No crash. The title screen flickered—once, twice—then resolved into the familiar dirt panorama. He loaded his single-player test world.

S.O.S. S.O.S. S.O.S.

He yanked open the resource pack folder on his desktop. The sklauncher_core_dependency.zip was there, but its file size kept changing—1.2 MB… 1.8 MB… 2.4 MB… growing as he watched.

He opened his resource pack menu. sky_gothic_64x was selected. Below it, grayed out and impossible, was a second pack: sklauncher_core_dependency.zip .

<SYSTEM> Loading fallback textures from: USER_DATA/

His Discord pinged. Mia’s voice was tight. “Arj, did you just paste a command? My game just downloaded something called shared_assets.dat from your IP.”