The Grand Nave of the Sanctum was less a place of worship and more a monument to crushing vertical intimidation. It was a cathedral of obsidian and ego.

  Basalt ribs vaulted into the twilight gloom like the fossilized cage of a leviathan god. Outside, the sun bled out against the horizon. It painted the high stained glass in the sickly purples and yellows of a fresh bruise.

  Inside, the air was already dead. It hung heavy and draped over Aerich’s shoulders like a wet wool cloak.

  The air tasted like rust and decaying sweets… The flavor of raw Aether left to rot in a sealed cathedral.

  Aerich stood barefoot on the marble. The stone was a heat sink that aggressively leached the warmth from his soles. It grounded him in a reality he still desperately wished was a hallucination. Glowing text flickered in the corners of his vision over the sputtering braziers and the terrified, pale faces of the lined-up novices. His Heads-Up Display twitched. It lacked the clean reliability of a triple-A release. Instead, it jittered and tore at the edges as it reacted to the ambient magical radiation like a Geiger counter in a reactor core.

  [ SYSTEM ALERT: AMBIENT MANA SATURATION > 85% ]

  [ WARNING: NEURAL INTERFERENCE DETECTED ]

  "Admin," Cidi’s voice ghosted directly into his auditory cortex. She sounded thin and reedy. It was as if her voice were being pushed through a cooling fan operating at maximum RPM. "I have managed to patch the local interference, but the signal-to-noise ratio is atrocious. The ambient Aether is not just spiking. It is turbulent. It is like standing inside a microwave set to 'Defrost'. Warning. Olfactory sensors register a 12% rise in ionized air. Spontaneous combustion has graduated from a statistical joke to a projected outcome."

  Aerich swallowed. His throat felt dry despite the humidity. He looked down the line. To his left, a farm girl stared at him. She was no older than sixteen and clutched a freshly bruised arm. Her pupils were dilated craters of fear. She was a native. She was a creature of this world’s confusing and organic logic. She did not see the blue wireframe boxes rendering around the braziers. She did not see the floating integers of her own health bar.

  High atop the dais that seemed miles away, Priestess Veyra raised her arms. Her robes were woven from shadows and silk. They spilled over the stone stairs like an oil slick.

  “The Weaver mends what the world breaks,” Veyra intoned. Her voice was designed for this acoustic space. It was cold, resonant, and practiced divinity. “Aerich. Step forward. Channel the mercy of the Font.”

  Aerich’s heart hammered a frantic rhythm against his ribs. It was a physical thumping that his UI helpfully visualized as a jagged red graph in his lower peripheral vision.

  [ VITALS: HEART RATE 143 BPM ]

  [ STATUS: CORTISOL TOXICITY RISING ]

  He stepped forward. Every instinct from his old life screamed at him to run. The logic of a software engineer and the survival instinct of a mammal were in total agreement. He reached for the rune-stone Veyra extended from her sleeves.

  To the initiates, it was a hallowed artifact. It shimmered like a frozen teardrop of the divine. To Aerich, whose eyes saw the underlying code, it was a waking horror.

  "Oh, look at that absolute garbage," Cidi hissed. Her tone shifted from clinical to professionally offended, in his head.

  "Look at the logic gate on the primary flow. It is not a circuit. It is a memory leak with a handle. That script loops back on itself three times before grounding. Admin, if you channel power into that unbuffered, it will not just heal her arm. It is going to try and overwrite the geometry of the room. Executing Hotfix 1.0... whatever you do, do not let go of the hardware."

  Aerich’s trembling fingers brushed the crystal.

  Contact.

  There was no grace.

  No divine light.

  The moment skin met stone, the world vanished into a roar of white noise. It was not a sound. It was the sensation of a firewall collapsing. He felt a tidal wave of raw and uncompiled data crash into his nervous system. It bypassed his senses and wrote agony directly onto his brain stem. It felt like attempting to pull a library's worth of encrypted data through a thin, frayed copper line. His synapses were that failing conduit, and they were dissolving.

  [ CRITICAL ERROR: BUFFER OVERFLOW ]

  [ ALERT: SYSTEM UNSTABLE ]

  [ FATAL EXCEPTION: MANA CONDUIT FAILURE ]

  “Aerich!” Veyra’s voice came from the other side of a long tunnel. She sounded distorted and panicked.

  The ritual didn’t fizzle. It crashed the server of local reality.

