The last thing Kenji Tanaka saw were the endless lines of phosphorescent green code sprawling across his triple-monitor setup, a chaotic tangle he was desperately trying to unravel before GlobalCorp Solutions' main system suffered a total meltdown. It was 3:47 AM on a Tuesday that had already bled into Monday, transforming his small Tokyo apartment into a mausoleum of frustrated ambitions and stale caffeine. The air hung thick with the scent of old coffee and reheated instant noodles, the bittersweet fragrance of his existence as a senior programmer. A cup of instant ramen, cold and untouched, lay beside his keyboard, a silent witness to another meal sacrificed воспалительный altar of deadlines.
"Just this one more bug," he muttered, his nimble fingers, almost autonomous, dancing across the keys. His eyes, redRimmed and burning from lack of sleep and the constant screen glare, fixed on the code as if, by sheer force of will, he could intimidate the errors into correcting themselves. "Just this one more... and I can..."
Sleep? Give up? At twenty-eight, Kenji was a programming prodigy, a "code wizard" according to his less-burdened colleagues. But in reality, he felt more like a digital Sisyphus, endlessly pushing a mountain of faulty data only to watch it roll back down each morning. His social life was a commented-out line in a forgotten script, and his passion for creation, the spark that had drawn him to programming in the first place, had dwindled into an exhausting routine of debugging and optimizing corporate nightmares. He built digital prisons for others and, in the process, had imprisoned himself.
A strange hum began to emanate from the tower of his custom-built PC, a beast of metal and silicon he had assembled himself. It was a low, guttural sound, an anomalous vibration that made the hairs on the back of his neck stand on end, despite his fatigue. He ignored it. He had to compile. He had to fix it. The screen flickered. Once, twice. The subtle smell of ozone, initially almost imperceptible, grew stronger, more chemical, overpowering the aroma of coffee. A silent alarm blared in some forgotten corner of his mind, but the urgency of the work drowned it out.
Then, darkness. Not a simple power outage that would plunge his room into urban twilight. It was a sensory annihilation. As if someone had deleted the universe with a single command. A sensation of vertiginous freefall into a bottomless abyss, a violent decompression that seemed to suck the air from his lungs, and a silence so absolute his ears ached, desperately seeking any vibration. There was no pain, just an abrupt shutdown, a final Ctrl+Alt+Del on existence itself. The "Kenji Tanaka" program had encountered an unexpected and fatal error.
Kenji blinked, sunlight filtering through vibrant emerald leaves stinging his unaccustomed eyes. Confusion was a grotesque understatement for the whirlwind forming in his mind. He was lying on a bed of incredibly soft moss, the fresh, pure air invading his lungs, laden with the scent of damp earth, pine resin, and exotic flowers whose perfumes he couldn't name. Above him, colossal trees, with trunks thicker than his old apartment, rose like a ncient pillars of a natural cathedral, their high canopies scraping an impossibly clear blue sky.
"Where... the hell...?" His voice came out hoarse, a scratch in his dry throat. He sat up, his head throbbing with a dull ache, as if he'd taken a fall. He looked at his clothes, and the confusion deepened. The worn-out sweatpants and faded t-shirt логотипом an obscure rock band were gone. In their place, he wore a simple tunic of rustic, neutral-colored fabric, surprisingly comfortable linen trousers, and soft leather boots that seemed molded to his feet. They were the clothes of a peasant, or perhaps some low-level RPG character.
He looked at his own hands. They seemed the same, perhaps a little less pale, with a few superficial scratches he didn't remember getting. But they were, unequivocally, his. This wasn't a dream. The texture of the moss beneath his fingers, the complex, melodic song of an unseen bird somewhere above, the gentle warmth of the sun on his skin – it was all too real, too vivid.
Panic began to bubble in his chest, cold and sharp. Had he been kidnapped? But by whom? And to where? It made no sense. His last clear memory was the makeshift office in his room, the code, the ominous hum of the computer... and then nothing. Had he suffered a stroke? Was he in a coma, experiencing an elaborate, feverish dream?
Suddenly, a nearby sound made him freeze, every muscle tensing. A low, menacing, guttural growl, followed by a high-pitched yelp of pure terror that cut through the forest air. Instinctively, Kenji scrambled behind one of the giant trees, his heart hammering against his ribs like an infinite loop in a faulty processor.
Peeking cautiously around the side of the immense trunk, he saw the scene that had caused the sounds. A small creature, no bigger than a house cat, with delicate, translucent wings like a dragonfly's that beat rapidly, and a soft, bluish glow emanating from its diminutive body, was cornered against the exposed root of a tree. Its features were delicate, almost human, but with an ethereal quality, as if made of moonlight and dew. A... fairy? A sprite? Something straight out of the pages of a fantasy novel.
The threat was a wolf, or something that resembled one. It was significantly larger than any wolf Kenji had ever seen in documentaries, with matted, black fur, caked with dirt and leaves. Strange, dark patches, almost like bubbling pitch, oozed from its skin in places, and a fetid odor of decay hung in the air around it. Its eyes glowed with a sinister, hungry red light, focused on the small winged creature. The beast looked sick, unnatural, corrupted.
The wolf advanced a step, its yellowed fangs bared, and the small winged being let out another sharp cry, a sound that seemed to carry the very essence of fear.
Without thinking, driven by an impulse he didn't know he possessed – perhaps the lingering remnant of a video game hero from his distant childhood, or simply the visceral aversion to seeing something so small and seemingly helpless be so brutally destroyed – Kenji moved. "Hey!" he shouted, his voice surprisingly firm, echoing briefly in the forest stillness. "Leave it alone!"
The corrupted wolf turned its head towards him, the growl intensifying, deepening into a threatening sound that vibrated in Kenji's chest. And then, something bizarre happened in Kenji's vision. For a fleeting instant, superimposed over the image of the wolf, he saw lines of translucent, cyan-colored text floating in the air like a holographic debugging console.
Entity: Putrid Wolf (Corrupted)
Threat Level: Low-Medium (for natives with basic equipment)
Vital Points: Cranium, Heart (protected by dense musculature)
Weaknesses: Elemental Fire, Holy Light (attribute unavailable to user), Intense High-Pitched Sound Resistances: Common Poison, Light Piercing Attacks, Fear Induction Status: Extreme Hunger, Elevated Aggression, Blight Infection (Stage 2)
Kenji blinked, and the lines of text vanished as quickly as they had appeared. Hallucination? Acute post-traumatic stress? But the sensation of having read it, of having understood the information instantaneously, remained, vivid and unsettling. The wolf, now focused on him as the new threat or, perhaps, the new meal, began to approach, its heavy paws crushing the undergrowth, its growl a constant tremor in the air.
Kenji swallowed hard, the metallic taste of fear in his mouth. He had no weapons, no combat training. He was a programmer. His primary form of attack was a well-crafted passive-aggressive email or, at best, a force quit on a stubborn application.
This new "kernel" he had been installed into, this new reality, seemed to have a far more hostile and dangerous operating system than he could have ever imagined. And he had no idea how to access the user manual.