Villain MMORPG: Almighty Devil Emperor and His Seven Demonic Wives - Chapter 1763: Bug Fragment?

Chapter 1763: Bug Fragment?

Villain Ch 1763. Bug Fragment?

Jane stood like a black monolith in the snow, calm amid ruin.

Undead rose around her—humanoid corpses from a forgotten battle buried in the ice.

Her voice was soft. “Rise.”

’Necromancy.’

Larissa? She was smiling. Too widely.

The vampire queen had no weapons drawn. Just… blood.

Puddles on the ground. Her own. The enemies’. It didn’t matter.

They floated around her, orbiting like a red galaxy.

She whispered.

And it screamed.

The wolves didn’t die normally.

They bled data.

Chunks of them corrupted mid-animation, then melted into red smoke and binary.

Bella, meanwhile, rode one like a sled—her hands raised like a kid on a roller coaster, five fireballs still hovering above her head.

“Wheeeeeeee—”

Then she snapped her fingers.

The creature exploded beneath her. She flipped off it mid-air like a gymnast and landed beside Allen with a hair toss.

“Boom.”

Allen didn’t answer.

He was already dealing with two wolves blinking through terrain like broken ghosts. His sword flicked in wide, reverse arcs. They weren’t fast enough.

But then—

One glitched.

Hard.

It split into two.

[WARNING: Hostile is Duplicating – Bug Stack Detected]

The clone lunged. Allen parried, but something shifted in the world—

His arm twitched.

[Desync Detected – Ping Spike 731ms]

“What the—”

He was struck.

Blood sprayed from his side. Not much. But enough. A warning.

The bugged clone smiled at him. Actually smiled.

“That’s new,” Allen muttered, eyes flashing red.

He reached out with his free hand—

And crushed the sky.

’Emperor’s Domain.’

[All Enemies in Radius: Rooted – Forced Stability Imposed]

[Admin Ping… Suppressed]

He stabbed through the clone’s smirking face.

No mercy.

The body spasmed once, then shattered like a broken mirror glitching out of reality.

[Bug Fragment Collected: 1/10]

Allen narrowed his eyes.

The sword’s aura hadn’t dimmed. That… wasn’t right.

He tilted his head slightly, breath steady, lips twitching in the faintest frown.

That message—wasn’t part of any system he remembered.

Bug Fragment?

Collected?

He muttered under his breath, voice low and skeptical.

“Bug Fragment… collected?”

His fingers flexed on the hilt of his sword. His gaze scanned the battlefield.

The wolves, the glitched environment, the corrupted status effects—they weren’t just random. Something deeper was being tracked. System-based. Patterned. Organized.

He scowled.

“…This turned into a quest?”

The pop-up hadn’t triggered like a player-side achievement. It was embedded deep, like a dev flag running beneath the UI. Which made zero sense—because bug hunts weren’t supposed to act like gameplay.

Allen sighed sharply and opened his interface with a flick of his hand. The dark red screen hovered before him, glowing faintly against the blizzard light.

He tapped into his private chat and opened a DM.

[Private Message – Sent to: KAFRA]

Azazel: Bug Fragment Collected? What the hell is this? Why does this feel like a quest instead of a real debug?

He hit send.

And before he even dropped his hand—

KAFRA’s voice filled their heads. All of them.

It wasn’t just a ping. It wasn’t a chat window. It was broadcast.

“Oh! Hi again, hi again~!”

Her voice popped into their minds like a hyper chipmunk soaked in caffeine and poorly coded happiness.

Vivian immediately clutched her head. “Ow—gods—why direct link? That’s in my brain!”

“Sorry! Sorry!” Kafra chirped, not sounding sorry at all. “I thought it’d be better to explain this way. Since someone already triggered the hidden notification!”

Allen didn’t even flinch. “You mean me.”

“Yep! Congrats, Emperor!~”

“…Stop calling me that.”

Kafra kept talking like a train that’d lost its brakes.

“So, the dev team got nervous after too many reports in Skaldrveil! We tested the environment before launch—really, we did! Everything passed! But then… it started acting weird. Too many desyncs. AI failing to despawn. Aggression stacking wrong. Even texture bleeding. That shouldn’t happen outside corrupted archives!”

“Why launch it?” Shea asked flatly, her feathers still bristling from the dive. “You knew something was off. Why release new fields if they still had bugs?”

“Believe me, we tried holding it back!” Kafra insisted. “But for three days, nothing triggered. Every test passed. Players even started doing side quests without issue. But then… today happened. Suddenly, AI started cloning. The lighting glitched. Mobs duplicated. And now…”

She paused.

“Now we think something’s living in the zone code.”

A beat of silence.

Larissa whispered, “Living?”

“I mean not alive-alive! But something’s hiding in the corrupted strings. Something new. Unmapped. So the devs flipped a panic switch. Made a patch that turns all detected corruption into collectible fragments. Like a bug-hunt quest. That way, we can track it manually.”

Bella sighed dramatically, five fireballs still dancing around her. “Well, the bugs were clear. Too clear. Like hey-look-at-me-I-have-three-heads clear.”

Shea added, arms crossed, “Yeah. One literally spawned inside the terrain. It phased through Jane.”

Jane blinked slowly. “I thought I glitched.”

Kafra’s voice went sheepish. “Yeah… no. That wasn’t you. That was the beast… uh… duplicating a hitbox. Which should not happen, unless the object’s flagged as a mirror mob or—wait! Sorry! Dev babble!”

Allen stared at the snowy ridge ahead. Cold wind tugged at his coat, but his attention remained fixed on that fragment message. The idea of bug hunting being gamified pissed him off more than it should. This wasn’t testing. This was bait.

“So,” he said calmly. “You turned this entire region into a live-quest tracking bug collection without telling us.”

“Yup!”

“And the enemy might be… what, a rogue process?”

“Or something even weirder,” Kafra admitted. “We’re not sure yet. We’re hoping you can find the rest of the fragments and maybe locate the source. There’s something nesting under the environment layer. We can’t ping it. But maybe… you can.”

Allen exhaled through his nose.

“Fine,” he muttered.

Zoe groaned. “Of course. Of course it’s us. We can’t just have normal field time anymore, can we?”

“Nope,” Bella chirped. “We’re the chaotic queen squad of region-breaking.”

Alice grinned darkly. “Honestly? I like it better this way.”

Vivian spun her whip once, shoulders rolling with a satisfied crack. “So do I. Let’s go bug hunting, baby.”

Allen closed the chat window and turned toward the ridge where the corrupted air thickened. His sword hummed quietly at his side, sensing something ahead.

Nine more fragments.

And then, maybe… the truth.

He said nothing more.

But he walked forward.

And they followed.