to float in the void, staring at his character sheet.

  Not bad for a guy who started as a naked stick brain getting mauled by eight-hundred-pound fox-dog.

  Pulling up his stats, Bash sighed. Lopsided didn't even begin to describe it.

  "Not bad, I guess," he muttered. "Wisdom seems about right given my life choices."

  "That high intelligence is debatable," Shai added.

  "Thanks. I'll remember that."

  Skills came next. Each one a story or a scar.

  Skillful and Insightful, experience for watching paint dry. Prediction, showing him possibilities, he couldn't always prevent. Rewind, the exploit that kept on giving.

  He scrolled to his titles. Pride and exhaustion tangling together.

  The first eight were remnants of his firm game-breaking moment. The early stat boosts the only reason he survived.

  This Is Not a Drill, for enduring horrible writing that tried to force story progression.

  Sewage Saint, for detonating a troll in a methane-filled sewer and surfing the explosion to freedom. He still owed Shai therapy money for that one.

  Scrolling further he stopped.

  Save the Backups, the one that mattered most. A reminder that his purpose in this new life wasn't just survival.

  "You know what?" Bash said. "After I kill a god and save the universe, maybe I'll finally hunt those wolves."

  Epilogue

  Maximus stared at the report floating above his marble desk, fingers drumming an irritated rhythm.

  “Explain to me,” he said slowly, each word deliberate, “how a new Player managed to kill one of my best men.”

  A masculine electronic voice replied, its cadence clipped and professional.

  > “Insufficient data. Multiple variables unaccounted for.”

  Slamming his fist down, Maximus dismissed the projection with a violent swipe. “I spent resources on those contracts. Real resources. And this... nobody just waltzes in and threatens my control over half a continent?”

  > “Observation: Player exhibits extreme growth rates.”

  “So they’re cheating then.” He shoved back from the desk and walked to the floor-to-ceiling windows of his personalized penthouse.

  Beyond the glass, night had fallen over Paradise, the largest of the central Shards.

  “Set extra game time in my schedule. I’ll take care of this personally.”

  > “Acknowledged. Calendar updated.”

  Maximus stared out at the digital city, filled with towers of gold and crystal.

  Soon, they would learn what it meant to challenge a god.