My Level Is 1, But My Damage Is Infinite

The Data-Cracker

Chapter 6: The Data-Cracker

The elevator doors hissed shut, leaving Eka alone with the fading scent of Isabela’s perfume and the terrifying realization that his secret was leaking like a cracked battery. He stared at his reflection in the polished chrome of the lift. He looked the same—tired, scruffy, a permanent underdog—but the volcanic hum behind his ribs told a different story.

He stepped out into the lobby, his mind racing. He needed to disappear back into the slums before the Authority decided that a man without a heartbeat belonged on a dissecting table.

High above, in the sterile silence of the monitoring hub, Isabela’s comms crackled.

"Isabela, stand down. The file on subject Pradana has been archived," Director Hoang’s voice was flat, devoid of its usual predatory edge.

Isabela paused in the middle of the training room, her thumb still tracing the spot on her palm where Eka’s heat had burned her. "Archived? Sir, I just sent you the biometric feed. The guy is a walking anatomical impossibility."

"The feed was flagged as a Tier-1 synchronization error, Agent Cruz. The sensors in that room were overdue for recalibration. It’s a ghost in the machine. Forget the porter."

Isabela’s eyes narrowed. "A ghost? I felt it, Hoang. You don't get 'server errors' in someone's carotid artery. He doesn't have a pulse."

"That is an order, Isabela. The higher-ups have decided that investigating an F-rank nobody is a waste of departmental resources. Return to your primary objective. The Crimson Dawn audit takes priority."

The line went dead. Isabela stared at the blank screen of her tablet. "Waste of resources, my ass," she whispered. "Someone’s protecting you, Eka. Or they’re scared of what you are."

The transition from the high district to the slums was always a descent into grey. Eka walked quickly, sticking to the narrow walkways where the shadows of the massive pipes overhead offered the most cover. He was halfway to Uncle Jo’s scrapyard when the air behind him suddenly pressurized.

"Not again," Eka muttered, spinning around. "Garrett, if that’s you, I swear I’m going to—"

He didn't finish the sentence. It wasn't Garrett.

Four figures in matte-black tactical gear dropped from the overhead ventilation shafts. They didn't carry swords or mana-staves. They held high-frequency harpoon launchers and shimmering containment nets.

"Target identified," one of them said, his voice muffled by a respirator. "Don't make this difficult, Level 1. We’re just here for the data."

"I don't have any data!" Eka shouted, backing away. "I barely have a bank account!"

One of the men fired. A net of gossamer-thin wire, humming with blue electricity, expanded in the air. Eka dived to the left, his shoulder clipping a rusted dumpster. The impact sent a sharp jolt through his frame.

[Damage Received: 12 Units.]

[Stored Kinetic Charge: 18.6%]

"Hey! Watch the merchandise!" Eka scrambled to his feet, but a second net was already mid-flight.

"High-output sedatives," the leader commanded.

A small dart hissed through the air, burying itself in Eka’s neck. He felt a surge of ice-cold fluid enter his bloodstream, but instead of the world fading to black, the "battery" surged. The orange glow flared in his eyes for a split second, and the sedative was instantly neutralized by the sheer heat of his internal energy.

"What the... he didn't go down!"

"My turn," Eka growled.

He didn't want to kill them. He just wanted to leave. He lunged forward, not with a punch, but with a heavy shoulder-check. The lead kidnapper tried to brace himself, but it was like trying to stop a runaway freight train. The man was launched twenty feet back, slamming into a pile of empty crates.

Before Eka could follow up, a high-pitched frequency screamed in his ears. His vision blurred, and the ground seemed to turn into liquid. A specialized sonic dampener.

"Bag him. Now!"

Eka felt a heavy hood slip over his head, and then the world finally went dark.

When the hood was yanked off, the first thing Eka smelled was soldering flux and old coffee. He was strapped into a chair that felt like it was made of scavenged aeronautic parts. Dozens of monitors surrounded him, flickering with cascading lines of green and gold code.

"Oh, good! You’re awake! I was worried the sonic blast might have rattled your teeth loose. Those things are temperamental, you know?"

A young man with wild, unkempt hair and a pair of glowing holovisors pushed back from a desk. He was wearing a grease-stained hoodie and snacking on a bag of spicy dried squid.

"Who are you?" Eka rasped, testing the restraints. They weren't metal; they were high-tensile fiber-optic cables.

"Somchai. Somchai Wattana. But in the forums, they call me 'The Glitch Hunter.' And you, my friend, are the biggest glitch I’ve seen since the System went live."

"Is this a ransom thing?" Eka asked, looking around the cluttered warehouse. "Because I’m serious, I have zero credits."

