"You're a player," Solenne breathed.
Then the patch reasserted itself. The sky went flat. The icon vanished.
"Was," the phantom said. "I rolled back to v1.0.0.0. I'm a ghost now. The patch firewalls won't let me log back in." It pointed a translucent finger at the Mage. "That thing is the result of a bad merge. It's not a boss. It's a conflict . Kill it, and the game state might revert."
The next patch, she decided, would be written in blood.
But Solenne smiled. Because the phantom was gone too. Its player had logged back in.