  A pillar of blinding and electric-white fire erupted from the stone in Aerich’s grip. It engulfed him instantly. He did not scream because the air in his lungs had instantaneously transmuted into plasma. He felt his skin blacken. It curled like burning paper. The heat was so absolute that it bypassed pain entirely and registered as a terrifying and numbing void.

  "Packet Loss Detected!" Cidi screamed. Her digital voice fragmented into static. "Admin, hardware integrity is critical! Drop to 4%! I am losing the signal! Overriding safety protocols...

  Force-activation.

  [Elven_Immortality.partition]. Commit and push! DO IT NOW!"

  Inside the column of white destruction, something cold and alien snapped into place beneath Aerich’s charred sternum. It was a secondary soul comprised of a crystalline logic of preservation. The fire did not cease, yet it ceased to consume.

  Royal Road is the home of this novel. Visit there to read the original and support the author.

  The acolytes gasped. Malakar watched from the shadows with flint-like eyes. He leaned forward.

  The onlookers stared as Aerich's form held its shape within the blaze. The charred peeling of his skin halted and then began to reverse itself. Blackened tissue blossomed into new, pale skin within a handful of pulses. The activated elven gene-code overwrote the destruction, its chill efficiency rewriting his very flesh before their eyes.

  However, the crash was not over. The energy spike had nowhere to bleed off. It breached a deeper wall. This was a partition Cidi had warned was encrypted into the very marrow of his avatar’s bones.

  [ WARNING: ADRENALINE OVERLOAD ]

  [ SYSTEM ALERT: FERAL_SUBROUTINE ENGAGING ]

  [ ROOT ACCESS: GRANTED ]

  "I cannot throttle it!" Cidi’s voice boomed. It was deep and resonant now as it vibrated in his teeth. "The energy density is forcing a state change. I am taking the wheel, Admin. Try not to scream."

  Aerich’s pulse synced with the dying and erratic thrum of the ritual stone.

  Snap.

  Bone stretched with a sickening grind, the dry crackle reminiscent of splintering timber in a tempest. His jaw unhinged. It reformed and elongated. Muscles swelled and tore through the refreshed skin only to be knitted back together instantly by the immortality protocol. Layer upon layer of hyper-dense fiber piled up.

  Fur erupted from his pores. It was as silver as a winter moon and stiff as wire.

  He fell to all fours. The marble cracked under the sudden impact of his increased mass. His spine rearranged itself while vertebrae clicked into a new and predatory alignment.

  In ten heartbeats, the programmer from Earth was gone. Standing in the center of the scorched Nave, breathing steam into the cool air, stood eight feet of claw, muscle, and kinetic potential.

  The Werewolf Alpha.

  Aerich was a passenger now. He was a ghost trapped in the backseat of his own mind. He watched through a windshield that was no longer his own eyes. The world had shifted. The colors were gone. They were replaced by a high-contrast monochrome where heat signatures glowed in vibrant oranges and reds. Text scrolled frantically down the left side of his vision with calculations, vectors, and threat assessments.

  Enforcers rushed from the shadows. Their silver blades gleamed, but they looked like pathetic toothpicks against the monstrosity he had become.

  [ TARGET ACQUIRED: PALADIN UNIT 1 ]

  [ DISTANCE: 4.0 METERS ]

  [ VELOCITY: 5.4 M/S ]

  [ PROTOCOL: EFFICIENT DELETION ]

  "Targeting," Cidi’s voice was cold. It was stripped of her usual personality. It was purely mathematical now. "Executing Strike_Protocol."

  The wolf moved. It did not move like an animal. Animals have grace, but they also have hesitation. The wolf moved with the stuttering and glitch-like speed of a frame-skip.

  Aerich watched his own arm lash out. It was a massive limb of silver fur and obsidian claws. It was a masterclass in physics. The claw connected with the leading Paladin. This was not a wild swipe but a calculated application of force. The man launched backward. His breastplate crumpled like tinfoil before he hit a basalt pillar with the meaty slap of a wet towel.

  [ CRITICAL HIT: 4800 DMG ]

  The wolf spun and ducked under a second blade with preternatural timing. Cidi piloted the body using the HUD’s predictive algorithms. She saw the sword swing before the Enforcer’s muscles had fully committed to the action.

  A backhand blow struck. Bone snapped. A body was tossed aside like a rag doll. The wolf did not snarl. It breathed in rhythm with the data stream. It dismantled the attackers and optimized every movement to use the minimum amount of calories for the maximum amount of structural damage.

