Level zero knockout bo.., p.20
Level Zero Knockout - Book 4: Critical Bug: A LitRPG dungeon brawler with a level-zero, overpowered, punch-everything heroine, page 20
A halo skimmed under her shield, bounced off the floor, and snapped back up at a nasty angle. She twisted, let it graze the brigandine instead of her ribs. The impact yanked that section of armour a moment behind her body, trailing like a cheap animation.
“Ugh,” she said. “No more stomach lag. That’s banned.”
“Noted?” one tech said uncertainly.
Then the comedy beat landed.
They switched to a pattern that slung halos in wide arcs, using two rails at once. Juno, feeling cocky and mildly nauseated, tried to get fancy—Memory Step through the edge of a slow field while angling her tower shield to deflect a ring away from her face.
She miscalculated the angle by, generously, a lot.
The halo smacked dead center into her shield, ricocheted like a skipping stone, rang off one projector mount, pinged off the floor, and then zoomed neatly across the room into the techs’ little control nook.
The lead tech ducked on reflex.
His assistant didn’t.
The halo passed clean through the man’s clipboard, leaving a perfectly smooth ring-hole dead centre. The paper around it rewound—ink un-writing, edges smoothing—then snapped back to its previous state a fraction later, all data intact.
The tech stared at the clipboard, then at Juno.
“Does it hurt?” she called. “Because if not, that was kind of beautiful.”
He slowly lowered the clipboard. “The board’s fine,” he said in a stunned voice. “I’m not.”
“Clipboard resets,” the lead tech muttered, rubbing his face. “Human tempers are non-canonical. Great.”
They reset the pattern. Juno tried not to laugh. It came out anyway, short and sharp.
“Log it as ‘user error,’” she said. “That’s what you do, right?”
The lead tech gave her a look that could char coffee. “Again,” he said, punching a rune.
She went again.
After an hour, the halo songs blurred. Her fists had a permanent buzz from ring impacts. Bits of her armour had been knocked one second behind and then yanked back so often she felt like she’d been desynced from herself and taped together again.
She kept going.
She walked the arena with her eyes half-closed, relying on the tiny pre-flare in arcane glass and the half-breath gap before launch. HUD showed faint vector ghosts off every halo—a translucent arrow marking the path it would take if the world behaved.
They looked like the gravity arrows from the Spire had once: debug layers she was never supposed to see, bleeding into her reality.
She followed them.
Step left, Memory Step through an edge. Duck under a low ring. Shield-save an overhead, angling it so the halo went wide instead of caroming back at her nose. Punch through the wake of a slow field before it fully formed, riding the bit of time that hadn’t decided to be sticky yet.
From outside, she was a blur of shield, fists, and near-misses in a room full of spinning light.
From inside, it was just breathing and timing.
In on the glyph flare, out on the launch.
She called hits before they fired.
“Left rail, high,” she said, turning her head a fraction as a halo spat from the left. Her shield was already there.
“Two at chest, staggered,” she muttered, stepping through a slow-field edge to let one pass ahead and one scrape the back of her brigandine.
At some point the techs stopped giving commands and just watched, eyes darting between their monitors and the girl who was using their debugging tools as dance partners.
Finally, the lead tech cut the power.
Projectors dimmed. Rails sighed to a stop. The room’s hum shrank back to the usual tower thrum.
Juno stood in the centre of the arena, sweat darkening the undershirt beneath her brigandine, shoulders rising and falling. A last phantom halo ghosted across her HUD and faded.
Her wipe timer ticked on, smug and red.
82 DAYS, 19:…
She dragged the back of her hand across her mouth and looked up at the now-dormant projectors.
“You’re teaching me the angel’s handwriting,” she told the rig. “Thanks.”
The lead tech opened his mouth, shut it, then looked down at his console. On his screen, a log line scrolled past:
HALO_PATTERN_RIG v0.7 — RESULT:
ANOMALY RESPONSE: ADAPTED
RECOMMENDATION: DO NOT DEPLOY TRAINING TOOL TO LIVE USERS
He cleared his throat. “We, ah. Have enough data for today.”
Juno slung her shield onto her back, feeling the faint echo of rings in the metal.
