The light that surrounded him faded, and Vaile was able to open his eyes once again and behold the exact area his little trick had sent him. However, as he opened his eyes, he was momentarily blinded by an absurdly bright light. Thankfully, the mask he wore had its effects kick in just a second later, but for the moment Vaile was still reeling from the aftereffects of what was, effectively, a natural flashbang, but without the bang portion.

He instinctively tried to cover his eyes but found that he could not move his arms. No, it was not just his arms that he could not move, but his legs, his torso, his hands, his feet and, in some capacity, his neck. As his eyes finished adjusting, he tried to look down and see what the problem was. The thing restricting his movement was a single four-letter word that a Space Wizard Samurai Monk described as something that was “coarse, rough and gets everywhere.”

Yes, he was nearly up to his chin in sand, and he thanked the makers of the game that the equipment system forbade such things from worming their way inside clothing. Vaile tested how much force he needed to use to move the sand around him, only to discover that he had to exert a not insubstantial amount of power to push the sand away and allow himself to move even slightly.

At this rate, it would take at least the rest of the day to get free…

“What have we here?”

A voice from someone that Vaile found himself unable to determine the gender of sounded out from behind him. Hastily popping up his minimap which had been turned off by the teleportation, Vaile discovered that a group of roughly ten Desert Elves who all had dismally low levels in comparison to his own, were behind him. He sighed internally and chastised himself for failing to guess their identity based on the terrain and the fact that they spoke in Common. The Races were almost never his ally, and Vaile wanted them to either go away, help dig him out or simply die right then and there.

He knew from the game that Elves were territorial, and that among the many sub-races under the blanket moniker of ‘elf’ the Desert Elves were by far one of the most dangerous to encounter. They had a nasty habit of killing first and not even bothering to ask questions, making them one of the most niche variants of the Elven Race to play. Heck, simply playing as a Desert Elf was a potential recipe for disaster, as Players would start not in a city but in a random place in their overall territory. It was then up to chance whether the Player would survive or not.

Still, Vaile did need a bit of help, so maybe having such negative thoughts wasn’t the best idea.

“A little help, please?” Vaile asked, trying to turn his head a little to show he was very much in a bind.

“How about…. No.”

With that, the Desert Elves moved on, leaving Vaile trapped in the sand.

“Fuck you, you crazy isolationist bastards!” Vaile shouted, but his words fell on deaf ears.

Vaile sighed, and began trying to squirm his way free. This would take a while…

…

Meanwhile, deep inside a bunker complex in a place both far away from the New World and impossibly close to it at the same time, a single giant machine hummed with power. The algorithms and programs it used to keep itself from failing were beginning to fail, but not by large margins. Such failings were well within the acceptable limits, and there had been times when such things had happened in the past. However, what the Warden AI had failed to realize was that the failures in The Prison were happening at an accelerated rate. Likewise, it failed to notice that these failings within The Prison were starting a slow but steady cascade reaction that not only affected the prisoners, but also the programs designed to keep the prisoners from realizing that they were shackled to begin with.

The failures it noted were comparatively minor when viewed alongside the ones of the “distant” past, but the signs were there. It was likely that this lack of attention on the part of the Warden AI was due to the injection of the Variable, which had thrown the entire Prison system for a loop when it was forcefully added. On closer inspection, if it was possible to do such a thing, any decent programmer worth their salt would have noticed that there was a bit of malicious code that had combined with the Warden AI.

If not for the fact that said code had cut The Prison off from any and all outside interference and observation, the people tasked with making sure the system was working perfectly would have noticed that something was very, very wrong. Such people would likely have attempted to take actions that would halt the plans made by those who sought to free the prisoners, which was why such a piece of malware was added as a Trojan that accompanied the injection of the Variable into the system.

Thus, the Warden AI began to slowly lose touch with what was going on in The Prison it was created to control. Like a poor parent whose growing lack of concern for their children and their actions, the Warden AI was gradually caring less and less about making sure that it fulfilled its purpose. By now, three pillars had fallen, and the dominoes that would lead to the destruction of the fourth were beginning to fall. By the estimates of the cultists who had infiltrated the team tasked with keeping The Prison operation, the shackles holding their Gods in place would break within a matter of a year at least and two years at most.

The dominoes had already started to fall, and soon there would be no one and nothing both inside and outside The Prison that could stop the jailbreak that was to come.