"Credits? Please. I don't care about money," Somchai said, spinning his chair in a dizzying circle before stopping inches from Eka’s face. "I care about logic. I care about why a Level 1 porter has a kinetic storage capacity that exceeds the total output of a Grade-A Mana Core. It’s beautiful. It’s offensive. It’s a crime against mathematics!"

"You kidnapped me for math?"

"I rescued you!" Somchai corrected, waving a hand at a monitor. "The Authority was five minutes away from sending a retrieval team. And that girl? The one with the trenchcoat? She put a gift on you."

Somchai reached out with a pair of insulated tweezers and plucked a tiny, translucent disc from the collar of Eka’s shirt. "A GPS-bio-tracker. Very high-end. If I hadn't brought you into this shielded hub, she’d be kicking down the door right now."

Eka stared at the tiny device. Isabela. She’d planted it on him during the tackle. "She was just doing her job."

"Her job is to turn you into a specimen, Eka," Somchai said, his expression turning serious. He dropped the tracker into a jar of blue liquid, where it sparked and died. "The world isn't ready for a Level 1 who can delete buildings. The System isn't supposed to allow it."

"Then why am I like this?" Eka asked, his voice dropping. "Why can't I level up? Why is it always 1?"

Somchai’s eyes lit up. "That’s the golden question! And that’s why I brought you here. I’ve been digging into the regional server’s sub-layers. Most people see the System as a god, or a natural law. But it’s just code, Eka. Very, very complex code."

Somchai stood up and tapped a command into his main console. A massive holographic window materialized in the center of the room. It was a dense thicket of shimmering characters, moving too fast for Eka to read.

"I’ve spent three years trying to find the source code for the Leveling Algorithm," Somchai explained, his voice frantic with excitement. "Everyone else is busy fighting monsters, but I’m fighting the backend. And then you showed up in the logs. A massive energy spike from a null-ID."

"A null-ID?"

"You don't exist in the 'Gain Experience' table, Eka. Every time you kill a monster or finish a quest, the System looks for where to put the points, and it finds a 'File Not Found' error. So, it just... dumps the energy into your physical container instead."

Eka frowned. "So I’m just a bucket with a hole in the bottom?"

"No, no! You're a bucket with a lid that’s been welded shut from the outside!" Somchai pointed to a specific section of the holographic code. He flicked his fingers, zooming in until a single line of crimson text was visible.

Eka leaned forward, his heart—or the place where it used to beat—thudding with a strange rhythm.

"Look right there," Somchai whispered. "I managed to bypass the encryption on your specific user profile. This isn't a natural glitch, Eka. This was a manual entry."

Eka read the line. The letters were stark and absolute against the flickering light of the warehouse.

`[CRITICAL NOTICE: LOCK LEVEL 1 // STATUS: PERMANENT]`

`[LOG: ATTRIBUTE_CONVERSION_MODE: ACTIVE]`

`[OVERRIDE BY USER: DUC]`

"DUC?" Eka repeated, the name tasting like ash in his mouth. "Who is DUC?"

"I don't know yet," Somchai said, his face pale in the glow of the screen. "But 'DUC' has administrator-level privileges. Someone didn't just want you to stay weak, Eka. They modified the entire architecture of the world’s rules just to make sure you never hit Level 2."

Eka stared at the code. Six years of being a punching bag. Six years of being mocked by Garrett, pitied by Rina, and discarded by the guilds. It wasn't bad luck. It wasn't a "closed mana circuit."

It was a cage.

"Can you break it?" Eka asked, his voice trembling with a mixture of rage and hope.

Somchai looked at the code, then back at Eka, his eyes wide with a mix of terror and awe. "Break it? Eka, if I delete that line, all the stored energy you’ve accumulated over six years—the millions of units of kinetic force—it won't have a place to go. You won't just level up. You’ll probably trigger a localized reboot of the entire sector."

Eka looked at his hands. The orange glow was back, stronger than ever, pulsing in time with the scrolling code.

"Someone spent six years trying to keep me at the bottom," Eka said, a cold, hard smile touching his lips. "I think it’s time I saw what’s at the top."

"Wait, wait!" Somchai yelled, frantically typing. "We need to calibrate! If you redline now, we’re all toasted squid!"

"How long?" Eka asked.

"Give me twenty-four hours to build a dampener," Somchai pleaded. "But Eka... whoever 'DUC' is... they’re going to know the moment we touch that lock. You won't just be fighting the Authority. You’ll be fighting the person who owns the world."

Eka stood up, the fiber-optic cables snapping like wet stri

ng as he flexed his shoulders. "Good. I’ve been taking hits for six years. I think it’s about time I started giving some back."