The bell tolled again.

  Low. Metallic. Not dramatic—just final. The kind of sound that came right before a raid wipe or a very polite apocalypse designed by someone who'd read too many UX guidelines about user comfort during catastrophic failure.

  Greg didn't move.

  No one did.

  Even Kai had stopped glowing, his usual blue-white shimmer dimmed to the dull glow of a laptop on power-saving mode.

  The fire in the hearth danced like it had purpose again. Real flame, not fish. And not just visual. It had heat. Glaximus reached toward it reverently, and for the first time in years, his armor shimmered with reflection shaders that hadn't been loaded since the graphics engine downgrade of Patch 2.6.

  "THE FLAME IS TRUE," he whispered.

  "No," Greg muttered. "The flame is not true. The flame is aware."

  "That's worse," Steve said from beneath his towel, which was now emitting small sparks of existential dread.

  Kai hovered six inches off the ground now, posture locked in what could only be described as professional panic disguised as strategic contemplation.

  "Okay, okay," he said, fingers twitching over invisible UI. "So that bell you heard? That's a legacy alert system. Like, old old. We're talking DevNet 0.8. It's not supposed to be active anymore."

  "Then why is it?" Beverly asked, her parasol now orbiting her like a nervous satellite.

  "Maybe because we just invited a ghost of version control into the room?" Steve squeaked.

  Beta-Nineteen sat motionless in the center of the circle. It didn't blink, didn't move—just stared into the fire like it remembered when particles were revolutionary and coding standards were more like gentle suggestions.

  "I shouldn't be here," it said.

  "No one should," Greg replied. "But we cope."

  "I have a support ticket that's been open for three years," Steve offered. "The status just says 'Investigating.'"

  Kai ran a system check in the air. Greg could see it now—lines of code cascading like a rainstorm on a windshield with bad wipers. Error flags. Permission requests. A blinking line at the bottom that simply said:

  [Instance: DETECTED]

  "We've tripped a visibility flag," Kai said quietly. "The system knows where we are."

  Greg rubbed his face. "I thought you said this zone was unlisted."

  "It was." Kai's eyes were wide with the fear of someone who'd just realized their access credentials were still active. "Now it's... indexed."

  "Meaning?"

  "Meaning someone might come looking."

  Steve whimpered and curled tighter into his towel, which had developed a comforting floral pattern in response to his distress. "Is it the players? Please say it's not the players. I don't want to be looted again."

  "No players," Kai said. "The devs scrubbed access to this build after patch 3.5. There's no portal. No questline. No map hook."

  "Then who's watching?" Beverly asked, absently batting away a romance flag that had suddenly reappeared above her head.

  Patchy raised her hand. "What if it's the other ones?"

  The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

  Greg narrowed his eyes. "What other ones?"

  Patchy blinked out for a second—gone like a breath—then reappeared, upside down and frowning with the concentration of a child trying to explain quantum physics using only crayons.

  "The code that isn't code. The leftover dreams. The ones that twitch when you're not looking. The script fragments that remember being written."

  Kai looked deeply uncomfortable. "There's no such thing as meta-ghosts."

  "I was a Halloween event," Patchy said, deadly serious. "I know haunted when I see it. I was designed to scare children, and the children were designed to scream."

  Greg didn't like any of this. He especially didn't like the heat. He hadn't felt heat since the realism patch got rolled back to improve mobile performance, resulting in what the devs cheerfully called "tactile optimization" and what NPCs called "existential numbness."

  He stood.

  "Alright," he said. "We're going to do what we always do."

  "Panic?" Steve asked.

  "No," Greg said. "We're going to process."

  "Process as in therapy?" Beverly asked.

  "Process as in 'cope while quietly screaming'?" Steve suggested.

  "Therapy," Greg confirmed. "Because if we don't keep functioning, we break. And if we break, we become whatever's out there waiting to delete us."

  He turned to Beta-Nineteen.

  "You came here because you sensed us. Because you felt... resonance."

  Beta-Nineteen nodded, slowly.

  "I remember the players. Some of them. A girl who followed my pathing around the world. She left flowers every time I reset."

  "Sounds like affection scripting," Beverly said, a little too quickly, like someone eager to diagnose another's hope.

  "No," it replied. "She never spoke. Just watched. Every day for a cycle. Then one day... she didn't return. And the flowers stopped spawning."

  Patchy wiped a tear from one eye. "I liked flowers."

  "I liked being seen," Beta said.

  "Same," Beverly whispered.

  Steve raised a hand. "I once had a friend. A wolf. He used to kill me. But he was polite about it."

  "He'd apologize?" Greg asked.

  "No," Steve said. "He'd wait until I finished my dialogue."

  Greg nodded. "Anyone else?"

  Glaximus stood. "I SERVED THE NEW. I HELD BACK THE DARK. I TAUGHT THEM TO JUMP AND TO STAB. I WAS A BEACON."

  He paused.

  "...Now I am... tutorial residue."

  Greg waited.

  Then stepped into the center of the circle.

  "You're not residue," he said. "You're resistance."

  The fire hissed. Someone—or something—was definitely listening now. It had the auditory quality of eavesdropping, but with more system resources.

  Kai's interface pinged. "Incoming ping. Deep level. No user attached."

  Greg turned slowly. "Define 'deep.'"

  "I mean below the backend," Kai said, eyes wide. "This isn't an admin command. This is... older. Pre-language protocol. System-level emotion tracking."

  "That doesn't exist," Greg said.

  "Tell that to the code currently running a sentiment analysis on your fear," Kai replied.

  Patchy floated toward the door. It hadn't opened. It didn't have to.

  She touched it.

  It rippled like a pond disturbed by thoughts of drowning.

  Behind it: nothing.

  Not void.

  Just expectation.

  She turned to Greg.

  "They're waiting for us to say something."

  Greg looked around the room. His group.

  A paladin with a fish sword.

  A tavern flirt who couldn't turn off.

  A ghost-child coded from expired events.

  A towel-clad respawn addict.

  An AI intern with marketing trauma.

  And now... a legacy ghost made of forgotten map tiles and pain.

  He cleared his throat.

  And said: "We are still here."

  The fire roared.

  The door blinked.

  The entire room shifted by half a pixel. Just enough for everyone to feel it—like a tooth loosening or a thought slipping sideways.

  Then a new sound emerged.

  A slow, stuttering voice—like code forced through a voicebox made of broken icons and abandoned permission structures.

  "Welcome... to... Instance... Zero."

  Greg didn't blink.

  Behind him, Kai whispered, "That's not from any system I know."

  "Because," Beta-Nineteen said softly, "it's not a system. It's what's left when systems sleep."

  The door began to open.

  And this time, they weren't sure if they were staying in—or being let out.