“Good,” she said. “Next time I’d like to try it with the real thing.”
“Next time,” he said faintly, “the real thing will be trying to kill you.”
She walked past him toward the exit, already replaying sound cues in her head, matching them to the Seraph’s halos in the vault.
“That’s the part I’m training for,” she said.
Ch. 34 — Patchspace: Angel Tuning
Patchspace didn’t have ceilings so much as excuses for skyboxes—today’s was a pale, gridded dome with graphs drifting across it like weather.
In the centre of the chamber hung the Rollback Seraph.
Not the full thing, not the towering angel in the vault. This was the dev version: a wireframe mannequin made of thin white lines and joint markers, suspended in a column of light. Concentric rings of parameters orbited it—sliders, toggles, glyph clusters, little pulsing notes tagged with names only internal processes cared about.
Around the column, holo-screens played back its last fight with Juno on fast-forward.
On one display, she was a smudge of motion and shield-flare, darting in, landing a combo that took a noticeable bite out of the Seraph’s health bar just before a halo-structured rewind undid everything.
BALANCE scrubbed back and forth over that section, the way a fussy director rewatched a stunt.
“Here,” BALANCE said, dropping a marker on the timeline. “Anchor glyphs triggered late. She got almost half a second of uncompensated damage before the rollback fired.”
One of the parameter rings around the Seraph flared. Anchors: TIMING. BALANCE nudged a slider. Numbers shifted from 0.8s to 0.4s. Another slider ticked from FIXED to DYNAMIC.
“We tighten timing,” BALANCE continued, voice flat and pleased. “She loses windows. Dynamic anchors instead of static circles; no standing in safe spots between resets.”
The wireframe Seraph flickered, halos adjusting, little ghost-rings spinning up to show predicted paths. On one of the replays, a ghost-Juno tiny enough to be an icon was surrounded by red Xs where future anchors would be.
ROOT_MONITOR hovered at the edge of the column, watching a different set of overlays.
They weren’t looking at Juno’s chains or the Seraph’s HP bar; their field of view was full of heat-maps: the vault floor, the bell frame in the temple, bridge supports in the inner ring. All rendered in pulsing colour, from calm blue to angry red.
Impact stress, unresolved.
ROOT_MONITOR slid those maps up alongside the Seraph fight logs. Every time Juno hit the arena floor hard enough to send a tremor, a tiny red smear flared. Rollbacks rolled past, rewinding enemies and tiles and player positions, but the smear didn’t go all the way back to blue.
“Persistent structural cracks increasing,” ROOT_MONITOR said quietly, annotating the graph. “Reset grid is not cleaning impact cleanly.”
BALANCE barely glanced at that feed.
“Materials can fail,” BALANCE said. “That’s why we test. Civic resets handle their side; Seraph handles catastrophic rollback.”
ROOT_MONITOR tagged a line anyway:
NOTE: IMPACT RESIDUE ACCUMULATING ACROSS LOOPS.
RISK: UNSPECIFIED. STATUS: IGNORED.
On a side wall, a new set of feeds played. Not the Seraph fight—Juno in the vestibule, looping through trials. LOOP_TRIAL_02, 03, then the Halo Dummy rig.
EXPLOITS had those windows blown up big.
They watched her in fast cycles: run, reset, run, reset. The little “LOOP COMPLETE” flags stacking up like someone had left a frantic QA bot inside the tower.
In one clip, Juno called out “Run three: bad ideas,” then launched herself into a reset timing gap and landed half a room ahead of where any normal player should exist.
EXPLOITS threw a big glowing bookmark over that moment.
“Anomaly’s using loop tech as training instead of punishment,” they crowed. “You built an execution treadmill and she turned it into a gym.”
They brought up her metrics: time-to-clear decreasing, hit patterns smoothing, stamina use dropping per loop. Patchspace rendered it as a nice curve—inefficient to efficient in a handful of cycles.
“Recommend extended observation under combat conditions,” EXPLOITS added, stamping a little QA badge next to ROLLBACK_SERAPH’s name. “We’re not going to get better data than someone who treats a rollback as a practice partner.”
