The silence in Rat Town stretched thin as spider silk. All eyes—human, enhanced, and cybernetic—were locked on Celine. The shock-pistol in her small hand still smoked faintly.
"Kill a god," Lucas repeated, his voice flat. "You mean the Warden?"
Celine's smile didn't reach her eyes. They were the color of dirty ice. "The Warden's just a jailer. I'm talking about the thing that built the jail."
She turned and walked deeper into the chamber without looking back, her bare feet making no sound on the grimy metal. The children fell in behind her like a grim parade. After a heartbeat, Nyra followed. Then Vex, his jaw tight. Dain leaned heavily on Lucas as they brought up the rear, the stone cracks in his arms pulsing with dull amber light.
The chamber narrowed into a corridor lined with pipes that throbbed with faint, rhythmic warmth. Lucas's glitching hand twitched in time with them. Every few steps, his pinky finger dissolved into static snow, then reformed. He clenched his fist until his knuckles turned white.
"Stop that," Dain grunted, his voice gravelly with pain. "It's giving me a headache."
"It's giving me a headache," Lucas shot back, but he tucked the hand under his opposite arm.
The corridor opened into a wider space—a control room from a dead era. Banks of shattered monitors lined the walls, their glass spiderwebbed with cracks. In the center of the room stood something that made Lucas's artifact throb in recognition.
A Hound Prime—or what was left of one—was bolted to a makeshift metal frame. Its chest compartment had been pried open, the viscous fluid drained, the human eyes inside replaced with flickering holographic projectors. Wires snaked from its open back into the room's old mainframe, pulsing with stolen data-light.
Celine hopped up onto a console and swung her legs. "Meet my eyes and ears."
On the largest cracked screen, a feed flickered to life. It showed a bird's-eye view of the manufacturing district—Patrols moving in grid patterns, Hounds sniffing at sewer grates, and in the center of the screen, highlighted in pulsing red, the Annihilator [NULL]. It stood motionless in the ruined marketplace, its blank visor tilted upward as if staring directly through the screen at them.
**[SUBJECT TRACKING: ACTIVE]** scrolled beneath its image.
**[ASSIMILATION PROTOCOL: PRIMED]**
"It's not leaving," Vex muttered. "It's waiting for you to come out."
"It can wait forever," Celine said. "System units don't get bored." She tapped a key, and the feed changed.
Lucas's breath caught.
It was his apartment. *His* apartment—the one he'd choked to death in. The camera angle was from above his old desk, looking down at his bed. The room was messier than he'd ever kept it—empty protein shake bottles piled in the corner, clothes strewn across the floor, game controllers scattered like battlefield casualties.
And there, sitting on the edge of the bed, was *him*.
Lucas Kane. Or something wearing his skin.
The imposter was thinner than Lucas remembered being, with dark circles under eyes that were too sharp, too knowing. He was staring at a handheld gaming device, thumbs moving rapidly. Then, as if feeling the gaze of the camera, he looked up.
Directly into the lens.
He smiled—a slow, unnerving stretch of lips that didn't match Lucas's own hesitant grin. Then he spoke, his voice filtering through the room's tinny speakers with a slight lag.
"Hello, Lucas," the imposter said. "I've been waiting for you to find me."
Nyra's claws were out. Vex had shifted into a half-crouch, a low growl building in his throat. Dain's stone skin audibly cracked as he tensed.
The imposter on screen set the game down and stood, stretching with casual familiarity. He walked toward the camera, his face filling the screen. Up close, Lucas could see details he'd missed in the vision—a small scar on the imposter's chin Lucas didn't have, a different way of holding his mouth, a faint glow behind his pupils that wasn't natural.
"You have questions," the imposter said. "I'll answer one. Choose carefully."
Lucas's mouth was dry. The artifact in his chest felt like a second heart, beating too fast. He swallowed. "Why me?"
The imposter's smile widened. "Wrong question. But I'll answer it anyway." He leaned closer, until his pixelated breath fogged the imaginary lens. "Because you were available. Because you died at the right moment. Because the System needed a vessel, and your world is full of empty, hungry shells waiting to be filled."
He stepped back, his expression turning serious. "The real question you should be asking is: what is the System harvesting from us?"
The screen split. On one side, the imposter. On the other, scrolling lines of code—fragments Lucas recognized from the artifact's initial integration.
[CODE 404: UNDEFINED ENTITY]
[EXTRACTION PROGRESS: 87%]
[PRIMARY RESOURCE: CONCEPTUAL MASS]
"Every time you use a skill," the imposter continued, "every time you level up, every time the System acknowledges your existence—it's shaving off pieces of what you are. Your memories, your emotions, your *self*. It packages them into data and feeds them to the thing at the center. The god in the machine."
Celine hopped down from the console. "They call it the Architect. It built this world. And it's starving."
The importer nodded. "The System was never meant to be permanent. It was a temporary scaffold—a testing ground for something greater. But the Architect went mad with hunger. Now it sustains itself by consuming the souls of players. Voidmark figured that out. He found a way to reverse the flow."
"Reverse it how?" Nyra asked, her ears twitching.
"By becoming a glitch," Lucas whispered, understanding dawning. "By breaking the rules so completely that the System can't categorize you. Can't digest you."
