The Summoning
In which our protagonist uses null injection for the first time, and the source code breaks a little.
The cultists came on the night of the new moon.
Kenji had been expecting them. The horn in his pack had been humming louder every night, and Pip had been pulsing with increasing urgency, and the refugees from the south had been reporting cult gatherings in the forest, smaller than before, but more focused, more ritualistic. They were planning something.
He was right.
The cultists did not come to the walls. They did not even come to the town. They came to the southern forest, in a clearing a kilometer from Oakhaven, and they began to chant.
Pip screamed. The scream was not a sound. It was a mana pulse, sharp, urgent, the kind of alarm that Kenji had only ever felt once before, when the dark-robed figure had raised the horn. This was worse. This was the scream of a system that is about to be overwritten.
"They are summoning something," Kenji said, to Elara. "Not a demon. Something older. Something that should not be here."
"How do you know?"
"Because Pip knows. And Pip does not scream unless it is real."
They rode out. Kenji, Elara, four guards, and Pip. The moonless night was dark, the forest was quiet, and the only sound was the chanting, growing louder as they approached. The green light of the cult's artifacts pulsed through the trees, and at the center of the clearing, in a circle of grey robes, a portal was opening.
It was not a beautiful portal. It was a wound. A vertical tear in the air, edged in sickly green, and through the tear, Kenji could see something moving. Something vast. Something that did not have a shape but had intent.
[Threat assessment: dimensional breach]
[Source: external, not native to this world]
[Target: lesser entity, but powerful]
[Estimated time to manifest: 90 seconds]
[Note: this is a piece of the corrupted source code, given form]
Kenji did not think. He did not have time to think. He did the only thing that his training told him to do when a process is about to spawn something it should not spawn.
He defined a null function.
"Function create(name='null_injection', inputs={target=portal}, outputs={terminate_process}, cost=high, side_effects=collapses_caller)!"
He cast it.
The function was, in the language of his old world, a kill -9. A forced termination of a runaway process. It told the system that the portal was an error, that the summoning was an error, that the entire ritual was a bug, and the appropriate response to a bug was not negotiation. It was termination.
The portal screamed.
The cultists screamed.
The thing on the other side of the portal, the thing that did not have a shape but had intent, screamed. It was the most terrible sound Kenji had ever heard, a sound of something that was being forcibly erased from existence, and the portal collapsed.
The green light died. The cultists scattered. The forest was suddenly, terribly quiet.
Kenji fell to his knees, his mana completely drained, his vision swimming. The null_injection had cost him almost everything he had. Pip was on his shoulder, pulsing weakly, the dragonfly's blue light dim.
"Status," he gasped.
[Mana: 0%. Stamina: 8%. Status: alive.]
[Note: null_injection has destroyed the portal. The summoning has failed.]
[Note: the cost was higher than expected. Recommend not using this spell casually.]
Elara was at his side. She had her hand on his shoulder, and her face was pale.
"What did you do?" she asked.
"I killed it. The process. The thing they were trying to bring through. I told the system it was an error and I terminated it."
"Can you do that?"
"I can do that. Once. Maybe twice. I do not recommend doing it three times."
She helped him to his feet. The cultists had fled. The clearing was empty, except for the circle of grey robes, the burned ground, and the faint smell of something that was not quite ozone and not quite rot.
One of the guards picked up something from the ground. A fragment of the portal, frozen in the moment of collapse, like a piece of broken glass. It was black. It was humming with the same kind of structured magic that Kenji used, but twisted, corrupted, like a function call with a malformed argument.
He took the fragment. He held it in his hand. Pip did not like it. The dragonfly pulsed, urgently, the same warning it had given about the horn.
"This is the second piece," Kenji said, quietly. "The horn. The fragment. They are both pieces of the same code. The same bug."
"What bug?" Elara asked.
"The bug that is Malachar. The chaos god. The thing that wants to bring me to him. The thing that is, in a way, the reason this world is the way it is."
Elara did not understand. She did not need to understand. She helped him onto his horse, and they rode back to Oakhaven, and the night was quiet, and the cult was broken, and Kenji had just done something that no one in this world had ever done.
He had told the system to terminate a process. And the system had listened.
# WORLD.md (updated)
## Status
- Summoning: interrupted, portal collapsed, cultists fled
- null_injection: first use, high cost, effective
- New fragment: piece of corrupted source code, second piece
- Kenji's mana: depleted, recovery needed
## Lessons
- Some processes need to be terminated, not debugged
- The cost of a kill -9 is the cost of a kill -9
- Pip's screams are not theatrical, they are accurate
- The cult is broken, but the bug remains