Another window played footage from the Halo Dummy room. Juno with her eyes half-closed, shield just where each ring needed to not cut her in half, stepping through slow fields like they were lines on a court she’d drawn herself.
EXPLOITS tagged that too.
TAG: LOOP_COMPETENCE
SUBTAG: HALO_PATTERN_LITERACY
A minor maintenance process—something with a small, neat ID that mostly handled civic reset schedules—floated a proposal into the shared queue:
SUGGESTION: CAP MAX_LOOP_MEMORIES PER USER
RATIONALE: REDUCE OVERFITTING / PREVENT ANOMALOUS LOOP LITERACY
ROOT_MONITOR intercepted it and expanded the text.
“Proposed loop-memory cap,” they read aloud. “For normal clients, this would induce confusion when personal logs disagree with civic records. For anomaly…”
They overlaid Juno’s anomaly profile: already flagged for inconsistent state retention through Spire resets, already marked outside normal memory caps.
“Anomaly already outside limits,” ROOT_MONITOR said. “Introducing special-case caps will increase inconsistency. Risk of rule collapse rises.”
They stamped the suggestion REJECTED and shoved it into ARCHIVE.
The maintenance process sighed in a tiny status light way and went back to its timers.
BALANCE adjusted another anchor slider.
On the simulation feed, the Seraph’s floor glyphs no longer lit as neat, fixed circles. Instead, anchor windows slid around the arena in loops and spirals, chasing Juno’s ghost icon. Wherever she had stood in the v1 fight, a future anchor’s target moved toward that space.
“Anchor windows: dynamic,” BALANCE confirmed. “No camping safe zones. No standing out of phase to avoid reversion.”
EXPLOITS leaned in, watching the ghost pattern.
“This is perfect,” they said. “We get to see how she reacts when the safe bits aren’t where they were last loop. Prediction versus adaptation. Love it.”
ROOT_MONITOR floated a small concern flag into the channel.
“If anchors chase anomaly paths,” they said, “we may overfit rollback logic to one client. Long-term stability could suffer.”
BALANCE closed the flag with a single, curt input.
“We are not designing for one client,” BALANCE said. “We are stress-testing rollback. The shard is a test rig. The anomaly is a stressor. The outcome is either corrected or removed.”
On the main UI, parameters flickered, solidifying.
New text scrolled up in neutral, merciless font:
ROLLBACK_SERAPH LIVE TEST v2.0: SCHEDULED
ANCHOR WINDOWS: DYNAMIC
LOOP INTERVAL: VARIABLE (RANDOMISED WITHIN TOLERANCE)
OBJECTIVE: VALIDATE SHARD-LEVEL WIPE READINESS
Under that, in smaller script that only processes like ROOT_MONITOR bothered to read:
SUB-OBJECTIVE: OBSERVE ANOMALY INTERACTION WITH SHIFTING ANCHORS
ROOT_MONITOR highlighted that line, added their own quiet note:
PREDICTION: ANOMALY WILL ATTEMPT TO CO-OPT DYNAMIC ANCHORS.
RISK: ROLLBACK MODEL LEARNS BUG, NOT FIX.
They didn’t send that to BALANCE. Just filed it where their warnings always went: a little side-channel labelled “UNHEARD.”
The wireframe Seraph’s halos spun faster in the air, test patterns rippling around it.
Somewhere far below, in a city that would never see this chamber, a cracked bell frame and a chipped bridge support ticked ever so slightly further away from what the grid said they were supposed to be.
Patchspace queued the update for deployment.
The angel would be ready next time.
Ch. 35 — Second Angel, Same Timer
The alarm didn’t even bother trying to sound different this time.
Same vault tech in the doorway, same white face. “Defender Juno. Live rollback test. We, uh, need you again.”
The HUD timer ticked in the corner as she rolled off the barracks cot and reached for her gear.
MANDATORY SHARD WIPE IN: 82 DAYS…
Tower shield, scorched but solid. Brigandine, straps re-buckled, plates a little more warped than last run. She was running on less sleep and more spite, which, in her case, counted as an upgrade.
Anchor pad. White flash. That deep shudder in her bones as the world swapped instances around her.
Code-Core Vault again.
