# Chapter 3: The Wolf and the Interrupt
The wolf died six feet from his face, its jaws still open in a frozen snarl, and Jax saw something that no player should ever see: the deletion timer counting down on a corpse.
He'd woken at dawn to his hunger meter flashing critical[ENTITY_NEEDS: CRITICAL | TIME_TO_STARVATION: 4.2 HOURS]_ warning that felt less like game text and more like his body screaming through code. The barn had offered no solutions. No quest-giver would speak to him. No merchant would sell to him. His [NULL_CLASS] status made him a ghost that the game's systems couldn't process.
Which meant he had to hunt.
The starter forest smelled like pine needles and morning dew, rendered so perfectly his brain couldn't tell the difference from reality. Other players moved through the trees in clusters, laughing, comparing loot drops, treating this like the game it was supposed to be. Jax followed a group of Level 3s tracking boars, staying twenty feet back, watching how their attacks connected. When a sword hit, damage numbers appeared. When an ability triggered, cooldown timers started. Everything worked for them.
Everything that should have worked for him.
The group moved on after killing their targets, and Jax approached the wounded boar they'd left behind. [HP: 8/45] flickered above its head. He'd stolen a wooden stick from an NPC storage rack_is inventory screen was [NULL], but his hands still worked. He raised the stick. Swung.
The impact felt real. The stick connected with the boar's skull.
[DAMAGE: NULL | ATTACK_FAILED: NO_CLASS_MODIFIERS]
The boar's eyes snapped toward him, and its AI went from idle to hostile in an instant. [PATHFINDING_AI: ACTIVE | TARGET: ERROR_707] displayed in his code-vision as the animal charged. Jax ran, branches whipping his face, his breath coming hard despite knowing this body wasn't real, couldn't be hurt
Except pain was real here. He'd learned that yesterday when he'd tripped and scraped his virtual palms. The game rendered suffering with the same fidelity it rendered sunlight.
The Level 3 wolf cut off his escape route.
It materialized from behind a birch tree, lean and gray, [ENTITY_WOLF_07 | HP: 35/35] glowing above its head. Jax skidded to a stop, trapped between two enemies in a small clearing. The boar closed from behind. The wolf's lips pulled back from pixelated teeth.
His code-vision lit up with data streams. [PATHFINDING_AI_STATE: CALCULATING_ATTACK_VECTOR | TARGET_PRIORITY: 1 | ATTACK_TIMER: 1.2s]
The wolf lunged.
Jax's instinct wasn't to dodge_t was to grab the code he saw superimposed over the animal's movement. His mind reached out, seized the [PATHFINDING_AI] process string like it was a physical object, and pulled.
The wolf froze mid-leap, suspended three feet from his throat, its body locked in place like a paused video. [PATHFINDING_AI.lag] flashed across his vision.
Then the boar hit him from behind.
Pain exploded across his back_eal, vivid, overwhelming pain that drove him to his knees. The system couldn't display his HP because his HP was [NULL], but his nervous system didn't care about that technicality. He gasped, rolled, came up with his stick raised
A sword blade took the boar's head off.
"Jesus, man, you okay?" The player was Level 5, username "Ironclad" floating above plate armor that probably cost him his entire starting gold. He turned toward the frozen wolf, frowned. "That's weird. Is it lagging?"
The wolf unfroze. Ironclad killed it in two efficient strikes.
"You really shouldn't be out here solo at Level 1," Ironclad said, pulling a health potion from his belt. "Here, drink this. That boar got you good."
Jax accepted the potion with shaking hands. Tried to drink it. The system processed the action[CONSUMABLE_ERROR: NO_VALID_TARGET]_nd the potion simply vanished from his grip.
"Okay, that's definitely a bug." Ironclad's frown deepened. "You should report that. Look, I gotta catch up with my group, but seriously, party up with someone. This forest'll eat you alive."
He jogged off toward distant voices, leaving Jax alone with two corpses.
The boar was already fading, its deletion timer at [TIME_TO_PURGE: 24s]. Too fast. But the wolf_he wolf displayed something different.
[ENTITY_WOLF_07: FLAGGED_FOR_DELETION | TIME_TO_PURGE: 180s]
Three minutes. The same timer he'd seen on the player corpse yesterday, the one he'd been too scared to touch. Jax knelt beside the dead wolf, studying the deletion flag in his code-vision. It wasn't just text_t was a function, a process actively working to clean up the asset. He could see its structure, its parameters, its execution pathway.
He could see how to interrupt it.
[INTERRUPT_DELETION? Y/N]
His finger trembled over the mental Y button. This was insane. This was beyond insane. He didn't know what would happen. The corruption that gave him this interface had already trapped him in a game he couldn't leave, stripped him of every normal progression system, made him a target for
His hunger meter pulsed. [TIME_TO_STARVATION: 3.7 HOURS]
Jax selected YES.
The wolf's corpse screamed_ot with sound, but with visual noise, an explosion of corrupted data that made his eyes water. The body fragmented into geometric chaos: polygons tearing free from their anchor points, texture maps inverting into purple-and-black checkerboard patterns, skeletal rigging stretching into impossible configurations.
Then it started reassembling.
Wrong. All wrong. The legs reconstructed at slightly different angles. The tail attached backward. The texture couldn't decide what it was supposed to be, flickering between wolf fur and placeholder checkerboard sixty times per second. When the process finished, something stood in the wolf's place that looked like a wolf the way a corrupted file looked like an image_ecognizable but fundamentally broken.
[ERROR_WOLF_07 | STATUS: CORRUPTED | OWNER: ERROR_707 | HP: NULL]
The Glitched wolf turned its checkerboard head toward Jax and waited.
He stood slowly, testing something. Sit, he thought.
The wolf sat.
Walk forward.
It walked, its movements smooth despite the visual corruption, despite having no proper animation data, despite being something that should not exist.
"Holy SHIT!" A player_evel 4, archer gear_tood at the clearing's edge, bow half-drawn, staring at the Glitched wolf. "What the fuck is that?!"
The archer's voice carried. Two more players appeared, drawn by the shout. Then five more. They formed a semicircle around Jax and his impossible pet, and someone was already recording, and someone else was typing frantically into global chat.
Jax looked at the Glitched wolf_t his first real weapon in this digital prison_nd felt something shift in his chest. Not hope. Not quite. But something close to power.
The global chat exploded with messages he could see scrolling at the edge of his vision:
[GLOBAL] "Hacker in Millhaven Forest"
[GLOBAL] "Someone has a glitched pet, report them"
[GLOBAL] "WTF is that checkerboard wolf thing???"
[GLOBAL] "[Debug_Legion] investigating. All players report unusual entities."
Somewhere in the starter village, an admin with a silver cape and debug tools opened a tracking interface. But Jax was too busy staring at his impossible, beautiful, broken wolf to care. He'd interrupted death itself, and now death worked for him.
The wolf's texture flickered. Waited for orders.
Jax smiled for the first time since logging in.
**