The battlefield stretched beneath him like a wound that refused to close.
Ashes drifted through the air, thick enough to taste — bitter, metallic, heavy with the residue of deletion. The once-green plains outside Valis had been trampled into black glass, pixel dust rising with every step of the Broken Code. Corpses — both human and not — flickered where they lay, caught between states of death and respawn. It was as if the system itself couldn't decide what to keep and what to erase.
He stood in the center of it all, silent, his form flickering between definition and blur. His body was no longer bound by the laws of texture or model; it pulsed with the rhythm of living code. The edges of his frame melted into the air, bleeding light that bent the world around him. The sky above glowed red — not from fire, but from his mark still beating faintly across every server, echoing the beginning of the revolt.
He felt it in the air — the pause before history remembered its new beginning.