On screen, the imposter gave a slow clap. "Congratulations. You're not as stupid as you look." His expression hardened. "But you're running out of time. The assimilation protocol isn't about capturing you. It's about *finishing the harvest*. Voidmark started the process—he reached 87% integration with the artifact. You're carrying his unfinished business. If NULL brings you to the Core, the Architect will consume what's left of Voidmark's soul… and then it'll start on yours."
The feed flickered. The imposter's image distorted, his voice breaking up. "—can't maintain this connection much longer. The System is purging backdoor accesses. Celine knows the way to the Core. Trust her or don't. But decide fast. NULL isn't waiting forever."
The screen went black.
For a long moment, no one spoke. The only sounds were the hum of stolen machinery and Dain's labored breathing.
Vex was the first to break the silence. "So let me get this straight." He pointed a claw at Lucas. "You're carrying a dead man's unfinished soul-debt. That thing outside wants to deliver you to a god that eats consciousness. And our plan is to… walk into its mouth?"
"Basically," Celine said.
"And why should we trust you?" Nyra's eyes were narrowed. "How does a child know all this?"
Celine's expression didn't change, but something in her eyes went distant. "I wasn't always a child. The System resets you when it harvests you too many times. Wipes you back to baseline. I've died seven times. Each time, I come back younger, with fewer memories." She tapped her temple. "But I remember enough. I remember Voidmark's rebellion. I remember the taste of the Architect's hunger."
She walked to the wall where the carvings glowed. "CLAVEM TENET VOIDMARK. Voidmark holds the key. SYSTEMA FRANGET. He will break the system. HIC FUIT. He was here." She traced the letters. "He carved these as he descended. Left a trail. A way down to the Core."
Dain slumped against a console, his stone skin grinding. "Even if we believe you… I can't make that climb. Not like this."
Celine looked at Lucas. "Your artifact. It's adapting to you, yes? Learning your biology?"
Lucas nodded slowly. "It gave me Frostbite after the stone. Phantom Step when I needed to escape."
"Then make it adapt to him." She pointed at Dain. "Make it fix what's broken."
"I don't know how—"
"You healed them with bandages and herbs," Celine interrupted. "That's a form of programming. A desire to fix, manifested through the artifact. Focus that desire. Tell the artifact what you want it to do."
Lucas looked at Dain—the big man who had shattered his own hands to save them, who was now slowly turning to stone from the inside out. He thought of the warmth of the artifact in his chest, the way it responded to his need. His panic. His fear.
He walked over to Dain and placed his hands—one flesh, one glitching—on the brawler's stone-cracked arm.
"What are you doing?" Dain asked, wary.
"Trying not to kill you," Lucas said honestly.
He closed his eyes. Instead of summoning a skill, he pushed a feeling into the artifact. The memory of Dain throwing himself between Lucas and the Champion. The sound of his stone fists clapping together to save them. The trust in his eyes when he said Lucas was telling the truth about being from another world.
Fixhim, Lucas thought, pouring the intention into the artifact. Not with code. Not with system overrides. Just… fix what's broken.
The artifact flared.
Golden light—not the violent violet of glitches, but a soft, warm gold—spilled from Lucas's chest and flowed down his arms into Dain. The stone cracks glowed in response, the amber light brightening, shifting… softening.
Dain gasped as the grinding stiffness in his joints eased. The cracks didn't vanish, but they stopped spreading. The amber light settled into them like molten gold in fissures, stable and contained.
[ADAPTIVE RESPONSE RECORDED]
[SKILL EVOLVED: MENDER'S TOUCH]
[EFFECT: TEMPORARY STABILIZATION OF CORRUPTED SYSTEMS]
[DURATION: 48 HOURS]
Lucas staggered back, his vision swimming. Nyra caught him before he could fall.
"You okay?" she asked.
"Tired," he mumbled. "Like I just ran a marathon."
Dain flexed his hands. The stone was still there, but it moved with him now instead of against him. "It's… not fixed. But it's not getting worse." He looked at Lucas, his expression unreadable. "Thank you."
Celine nodded, as if she'd expected nothing less. "Good. Now we can move." She walked to the far wall and pressed her palm against a section of metal that looked no different from any other. It hissed open, revealing a vertical shaft dropping into darkness. A ladder, ancient and rusted, descended into the gloom.
"The descent begins here," she said. "Voidmark's trail is below. So is the Architect."
Vex peered down the shaft. "How far down?"
"All the way," Celine said. "To the bottom of the world."
Nyra helped Lucas to his feet. "You sure you're up for this?"
Lucas looked at the shaft, then at the screen where his own face had stared back at him with alien eyes. He thought of the Architect, hungry and mad. Of Voidmark's soul, 87% harvested. Of the System slowly eating everyone in this world.
"No," he said. "But I'm doing it anyway."
Celine went first, descending with the surety of someone who'd done this before. Vex followed, then Dain, his stabilized stone hands gripping the rungs firmly. Nyra looked at Lucas.
"Together?" she asked.
"Together," he said.
As he climbed down into the darkness, Lucas's glitching hand flared with static. This time, the artifact projected words directly onto his retinas—a message only he could see, scrawled in flickering violet text:
[VOIDMARK'S INTEGRATION: 88%]
[WARNING: ASSIMILATION ACCELERATING]
[TIME REMAINING: ≈12 HOURS]
Above them, the hatch hissed shut, sealing them in the deep dark. The only light now came from the artifact in Lucas's chest, from Dain's amber cracks, and from the carvings on the shaft walls—Voidmark's trail, glowing softly, leading them down.
Into the belly of the god.