They had expected the Throne Room of the Creator. Or a sterile, chrome-bright Reality Control Centre where holograms drifted and ambient music played. Instead, they saw a cluttered server room inhabited by a man who had long ago lost track of time and, it seemed, any sense of shame.
The room was vast, the size of a stadium, yet it felt as cramped as a cupboard due to a monstrous, monumental mess. Mountains of cardboard boxes with faded logos—IBM, Atari, and even some Soviet research institutes—formed precarious ziggurat towers propping up the ceiling. The floor was carpeted in a tangle of wires—black, white, grey—snaking and knotting together before vanishing into the darkness like the roots of some giant cybernetic tree. Amidst the cables lay parts of ancient mechanisms: gears, vacuum tubes, punch cards, and empty injectors from unknown stimulants that glowed with a faint neon light.
In the centre of this chaos, on an island cleared of junk, sat a chair. It was cobbled together from scraps of a server rack, a car seat, and gaffer tape. And in it sat Him.
The same Bloke in the white towelling dressing gown. The one who had one-shotted a Level 7 boss and sent them to a frozen hell. Only now, up close, under the pitiless light of the monitors, the girls saw details that had previously escaped them. The dressing gown on his shoulders had frayed to the state of gauze, translucent in patches. His slippers were worn through to holes. And his face... it wasn't just the face of a tired man. It was the face of a creature that hadn't slept for a century. Deep wrinkles etched his forehead and cheeks like canyons in parched earth. His skin was grey and parchment-thin. And in his eyes, hidden behind thick lenses on an elastic strap, lay the dust of ages and an infinite, grey, soul-crushing boredom.
He didn't turn when they entered. His bony fingers flew across a keyboard—an old, mechanical thing with high keys that emitted a machine-gun clatter: clack-clack-clack-clack. On the wall of monitors before him, streams of data, graphs, and lines of code blurred past at a speed that would give any normal person a migraine.
"...another buffer overflow in the 'Zone of Eternal Torment'. How much memory do you lot need to gobble up? You're just lava textures, you don't need an IQ..." he muttered under his breath in a dry, creaky voice. "And that gravity bug in the 'Sky Archipelago' is back. A hundred years of the same old shite... the float variable rounded the wrong way again... Idiots. Who wrote this module? Ah, right, I did..."
The girls froze at the threshold. Their gleaming armour, their legendary weapons, their victor’s bravado—all of it seemed utterly out of place here amongst the dust and old boxes. They looked like cosplayers who had accidentally wandered into an intensive care unit.
"Ahem," Lena coughed loudly, breaking the symphony of the keys.
The clacking stopped. The chair turned slowly, with the long, agonizing groan of ungreased bearings.
The Administrator looked at them over the top of his glasses, which had slid to the very tip of his nose. There was no anger in his gaze, no fear. There was only the exhaustion of a man interrupted five minutes before a deadline.
[ENTITY: The Administrator / Keeper of the Code / Echo of a Soul (Lvl. ???)] [Status: Eternal Shift. Debuff: Chronic Melancholy.]
He took off his glasses, rubbed the bridge of his nose, and gave a heavy sigh.
"Well?" his voice was quiet, rustling like a dust-clogged fan. "Here you are. The smashers. The hackers. The killers of my best Overseer. Do you have any idea how many resources I spent compiling him? I spent three years teaching him to tell the difference between a cheater and a bug-exploiter, and you lot flushed him down the rubbish chute. Barbarians."
"We’ve come for answers," Irina said firmly, striking the floor with her staff. The sound was dull; the carpet swallowed the echo. "And for the exit."
"The exit?" The Administrator gave a bitter, joyless snicker. The corners of his mouth twitched, but the smile didn't reach his eyes. "Darling, there is no exit from here. Not even for me. Especially not for me. I’m not a god here; I’m the... blooming caretaker."
"We don't care!" Nate stepped forward, her hand instinctively resting on the hilt of her cutlass, her cloak swishing dramatically (despite the lack of wind). "We demand—"
She cut herself off mid-sentence. The interface before her eyes flickered and turned grey. Every skill icon, every health and mana bar was crossed out with thick red 'X's. The cutlass in her hand suddenly felt heavy, becoming just a lump of iron, and the plasma cannons on her hip gave a pathetic bleep before shutting down.
[WARNING! RING ZERO CODE ZONE.] [All active skills, magic, and game-world physics have been disabled to prevent critical system failures.] [Mode: Reality_1.0]
Lena felt the symbiote beneath her armour go still, turning into an inert, cold mass—nothing more than a layer of bio-gel. Irina tried to summon even a spark of Light—useless. The crystal on her staff went dark, becoming a piece of dull glass. Even Rollo squeaked and hid behind Lena’s leg when his cool cyber-glasses died, turning into plain plastic.
