Broken

Chapter 46 (Interlude)

Faust found herself standing in her master's study once more. This time she had come to deliver his meal, as the usual servants were having a hard time. The master had been in a mood lately, and on top of barely touching his food, he was also prone to snap at the servants. Faust had been 'volunteered' to attend to him during this time.

The main source of his irritation was not so much his human toy herself, but the laws imposed by her race. To sum it up: he was frustrated because the laws of humans were preventing his new toy from entering the tower. Apparently, most of the human authorities would not allow Climbers to enter the tower without prior testing.

Though Faust could understand her master's frustrations, she couldn't help but understand where the humans were coming from. It was rare to see a race of Climbers who were just so... killable. She found it a wonder that humans could even survive the elements on their own planet, much less the extreme environments and monsters within the higher tiers of the System's grand design.

This was not the cause of the master's current frenzy, however. Faust stood a couple meters back from her master as he jumped from one blue screen to another, hands flying as he worked frantically on something, a look of abject panic on his face. What really concerned her- besides the panic- were the windows themselves. She recognized some of the code and back-ally pathways he seemed to be accessing: many of them had been used by the master before he got banned from the Climber Network last time.

"Um... Master?" Faust hedged. Despite the nature and strength of the Higher Powers, they did have individual personalities. Her master was not the kind to handle stress well, and panic or grouchiness was not uncommon for him. However, even for him, this was an extreme level of stress.

"Not now." the agitated man huffed, waving a distracted hand over his shoulder and barely acknowledging her. "Everything is getting broken!"

She felt one of her eyebrows rise involuntarily at the choice of words, given the subject of his current aggravation. She new better than to mention it. Besides, when he lowered one of the windows all amusement left her mind anyway.

The uncovered display showed the active view-screen of the master's toy in the middle of an instance, looking to be in quite the dire situation. She was with a group of people, some of whom Faust recognized, and they appeared to be in some sort of jungle. All of them looked frightened and bloody...

"Master? Is that a giant?" She asked, confused. Giants were some of the more ferocious enemies one would encounter on the lower-mid levels of the tower. Never should one ever be found in an instance! Even if this one looked naked and half starved.

Something else then caught Faust's attention. An error message seemed to be playing on repeat. Not just on several of her master's open system windows, but also before the members of the fighting raid-party. Direct interaction by the System within a Soil bound world? That couldn't be right. Even the System had limited access there, so how could message windows not related to a Climber's direct growth just pop up? Much less broken and stuttered error messages.

She might not know a scintilla of what half of the master's open monitors were showing, but she was able to work out that something had caused a major glitch within the System, and the System was now attempting to correct it.

Faust jumped when her master slammed down his fists, nearly making her drop the tray of food that was quickly growing cold under its dome. "Damn it! From what I can gather, <Broken> must have spat out something truly devious. So nonsensical that even the System can't handle it..."

"Surly not..." Faust breathed. Had any other master been questioned by a subordinate, they may have been punished. Faust's master was a little too engrossed in his fun to be bothered by such things.