"NOW, LEO!"
Anya's scream cut through the blaring alarms, a desperate, final command. My heart was a hammer in my chest. She was right there, standing next to the massive, trapped drone. The overload would hit them both. It would fry the Alpha Cleaner, but it would also hit her with enough raw energy to delete a player ten times over.
It was an impossible choice. Activate the trap and kill my friend, or hesitate and let the sterilization protocol kill us all.
But I saw the look in her eyes. It was not fear. It was trust. She was trusting me to make the hard choice. The only choice.
My hand slammed down on the console's activation button. I did not scream. I did not shout. I just acted.
[OVERLOAD INITIATED].
The world turned white. A massive surge of pure, raw electricity erupted from the diagnostic cradle. The sound was not a boom, but a deafening, high-frequency screech that vibrated through my bones. The Alpha Cleaner, caught in the center of the blast, convulsed violently. Its single red eye flickered and died. Its systems shorted out in a massive shower of blue and white sparks. With a final, shuddering groan, it collapsed, an inert, smoking husk of metal.
The guardian was dead.
But Anya... she was caught in the edge of the blast. The wave of energy washed over her. I watched in horror as her health bar on my HUD instantly shattered, plummeting from its already low value down to a single, terrifying point.
[ANYA HP: 1/100].
Her entire body, not just her leg, became a flickering, unstable mass of red static. She was on the very brink of deletion, a ghost made of corrupted data. She collapsed to the floor, unconscious, but somehow, impossibly, still alive.
I did not understand. The blast should have killed her. Then I saw it. A new status icon flickered on her HUD. [ANOMALOUS DATA CASCADE]. Her own corruption, the flaw in her code, had reacted with the system's energy attack in an unpredictable way. It had not saved her from the damage, but it had somehow prevented her from being deleted. My System Anathema had infected her, and in a strange, twisted way, that curse had just saved her life.
The timer on my screen was a pulsing red beacon of doom.
[LOCAL STERILIZATION IN: 10 SECONDS].
There was no time to process what had just happened. "Jax! The door!" I yelled.
The big man was already moving. He slapped a heavy explosive charge onto the sealed blast door. "Veda, grab her!"
Veda, the scout, was a blur of motion. She sprinted across the room, scooping up Anya's limp, glitching form and throwing her over her shoulder. The weight seemed to be nothing to her.
"Leo, the part!" she shouted. "Get the part!"
I ran for the other drone, the decommissioned one resting in its cradle. I vaulted onto the platform, my hands searching frantically for the access panel on its head. I found it, ripped it open, and saw the [Cybernetic Neural Interface]. It was a complex crystalline device, interwoven with fine, golden wires. I pulled it free just as Jax detonated the charge.
BOOM!
The blast door blew inwards, torn from its hinges. Our escape route was open.
The final alarm blared, a sound that signaled the end.
[STERILIZATION IN 3... 2... 1...]
"GO! GO! GO!" I screamed.
Veda was already out the door, carrying Anya. Jax followed close behind, laying down a storm of plasma fire into the corridor to suppress any other players who might have been drawn by the explosion. I sprinted after them, the precious neural interface clutched tight in my hand.
As I left the maintenance bay, a wave of shimmering, white-hot energy flooded the room behind me. It moved with an unnatural speed, vaporizing everything it touched. The inert Alpha Cleaner, the dormant drones, the massive control console—it all dissolved into nothingness. We had escaped with less than a second to spare.
We did not stop running. We sprinted through the sterile white corridors of the Med-Bay, heading for the extraction point. The facility-wide purge was still in effect. Newly activated standard Cleaner drones, their red eyes glowing, now patrolled the hallways. They were not as strong as the Alpha model, but there were dozens of them.
We did not fight them. We just ran. It was a mad, desperate dash through a collapsing dungeon. We dodged plasma fire, vaulted over medical carts, and slid under closing blast doors.
We finally burst out into the main lobby where we had started. The match timer was almost at zero. We had made it.
As the final second ticked away, the familiar blue light of teleportation enveloped us. The sterile, white world of the Lethe Clinic dissolved.
We reappeared in the Undercroft, collapsing in a heap in front of the Oracle's campfire. We were alive. We had succeeded. We had the neural interface.
Jax and Veda, the two Ouroboros Idealists, looked at me. There was a new expression on their faces. It was not just the look of a professional doing a job. It was respect. Deep, hard-earned respect. We had been through the fire together, and we had come out the other side as a real team, a real unit.
We rushed the unconscious, still-glitching Anya over to the Oracle. I handed the old woman the neural interface. "Can you help her?" I pleaded.
The Oracle took the device, her cybernetic fingers tracing the golden wires. "Yes," she rasped. "The code in this component is clean. It is stable. I can use it to write a patch. To rebuild the corrupted data." She plugged the interface into her master terminal and began to work, lines of code scrolling rapidly across her screen. "But it will take time. The damage is severe."
While we waited, my nerves still frayed, Glitch hobbled out of the darkness. He had been monitoring our progress, no doubt. He looked at Anya's unstable form, then at the exhausted but triumphant look on our faces.
"Your little trip... it did more than just stir up the Warden's nest," he rasped, his mechanical voice more serious than I had ever heard it.
He pointed a clawed finger at his master terminal. He brought up a new feed. It was a system-wide broadcast, a public channel accessible to all factions.
It was a news report. Ouroboros was fracturing. Open warfare had broken out in several high-traffic Safe Zones. Players wearing the Ouroboros symbol were fighting each other. Seraph's Idealists against the remnants of Viper's Dominion faction. The civil war was no longer a secret. It was open, public, and bloody. Our actions were having consequences that rippled throughout the entire game world.
But that was not the most disturbing part. Glitch switched the feed. It was a simple, scrolling kill-feed, aggregating data from dozens of recent matches. And a single, terrifying line of text kept repeating.
[Player_Rogue7 eliminated by UNKNOWN ENTITY]
[Player_ShadowFox eliminated by UNKNOWN ENTITY]
[Player_Xylo eliminated by UNKNOWN ENTITY]
"Something new is in the system," Glitch said, and for the first time, I heard something that sounded like genuine fear in his mechanical voice. "It started after your fight in the server room. After you injected the Undercroft's code into a live match."
He looked at me, his red optic eyes seeming to stare right through me.
"Your Anathema, the scar you left on the system... it's not just making the System angry. It's a crack in the wall. And it's letting something else in."
The glitches I had caused, the chaos I had unleashed, had created a new, unknown, and hostile predator in the game. And it was already hunting.