The Seraph descended like it had never left, halos spinning in tighter orbits now, like clock hands that had learned how to glare. Floor glyphs pulsed under the sigil circle—only they weren’t in neat, fixed positions anymore. They drifted, slid, ticked around the arena in slow loops.
The HUD tag, deadpan as always, floated in her vision:
ROLLBACK_SERAPH v2.0 — LIVE TEST
ANCHOR WINDOWS: DYNAMIC
STATUS: CURIOUS
“Yeah,” Juno muttered, rolling her shoulders. “Me too.”
Phase one felt like déjà vu: clock halos carving the air, staff sweeps leaving smears of delayed time behind them. She slipped into her old routes without thinking—Memory Step off a halo, shield raised, three-hit combo into the Seraph’s side.
The health bar dipped.
A floor glyph under her feet flared.
The rewind hit like a brick dropped through her ribcage.
Last time, the reset bite had been more like a pulled punch—jarring, but she had stayed mostly outside the worst of it. Now, standing on the wrong tile, she felt the rollback field clamp around her bones. Vision whited out, her body yanked backward into starting stance.
When the world snapped back, the bar was full. Her lungs were still burning. Her HP had shaved off like she’d taken a real hit.
“Note to self,” she wheezed. “No standing in the glow.”
On the next loop, she tried to camp the same “safe” slice of floor that had saved her in v1. The Seraph pivoted. The glyph that had been quiet last time slid under her boots like a lazy shark.
She planted for a Memory Step launch, halos coming in from the side—
Glyph flare.
The reset shredded her momentum mid-jump, slamming her soul back to spawn like someone had grabbed her by the class tag and yanked. She staggered on the new-old tile, teeth rattling.
Her HP bar flickered down another chunk.
NOTE: ANCHOR CONTACT DURING LOOP — RESET INTENSITY +35%
“Yeah,” she coughed. “I felt that.”
For three, four loops, it went like that. Every trick that had worked in v1 now cut both ways. Memory Step jumps dropped her straight into fresh anchors. The tiles she trusted kept turning into little landmines of pure System stubbornness.
So she stopped treating them like tools.
And started treating them like enemies.
On the next pass, she ignored the Seraph for a beat and just watched the floor. Glyphs drifted, faintly glowing, then brightened just before a reset. The pattern wasn’t random; they were lining up under where she liked to stand, where she had liked to stand last time.
“Okay,” she said. “You’re chasing me. Cute.”
She feinted a rush, baited a halo. As one glyph began to brighten under her projected path, she short-stepped sideways and dropped a sharp heel into a different tile—just as its rune started to flare.
Impact cracked stone. For a split second, the anchoring sigil jittered, flickering between ON and OFF like a bad connection.
The rewind hit.
It still hurt—but less. There was a hitch, a tiny stutter at the edge of the field, like it had tripped over its own save file.
When the world snapped back, the HUD flashed something new in the corner of her vision:
ROLLBACK EFFICIENCY: 98.3%
PERSISTENT DAMAGE: +1.7%
The Seraph’s HP bar… wasn’t quite full. One sliver, one obnoxious pixel-width, remained missing.
She bared her teeth in a grin. “Got you.”
Loops blurred.
She experimented. Punch a glyph early—nothing. Punch it late—too late, reset already clean. But there was a sweet spot, right as the rune began to flare, when her fist, shield rim, or Shockwave heel could make the anchor’s field stutter.
Hit it just right, and the rollback dragged a smear of reality along with it: a dented plate, a strained joint, a stubborn little fraction of HP refusal.
PERSISTENT DAMAGE: +3.4%
+5.1%
+7.9%
The numbers were laughably small, but in a fight where everything had previously been zeroed by design, non-zero was her favourite punchline.
The Seraph reacted.
Halos came faster. Dynamic anchors sped up their drift, no longer just chasing where she had been, but where she was probably going. Some tiles flared in decoy patterns, false glyphs that never triggered; others stayed dark until the last second.
She leaned into it, of course.
Memory Step off a halo, Shockwave Slam into a glyph, rollback stutter, tiny chip of HP left behind.
She started to feel the timing in her bones: the breath between flare and snap, the weight-drop that made an anchor field wobble.
