The Void-Space was a dizzying kaleidoscope of raw data and ancient ruins. Floating fragments of Sanskrit code drifted past us like digital shipwrecks. Archivist Kael loomed over us, his form flickering between a gaunt man and a many-armed shadow deity.
"The Sovereign's lapdogs have arrived," Kael sneered, his voice echoing like a corrupted audio file. "You brought a CEO, a frozen brat, and a... data-entry clerk? Truly, the 'New Era' is as pathetic as I imagined."
He raised the Delete Key—a glowing obsidian obelisk—and the floor beneath us began to dissolve into white nothingness.
Protecting the Core
"Ren, get behind me!" Bai Ling commanded. She slammed her hands onto the vanishing floor, and instead of ice, she manifested Crystalline Logic Gates.
"I'm shielding your neural-pathways from his deletion code!" she grunted, her blue eyes bleeding white from the strain. "Lin Yue, do something with those 'investments' of yours!"
Lin Yue didn't hesitate. She threw her jade-tablet into the air, where it expanded into a massive Holographic Firewall. "I'm buying us time! I'm flooding his buffer with a billion 'Dao-Dash' terms-of-service agreements! He has to 'Accept All' before he can delete us!"
Kael roared in frustration as trillions of pages of fine print spiraled around him. "Insolent mortals! You think your 'contracts' can stop the God of Ruin?"
I grabbed Zhou Min, who was currently cowering in 8-bit form, looking like a very confused pixelated turtle.
"Zhou! Look at him!" I pointed at Kael. "He's the one who deleted your vacation days! He's the one who set your 'Contribution Points' to zero! He's the Ultimate System Administrator who never gave you a raise!"
Zhou's pixelated eyes started to glow with a dangerous, incandescent gold. "He... he restricted my bandwidth?"
"Worse," I whispered, stoking the fires of a century's worth of office-drone rage. "He's the reason the breakroom only has decaf."
That was the final straw. Zhou Min didn't just awaken; he Overclocked.
[DAO MESSAGE: HOST, ZHOU'S BIO-CORE IS HITTING 9000% CAPACITY. HE IS NO LONGER A DATA-CLERK. HE IS THE 'ADMINISTRATOR OF VENGEANCE'.]
"I... AM... THE... CTO!" Zhou roared. He lunged at Kael, not with a sword, but with a torrent of Golden Root-Command Energy.
Zhou Min collided with Kael in a blinding explosion of gold and shadow. Because Zhou's energy came from the previous era, Kael's modern "Ruin Patch" couldn't recognize the file type.
"What is this?" Kael screamed as Zhou's golden hands gripped his face. "This energy... it's incompatible!"
"System... Restore... to... FACTORY... SETTINGS!" Zhou bellowed.
The gold engulfed Kael's shadow-form. The "Delete Key" shattered into a million harmless bits of junk data. Zhou wasn't killing Kael; he was Reformatting him. He was wiping Kael's "Deity of Ruin" personality and replacing it with the only thing Zhou knew: the mundane, crushing logic of a 9-to-5 job.
Kael's eyes widened, then went dull. His many arms vanished. He shrunk down until he was just a man in a wrinkled suit, holding a stapler.
"I... I think I have a meeting at ten," Kael-the-Clerk mumbled, looking confusedly at his stapler before vanishing back into the recycled data of the Void.
The Void-Space collapsed. We were thrown back into the Aethelgard gym, our resolutions returning to 4K high-definition. The 8-bit world was gone.
Zhou Min fell to the floor, snoring instantly. He had used every drop of his "Golden Energy" to fix the world's software. He was back to being a normal, tired data-clerk.
I felt a soft pressure on both sides of me. Lin Yue had her head on my left shoulder, and Bai Ling was gripping my right arm, both of them exhausted but alive.
"We did it," Lin Yue whispered, her violet eyes soft and lingering on mine. "You really are a miracle worker, Ren. Even if your 'miracles' involve weaponized HR policies."
"You fought well," Bai Ling added, her voice a warm breeze for once. She looked at Lin Yue, then back at me, a silent challenge in her eyes. "But the 'Ruin' is only one bug. I think the real 'Alpha Test' is just beginning."
[SYSTEM NOTIFICATION: DAO STABILITY AT 99.8%]
[NEW QUEST: THE SOVEREIGN'S HOLIDAY — YOU HAVE 24 HOURS OF PEACE BEFORE THE NEXT SYSTEM UPDATE.]
"Twenty-four hours?" I sighed, looking at my two beautiful, dangerous companions. "I think I'll just spend it taking a nap. And maybe... finally buying that watch."