Hell's Glitch (initial draft)

2:6 Unlimited

Malen's body shook from head to toe and his fingers all twitched and wriggled like worms in earth. Sam could hear a loud series crackling sounds coming from the body, like burning wood. It was odder still how the area around the body, the very air and ground beneath, looked to be moving and shifting in a distortive manner. The air rippled as if superheated and the rocky ground looked like a pool of roiling grey liquid.

What the hell is going on?

A dark green, almost black, slime oozed from each of Malen's wounds, particularly the limbs that Sam had disabled, and covered the entirety of it by snaking tightly around it. Malen pushed up off the ground into an upright position then stood up on trembling legs that repeatedly snapped as what Sam guessed were bones shifted around until the trembling ceased. The giant reached down and grabbed his helmet with his eyes still closed and no expression whatsoever on his face. He crushed the golden helmet in his hands until it was made into a sharp pointed cone shape. He then jammed the golden cone into the center of his face with the point sticking outwards. The first strike brought forth blood and the sound of more breaking bones and the second strike pushed his face in further, but with the third strike the cone was embedded into Malen's face. It looked like a bloody golden beak. The slime oozed out of Malen's fresh face wounds as well and quickly coated his whole head and the rest of his body. Once that happened, Malen's body took on a minor transformation, becoming thinner and more birdlike. He opened his eyes and they were wide and completely black.

"What the fuck am I even looking at?" Sam muttered. He looked behind him at the incline leading down into the Stone Valley. There was nothing stopping him from just leaving this freakiness behind and that's just what he did.

"EEPACS SION HETER" a multitoned voice yelled.

The ground near the incline bubbled like lava then shot high into the air before solidifying. Sam spun around to face the monstrous giant, completely at a loss for what was happening. Was he supposed to fight this thing or was this something else entirely. He seemed to get his answer once it stooped down and picked up its sword.

"GWAKLENI UNHAM CUNOHUT EMIN SIDOBY YURO"

The multitoned voice became single toned and the giant and his sword began to glow.

******

There it is again, that hidden code infecting the rest.

Thomas sat at Alex's desk, mesmerized by line after line of scrolling data. The indecipherable hidden code was far more prevalent now than the last time he had seen it.

What exactly is it doing...or trying to do?

The only things Thomas could recognize were that the code was spreading quickly and that it was affecting statistics and boundaries in the game. It was altering one of the enemies in Sam's game, increasing its stat values and altering its model and textures on the fly. Not only that, but it was also warping the environment. It was using up resources from the game at a rising rate. If it continued as is, the chances of it crashing Sam's game were extremely high.

"Damn, I have to contain this."

Thomas opened his coding program and turned on his Language Lobe, a forehead mounted device to turn his thoughts into text, by pressing it. He created a program on the fly to limit the resources taken to only the area that the offending code was already occupying. He created another program to limit that even more to a small area around it. He tried to alter the code itself, but there was nothing he could do to delete or rewrite it and it continued to spread where it could. It was...willful or the closest thing to it.

"That barrier you created won't last long."

Thomas jumped up violently at the sound of Milner's voice, knocking over several of the standing devices on Alex's desk including two of her speakers. The old grey haired guy, Milner's guard dog, stood right next to him glaring at Thomas.