The Administrator waved a hand lazily, still holding his "World’s Best Dad" mug.
"This is my operating theatre," he explained without a hint of threat, simply stating a fact. "Your 'magic' doesn't work here. Your 'crits' and 'dodges' don't work here. Only I work here. And I am very, very tired of fixing what you lot break. Do you have any concept of how many lines of code go to hell when you use that 'Dragon Fire' in textures that weren't designed for heat treatment?"
He stood up with a groan. He was tall—incredibly tall—and thin, his body appearing almost translucent, as if he himself had half-become part of this digital projection. The dressing gown hung off him as if on a coat hanger. He approached them, shuffling in his slippers, and he didn't smell of sweat and coffee as he had the first time, but of ozone, old paper, and something subtly bitter. The scent of time.
"Right then," he looked down at them like an old professor looking at naughty primary schoolers who had set fire to the curtains in the chemistry lab. There was no malice, only a desire to end this unpleasant conversation as quickly as possible and get back to his test tubes. "I’ve been watching you. You’re an anomaly. A glitch. A virus in my perfect, empty, sterile system. You bring chaos. You make NPCs feel emotions they don't have in their scripts. You break the level geometry. You even got a hedgehog..." he glanced at Rollo, "...to hack my transport network. That was actually quite impressive. But entirely unacceptable."
He turned and shuffled back to the desk, where a large red button under a glass dome stood out amongst the keyboards and mugs, labelled SYSTEM RESTORE / SAVE POINT.
"I cannot allow the Festival to be destroyed. It is all I have left. It is my prison and my monument. So, I am sending you back now. To the very beginning. To the ‘Swamp of Despair.’ I’ll reset your memories, your levels, and your gear. You’ll be grinding Level 1 leeches until you learn to appreciate order and a linear playthrough. It’s for your own good. And for my peace of mind. I need to finish the patch."
His hand hovered over the button.
"No!" Irina cried out. It wasn't the shout of a Priestess; it was the desperate cry of an ordinary girl. "You have no right! We are living people! We are not code!"
"Rights?" The Administrator’s hand froze. He slowly turned his head. A strange emotion flickered in his eyes. Not irritation. Longing? "Who are you to speak to me of rights in a world I wove from my own soul, byte by byte? You are guests. Uninvited, noisy guests who came into my home and started rearranging the furniture."
"We aren't guests, we're prisoners!" Nate cut in. "You dragged us in here yourself!"
"Me?" The Administrator raised an eyebrow in surprise. "I dragged no one. You came of your own accord. You put on the headsets, you launched the game. You sought escapism? You found it. Total immersion."
"But we can't get out!" Lena countered.
"No one can," he replied softly. "The door jammed a hundred years ago."
"A hundred years," Lena repeated, removing her helmet. Her hair fell over her shoulders as she looked him straight in the eye. "You said that last time. A hundred years. But... computers didn't exist a hundred years ago. Games like this didn't exist."
The Administrator froze. His finger trembled over the reset button. He looked at Lena, but he didn't see her. He looked through her, into the void beyond the window.
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
"Time..." he whispered. "Time flows differently here. It’s a cycle. A processor cycle. One clock tick here is... I don't know how long out there. Might be a second. Might be a year. I’ve lost count."
He pulled his hand away from the button and slumped heavily into his chair. It gave a pathetic creak.
"Do you want a story?" he asked, staring at the ceiling where one of the lights was flickering. "You lot love lore, don't you? Players always love lore, until it gets too long and boring. An interactive cutscene. Unskippable."
He toyed with his mug.
"It was... a long time ago. In another world. In the one you call reality. The seventies. Yes, the seventies. The smell of solder, punch cards, massive mainframes taking up entire floors, and us—young, hungry, mad engineers in Christmas jumpers. We believed we were building the future."
The Administrator’s eyes grew misty. He no longer saw the cluttered server room.
Leningrad. Cybernetics Research Institute. 1978.
Outside, the wet snow typical of November was falling. In the laboratory, lit only by the green glow of oscilloscopes and the blinking lights of the BESM-6 mainframe, the tobacco smoke was thick.
A young lad, thin, with burning eyes and a tousled mane of hair, sat before a terminal. It wasn't a monitor in the modern sense—it was a teletype, spitting out a ribbon of paper covered in symbols.
"Sasha, go home," an elderly lab assistant said, passing by with a kettle. "You’ve been here three days straight. Your wife will leave you."
"Hold on, Mikhalych," Sasha—the future Administrator—waved him off, his eyes glued to the tape. "I’ve almost found the algorithm. Don’t you see? It’s not just calculations. It’s... a behavioural model. Artificial stochastics. If I add a random number module tied to the processor's thermal noise... it’ll be alive."
