Our new alliance was an unspoken, fragile thing, born from desperation and a shared, impossible goal. We stood in the Undercroft, the air thick with tension. The plan was set. Anya's healing came first.
Seraph, true to her word, provided the support she had promised. Two of her Ouroboros Idealists emerged from the shadows to join us. They were nothing like Kain or Hydra. They were professionals. The first was a mountain of a man named Jax, his heavy armor scarred from a hundred battles. He carried a massive plasma repeater, a weapon designed to shred both armor and cover. He nodded once at me, a silent gesture of solidarity. The second was a woman named Veda. She was small and wiry, dressed in light scout armor and carrying two silenced machine pistols. Her movements were fluid and silent. She was a ghost, a scout designed to move unseen. They were the first members of Ouroboros I had met who did not look at me with hatred or hunger. They looked at me like a comrade.
Glitch handed me his System Spoofing Device. I activated it, and the familiar wave of energy washed over me and Anya, masking our Anathema signatures from the system's prying eyes. I brought up the match queue. Seraph's intel was perfect. A special match was scheduled to begin in minutes on the exact map she had specified.
[MATCH FOUND: DECOMMISSIONED MED-BAY 'LETHE']
[MATCH TYPE: SCAVENGER]
I confirmed the entry. The world dissolved into the familiar blue light of teleportation.
We materialized not in a fiery forge or a dusty battlefield, but in a place of absolute, unnerving sterility. We were standing in the main lobby of a massive, state-of-the-art medical facility. The walls were a pristine, antiseptic white. The floors gleamed under the cool, white lights of the ceiling panels. But the place was dead. Utterly abandoned.
A fine layer of dust covered everything. Medical equipment and diagnostic machines lay silent and unused. Automated service drones, shaped like rolling discs, were dormant in their wall-mounted charging bays. The silence was profound, broken only by the faint, rhythmic flicker of a faulty light panel down one of the long corridors. This was the Lethe Clinic. A place of healing that had long since been forgotten.
Our objective for this match was simple: collect "data packets" scattered throughout the map. It was a perfect cover for our real mission.
Seraph's intel was correct again. A new timer appeared on our HUDs, separate from the main match timer. It was a countdown, stark and ominous.
[SYSTEM STERILIZATION PROTOCOL INITIATING IN: 10:00]
Ten minutes. That was our time limit. When that timer hit zero, the entire facility would be flooded with a lethal energy field. At the same time, the dormant service drones would activate, but not to clean. They would become 'Cleaner' drones, the system's janitors, sent to sterilize everything and everyone left inside.
Our real objective was clear, and it was a race against the clock. We had to find the drone maintenance bay, locate a specific, decommissioned model of a Cleaner drone, and extract its [Cybernetic Neural Interface]. That was the component the Oracle needed to repair the corrupted code in Anya's leg.
"Ten minutes is not a lot of time," Jax said, his voice a low, rumbling bass. He hefted his plasma repeater. "Veda, you take point. Find us a path."
Veda nodded silently and vanished into the nearest corridor, her movements swift and silent. We followed close behind. The Med-Bay was a labyrinth of identical-looking hallways, empty patient rooms, and eerie, silent operating theaters. Surgical tools lay neatly arranged on trays, as if waiting for doctors who had vanished years ago.
Veda was an expert scout. She moved with a purpose, her eyes scanning every corner. She would hold up a hand, signaling us to stop, pointing out a potential ambush spot where other players might be hiding. She found a hidden supply closet, and we quickly stocked up on ammunition and grenades.
I had my own tool. I used my Acoustic Sensor and my knowledge from Caden's notes to navigate the facility's underlying structure. The path to the drone maintenance bay would likely be in the sublevels. "This way," I said, pointing towards a service elevator. "The bay should be on the sub-level B3."
We were working together now. A real team. Jax's heavy presence was a reassuring anchor. Veda's scouting kept us safe from other players. And my technical knowledge guided our path. Anya, with her leg supported by the Oracle's stabilizer brace, was moving well, her confidence restored.
But my System Anathema status was a constant, unpredictable threat. The pristine, orderly environment of the Med-Bay seemed to react to my presence, glitching in subtle, dangerous ways.
As we walked down one long corridor, a sterile white floor panel directly in front of me flickered for a second, de-rezzing into static. It revealed a deep service shaft below before solidifying again. If I had been walking a second faster, I would have fallen.
"Watch your step," Jax grunted, his eyes scanning the floor ahead of me.
Later, as we were sneaking past a large ward full of empty beds, an automated door to my right suddenly slammed shut with a loud clang that echoed through the silent halls. We all froze, waiting to see if any other players had heard the noise. The System was trying to separate me from my team.
The worst moment came when we passed a large diagnostic machine. As I walked by, the machine, which had been dormant for years, flared to life. Its screen lit up, and a loud, blaring alarm began to sound, its red lights flashing. It was a medical emergency alert. It was screaming our position to anyone within a hundred meters.
"Shut it off!" Anya hissed.
I ran to the machine, trying to access its control panel. My Anathema was fighting me. The interface was a mess of glitching code. As I struggled to disable the alarm, we heard footsteps approaching. Another team had heard the alarm and was coming to investigate.
Veda and Jax did not hesitate. They set up an ambush at the corridor's intersection. When the two enemy players rounded the corner, they were met with a storm of plasma and silenced pistol fire. The fight was over in seconds. They never knew what hit them.
I finally managed to kill the power to the diagnostic machine. The alarm died, and silence returned. But the message was clear. I was a hazard. My very presence was a danger to my own team.
We finally reached the sublevels. Following my directions, we found a heavy blast door with the words "DRONE MAINTENANCE & REPAIR" stenciled on it. This was it.
We entered cautiously. The bay was a large, dark chamber, even bigger than the server farm. Rows upon rows of dormant Cleaner drones stood in their charging stations, their single optic eyes dark and lifeless. It was a high-tech graveyard.
At the far end of the bay, we saw it. A single, older model of a Cleaner drone, resting in a diagnostic cradle. It was different from the others, its chassis a different color. That had to be our target.
We started to walk towards it, our boots echoing in the silent, cavernous room.
As we reached the center of the bay, a deafening clang made us all jump. The massive blast door we had entered through slammed shut. Heavy magnetic locks engaged with a series of loud, final clicks. We were sealed in.
The lights in the room flickered on, not the dim emergency lights, but the harsh, sterile white of a full alert. The main sterilization timer on our HUDs vanished. It was replaced by a new, local countdown.
[QUARANTINE LOCKDOWN INITIATED. UNAUTHORIZED ANOMALY DETECTED.]
[INITIATING LOCAL STERILIZATION IN: 03:00]
We had walked right into a trap. But it was not set by another player.
On the far side of the room, the single, dormant Cleaner drone that we had ignored began to power on. Its limbs twitched. And its single, central optic eye glowed to life, a baleful, menacing red.
The System itself had trapped us. And it had just activated its guardian.