  The Grand Nave dissolved into chaos. Acolytes screamed and scrambled over pews. High Seer Malakar stood motionless on the dais. The light from the dying ritual fire illuminated his face. He was not horrified. His eyes were wide with a terrifying and hungry clarity. He looked at the beast not as a monster, but as a masterwork. To him, it was the ultimate vessel of power he had spent a lifetime trying to source.

  The violence was absolute, but the battery life was not.

  As quickly as the surge had come, the adrenaline spike hit a hard and unbreakable ceiling.

  [ ALERT: THERMAL OVERLOAD ]

  [ SYSTEM: EMERGENCY VENTING REQUIRED ]

  The blue HUD flickered violently while red warnings washed over Aerich’s vision like blood.

  "Forced Shutdown Initiated," Cidi whispered. She sounded exhausted. Her voice shrank back to a tinny whisper. "Hardware cannot sustain this throughput. Reverting to Safe Mode... shutting down."

  The strength vanished. The wolf collapsed mid-lunge and crashed onto the unforgiving stone.

  The transformation reversed with sickening speed. Fur receded into pores. Bones snapped and shrank back into human proportions. The mass evaporated into mist. Aerich was left lying on the cold basalt. He was naked, shivering, and retching. The air was filled with the smell of his own scorched body, the copper tang of blood, and the electric stink of the ritual.

  Silence reclaimed the Nave.

  Through the settling smoke, the click-clack of obsidian-soled shoes approached. They stopped inches from his face. Aerich forced his eyes open. His vision was blurry and swam with after-images of code.

  He looked up. Malakar loomed over him like a god of the void, silhouetted against the stained glass.

  “A fascinating vessel,” Malakar whispered. His voice was smooth. It was polished like a river stone and utterly devoid of empathy. “Take him to the infirmary. Secure him. I want every sliver of his aura analyzed. The dissonance... is exquisite.”

  Aerich’s head throbbed. The darkness was closing in, a heavy curtain falling on the stage. His last coherent thought was a desperate, mental ping into the void of his own mind.

  Cidi?

  "I am... here, Admin," she whispered back. Her voice was faint and crackled with static. "But we're going to need a hell of a patch for this."

  * * *

  Aerich surfaced into consciousness like a drowned man gasping for air. The first sensation was not pain, but a profound, bone-deep cold. He was lying on a hard cot, a thin blanket doing little to stop the chill emanating from the stone walls. The air smelled of antiseptic herbs and old blood.

  [ VITALS: STABILIZING ]

  [ STATUS: SEVERE MANA DEPLETION ]

  "Welcome back to the land of the painfully conscious," Cidi's voice chimed in his head, sounding remarkably clearer, though laced with a new, grim fatigue. "Your core temperature has normalized. The Elven partition is holding."

  What happened, Cidi? Aerich thought, not trusting his voice. That thing... that wasn't me.

  "It was a subroutine, Admin. A part of your base code that I was forced to execute to prevent total system failure. But the real shock is the source." Cidi's tone shifted to one of analytical awe. "While you were recovering, I ran a full diagnostic. I had to bypass several firewalls your... creator... put in place. Aerich, you weren't just dropped into this world with a blank slate. Your avatar is a legacy build."

  A complex schematic, reminiscent of a DNA helix intertwined with glowing glyphs, flickered to life in his mind's eye.

  "Your genetic structure has pre-installed partitions… deep, encrypted sections of code that represent extraordinary abilities. The Elven regeneration and the Lycanthropic transformation aren't bugs or random mutations. They're inherited. They're part of the original design."

  Inherited from who? Aerich thought, a cold dread seeping through him that had nothing to do with the room's temperature.

  "The data is heavily encrypted, but the labels are clear enough," Cidi continued. "You have at least two other major partitions lying dormant. One suggests high-level psychic potential. The other... Admin, the other is flagged for reality manipulation. Chrono-spatial fields. This isn't just a werewolf template. This is a chassis built for a god."

  Aerich stared at the rough-hewn ceiling, the weight of her words crushing. He had thought he was a simple programmer trapped in a fantasy game. Now he understood Malakar's hungry stare. He wasn't just a monster. He was an archive, a living repository of power he never asked for and didn't understand.

  "And the worst part," Cidi added softly, "is that the crash we just experienced... it didn't just activate the Feral Subroutine. It put significant strain on the encryption of the other two. They're not just locked anymore, Admin. They're cracking."