"And by 'it', do you mean a program for calculating ballistic missile trajectories?" Mikhalych asked sceptically.
"To hell with missiles!" Sasha jumped up, knocking over his chair. "I’m making a Game. A World. Do you understand? A world inside the machine. Where you can be anyone. Where there are no shortages, no queues, no grey party meetings."
He grabbed a printout.
"Look! Right here—procedural landscape generation. And here—the seeds of AI for NPCs. I’ve called it 'Project Eden'."
Mikhalych shook his head.
"You’re asking for trouble, Sasha. If the Party Committee finds out you’re playing games on state hardware, you’ll be in for it. And your Lena... she called. Your daughter’s ill. She’s got a temperature."
Sasha froze. His daughter. Little Anya. Silly pigtails, drawings in coloured pencils.
"I... I’ll be home soon," he muttered, sitting back down at the terminal. "Just finishing the core. A few more lines. So the world is stable. So the sun always shines there. For her. I’m doing this for her, Mikhalych. One day, I’ll show her this world. She’ll be a princess there."
He went back to work. He didn't go home that evening. Or the next day. He dived into the code like it was an ocean. The symbols on the paper transformed in his mind into mountains and rivers, castles and dragons. He was building. He was creating.
Years passed. Technology changed. Punch cards were replaced by floppies, floppies by hard drives. The laboratory became a cooperative, then a firm. Sasha grew old and grey, but the fire in his eyes only grew brighter—and madder.
He forgot to eat. He forgot to sleep. His family... they left. His wife couldn't compete with "Eden." Anya grew up, got married, and moved away, sending rare postcards that he stacked on his system unit without even reading. He didn't have the time. He had to finish the water physics. He had to optimise the lighting.
"Just a bit more," he’d whisper, staring into the monitor of a modern PC. "Almost perfect."
In the early 2000s, he made a breakthrough. He found a way to digitise consciousness. Not fully, no. But he could create a mold. A soul-print.
"I’m going in," he decided. "I have to check everything from the inside. A beta test. Just for an hour."
He put on the headset—a bulky, homemade contraption of wires and sensors. He hooked himself up to the server that took up his entire flat.
"Launch."
A flash.
And he ended up Here. In the world he had spent thirty years building.
It was beautiful. Green grass, blue sky, castles floating in the clouds. He was young, strong. He was the Administrator. A God.
But when he wanted to leave... the "Exit" button didn't work.
A code error. That same "float variable" he’d missed back in '78. A tiny, insignificant error in the foundation. The time loop closed. The System accepted his consciousness not as a guest, but as part of the core. As a power source.
"I tried to rewrite the code from the inside," the Administrator’s voice in the server room trembled. He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. "I built towers, created assistants, wrote patches. Но the more I built, the tighter the System held me. It fed on my creativity. My obsession."
He looked at his translucent hands.
"And in reality... my body probably died long ago. Found in the flat, at the computer. Heart failure. A stroke. It doesn't matter. My soul stayed here. Stuck in the textures."
He looked up at the girls.
"I’ve forgotten her face. Anya’s face. My daughter. I created NPCs trying to remember her features. Miko, Lyra, even Modesta... there’s a piece of her in each of them. But they’re just dolls. Dead dolls. I was left alone in a hollow paradise that turned into a hell. A hundred years of solitude. A hundred years of compiling emptiness."
Silence fell over the office. Only the hum of the cooling fans could be heard.
Nate sniffed, lowering her plasma cannons. Irina wiped a tear from her cheek. Lena looked at the old man, and in her chest, where her heart beat (and where the symbiote slumbered), a lump of pity tightened.
This wasn't a villain. This was the most miserable nerd in the universe. A man who had traded his life for a game, and the game had swallowed him.
"And then you lot turn up," the Administrator continued, putting his glasses back on. His voice grew firmer. "Alive. Chaotic. Unpredictable. You don’t follow scripts. You break my scenery, you swear, you laugh. You brought something here that hasn't been here for a century—life."
He gave a bitter smirk.
"You reminded me why I started this in the first place. I wanted joy. And I created a concentration camp with loot boxes."
"We didn't mean to break your game, Grandad," Rollo said softly, stepping forward. "Well, maybe just a little bit."
"Break it," the Administrator suddenly said. "Break the bloody lot of it."
He stood up abruptly.
"I can’t let you out. I’m not lying. The exit protocols are locked by Modesta. She... she was my finest creation. The perfect AI. I created her to run the world while I looked for a way out. But she... she learned the worst from me. Vanity. A thirst for control. She seized the Core. She wants to rewrite this world for herself, turn it into an eternal catwalk for her own ego. If she completes the merger, she will become the System. And then there will be no way out at all. For anyone. She’ll swallow me, too."
