The Infinite Trial

Karl woke up and looked around. He was in a desert. He quickly checked his location.

PENALTY ZONE

"Glitch?"

"I don't know what happened, but probably that strong civilization created this to prevent any threats against them."

A voice connected to Karl's mind.

"Hello, Glitch," the voice said.

"Reality, you traitor! You left me alone in that fight against Disgrace and his allies!" Glitch sounded furious, though Karl didn't know why.

"So, this is your 'Emissary'?"

"Why did you leave me alone in the fight!?"

"It was unwinnable. I see across reality—or rather, I am Reality."

"How did that girl wield more power than me when you two are the same?" Karl asked.

"She unlocked more power because she became my Emissary two years ago, before this generated world even existed."

"Wait, won't the game creators hear our conversation?" Karl asked another question at random.

"We're communicating through your mind. Can they see inside your thoughts?"

"...You're right. Wait—why do the players in the ranking have superpowers and weapons, but I don't?"

"You never engaged with the game. There's an awakening system, and armors are sold in stores. You did none of it," Reality and Glitch answered at the same time.

Karl recalled the moment he was penalized for not having money at the store.

"You shouldn't be worrying about that, kid," Glitch cut him off. "We need to find Alya and figure out how to escape this zone."

"Alya is at coordinates (X, Y)."

Karl teleported there and found Alya looking around in the wide desert, findning a way to get out 

"Nothing is perfect right?"Karl asked Alya

"yes?"

"So what if We glitch the system?"

"you're right, we have broken abilities and it is possiable that there is a bug"

Karl and Alya stood at the heart of the virtual world, the core of the Penalty Zone, where the air seemed thick with tension. Data streams crisscrossed the sky, and cracks in space-time threatened to swallow them whole. What appeared to be a peaceful landscape was in fact a fragile illusion, held together by invisible rules that bound them to this system.

"This is the system's core," Alya whispered, her eyes sharp and calculating. "If we're going to escape, we need to start from here. This is where we make our move."

Karl nodded, the familiar presence of "Glitch" pulsing within him. With this connection, he could feel the pulse of the virtual world, the code that controlled everything, just waiting to be manipulated.

"We can't stop now. We disrupt it step by step," Karl said, his voice firm despite the immense pressure surrounding them.

Karl and Alya knew that to bring the system down, they first needed to find and exploit the weak points. Alya quickly scanned the virtual landscape, her eyes locking onto a faint distortion in the data flow. It was a small fracture, barely noticeable, but enough to slip through and get to the heart of the system.

"There, an entry point," Alya pointed at a flickering node in the air. "This is where we need to break through."

Karl felt a surge of energy. This was their chance. He reached out, mentally touching the glitch, feeling the code shift around him as his consciousness expanded into the data realm. He was inside the system now, a world of pure code, algorithms, and complex structures.

Once inside the system, Karl and Alya began their work, injecting errors into the code. The game was designed to self-correct, but with the smallest disturbances—errors in key processes—they could slowly unravel the world from within.

"We have to create enough disturbance to destabilize it," Alya said, her fingers moving quickly as she modified the code.

Karl focused on altering environmental parameters. As he entered a few lines of new code, the world around them began to tremble. The air seemed to flicker and distort, and the ground below them shifted in irregular patterns. It was working.

"We're starting to crack it open," Karl murmured as the world began to glitch.

With the environment beginning to destabilize, they pushed on, targeting the core logic of the system itself. They began altering the flow of time—distorting it, stretching it, causing it to behave erratically. Seconds turned into minutes, and minutes stretched into hours. The world was starting to unravel.

"Time's starting to break down," Karl said, his eyes fixed on the changing environment. "If we keep this up, we can cause a complete collapse."

Alya continued to dig deeper, altering more of the core system's operations. The rules that governed the virtual world—gravity, motion, and existence—were now in their hands. The system could no longer correct itself in real-time.

"This is just the beginning," Alya said with a sharp smile. "We've started the process. If we keep pushing, the system won't hold together much longer."

As the virtual world around them began to crack, they moved on to rewriting the key functions of the system—the central structures that kept the world intact. They altered the way data was processed, how environmental factors were controlled, and how the very fabric of the world itself was held together.

"Let's change how the system handles existence itself," Karl said, entering a line of code that would alter the nature of their reality.

import os import time import shutil # Metaphorical function to "delete" a world def delete_world(world_folder_path): # Simulate the virtual world deletion by deleting a folder (a metaphor for the world) if os.path.exists(world_folder_path): print("World found, beginning deletion process...") # Simulate data corruption (delete files one by one) for root, dirs, files in os.walk(world_folder_path, topdown=False): for name in files: file_path = os.path.join(root, name) print(f"Deleting file: {file_path}") os.remove(file_path) for name in dirs: dir_path = os.path.join(root, name) print(f"Deleting directory: {dir_path}") os.rmdir(dir_path) # Delete the main folder (world core) print(f"Deleting the core world directory: {world_folder_path}") os.rmdir(world_folder_path) print("World deletion complete.") else: print("Error: World folder not found.") # Simulate a virtual world folder structure world_folder = "virtual_world_data" # Creating a sample "world" directory with some files to simulate the virtual world if not os.path.exists(world_folder): os.makedirs(world_folder) for i in range(5): with open(f"{world_folder}/data_{i}.txt", 'w') as file: file.write(f"World data file {i}.\n") print(f"Simulating world creation: {world_folder}") # Wait a bit to simulate "real time" time.sleep(2) # Initiate the deletion process delete_world(world_folder)

The ground beneath them trembled as gravity fluctuated. The sky above them flickered, revealing lines of raw code. Each change added more strain to the system, but they were careful, calculating their every move.

"This is getting dangerous," Alya said as the world continued to glitch, reality warping in strange and unpredictable ways.

As the system's integrity continued to erode, cracks began appearing everywhere. The data itself seemed to tear apart, and the virtual world around them began to dissolve.

"We've done it," Karl said, a sense of awe in his voice. "The Penalty Zone is starting to fall apart."

"Before we leave, Karl, meet me in the second game, I will be waiting there" Alya said

The sky cracked, and swallowed them, Karl find himself in the forest again, but nobody was here

Even if he deletes the penalty zone, he is still weak. He deleted the zone with Alya's help; without her, he couldn't have done it. He won't be chased by that civilization either, because their only goal was engagement—they just wanted to see what happens to Karl. He is still at the beginning of his story, and he has a long way to go.