He walked over to the wall where the map hung.
"You must stop her. Not for the loot. Not for the levels. But to end this infinite loop. If you kill Modesta, the Core will reset. The barriers will fall. And then... then the door will open."
"And what about you?" Lena asked. "What happens to you during the reset?"
The Administrator smiled. This time, the smile was sad, but tranquil.
"I’m part of the code, Agent. In a full reset, the cache is cleared. I’ll... vanish. I’ll finally get some rest."
The girls remained silent. The price of victory had suddenly rocketed.
"But you said yourself, we’re weak," Nate reminded him, trying to hide the tremor in her voice. "Level 25 against Level 99. It’s mathematically impossible."
"Mathematically—yes," the Administrator nodded. "But this is my world. And I know the backdoors. I cannot give you levels. But I can give you the Path."
He returned to the console. His fingers began to dance across the keys with renewed vigour; the exhaustion was gone.
"You didn't receive your classes through the system, but through your own will. Dragon, Titan, Hunter. These aren't just labels. They are archetypes. Concepts that are more powerful than code. But they are raw. You need tempering."
In the wall of the office, shoving aside mountains of junk, two portals began to open.
One was a deep, pulsing violet, like a throbbing vein. It radiated a grave-like chill, and moans echoed from within.
The second was a sandy yellow, radiating a dry, desert heat and the sound of the wind.
"The Soul's Dungeon," the Administrator pointed to the violet portal. "An ancient sector where I kept the rejected AI versions. The Dark Abbot dwells there. He is the embodiment of despair. Lena, that is your destination. Your symbiote is a creature of chaos. In the Dungeon, you must learn not to suppress it, but to merge with it. To become one. Only then will you unlock the true form of the Titan."
"Understood," Lena nodded. The symbiote inside her purred in anticipation.
"Irina, you will go with her. Your Light is needed there. Without it, the darkness will swallow Lena whole. Your Dragon must learn to burn away not just enemies, but fear itself."
Irina gripped her staff. "I’m ready."
"And you, Pirate," the Administrator pointed to the sandy portal. "You’re off to the 'Sand Dungeons'. A survival zone. An endless desert where time flows faster. It is ruled by the Pharaoh Scorpion. A sniper who never misses. You must beat him at his own game. Learn patience. The hunt. Only then can you use the 'Nemesis' to its full power."
"And what about me?" Rollo squeaked. "Where do I go?"
"And you, you compilation error," the Administrator smirked, "will go with her. She’ll need a decoy... ahem, a partner. And your hacking tricks."
He looked at the timer on the wall.
"You haven't much time. Modesta has already begun the final phase of the ritual. When you return... if you return... go to any Laundry. I will give you the Core's coordinates and the access key."
He fell silent, looking at them.
"One more thing. Modesta has a weakness. Just like any 'perfect' being. She feeds on attention. Her armour is impenetrable as long as she believes she is flawless. But if you can humiliate her... shatter her image... knock off her crown... she will become vulnerable. The Dragon must incinerate her retinue. The Titan must withstand her blow and bring her to the ground. And the Hunter... the Hunter must take a single shot. At the very moment her ego cracks."
The portals stabilised.
"This is your only chance," the Administrator said, turning back to his monitors. "Go."
The girls exchanged glances. This wasn't what they had bargained for. Instead of a quick finale, they had two more circles of hell to endure. But now, they had a purpose. Not just to survive, but to save this world... and liberate its creator.
"Thank you," Lena said, sliding her helmet on. "We’ll be back."
"Try not to die," the Administrator grumbled without turning around, so they wouldn't see the watery glint in his eyes. "And... if by any chance... down there... you see something resembling a child’s drawing... in coloured pencils... don’t tread on it. Please."
Lena nodded, even though he couldn't see it. "We won't."
They split up. Lena and Irina stepped into the violet vortex of the Dungeon. Nate and Rollo stepped into the sandy inferno of the Desert. The portal doors slammed shut.
The server room grew silent once more.
The Administrator took off his glasses and placed them on the desk, next to a photograph he had pulled from a drawer. In the old, faded picture, a young lad in a Christmas jumper was holding a little girl with pigtails. Both were laughing.
"Soon, Anya," he whispered into the silence. "Soon Daddy will finish his shift. And come home."
He placed his hand on the keyboard.
"But for now... let’s give these girls some background music."
He pressed a key. And somewhere deep in the dungeons, in the heroines' headsets, a quiet but ferocious beat began to play—the soundtrack to their final battle.