The wave that hit the shop wasn't a wave.
It was an un-wave. A tide of cessation.
It made no sound. It emitted no light. It was a moving front of pure ontological negation.
Leo saw it first as a distortion in the air, a lensing effect that made the world behind it wiggle like a heat mirage, before that world began to lose its meaning.
The display case nearest the window didn't explode. It un-became.
First, the sharp edges of the glass lost their threat, rounding into blurry, uncertain shapes. Then the color drained, not to grey, but to a non-color, a visual static.
Then, in a silent, lazy unraveling, the entire structure—glass, wood frame, dust mites suspended in the air within it—simply dissolved into a faint, dissipating mist of pixel-dust.
It left behind not a hole, but an afterimage of absence.
The un-wave advanced slowly, with the terrible, inevitable grace of a glacier made of silence.
It consumed a section of wall, erasing the faded eye-chart poster, leaving smooth, blank drywall that looked newborn and ancient.
It was coming for the center of the room. For the Fixer. For him.
Leo's [Glitch Reading] screamed a constant, agonizing alert at the edge of his perception.
It wasn't reading a glitch. It was reading the anti-matter of glitches, the System's absolute, authoritative DELETE command.
There was no error to exploit. No flaw. Just finality.
Then the Fixer shrieked.
It wasn't a sound of pain. It was a broadcast. A piercing, electronic ululation of pure, defiant data-joy, layered with the static-shriek of the dying radio in Leo's hands.
Two frequencies: one of mechanical ecstasy, one of corrupted human memory.
The un-wave met the sound.
And it hiccuped.
The perfect, advancing edge of erasure rippled. It was like watching clean water hit oil.
The two signals—the null-pulse and the chaotic broadcast—didn't cancel each other out. They interfered. They created a chaotic dissonance in the fabric of the command.
The un-wave didn't stop. It fractured.
Instead of a clean wall of deletion, it broke apart into a dozen smaller, wild vortices of nullification.
They spun off like malignant, silent tornadoes, each consuming whatever they touched at random.
One ate a three-foot circle of the ceiling, exposing rusty pipes that then vanished halfway through.
Another scooped a perfect hemispherical crater from the floorboards near Leo's feet, leaving behind a smooth, impossible basin of nothing-substrate.
A third swirled through the space where the chemical mist hung, erasing it and leaving the air strangely clean and scentless.
The shop wasn't being cleaned. It was being vandalized by emptiness.
The Fixer trembled violently, its bindings unraveling. Cans of solvent clattered free from its body, rolling into the silent vortices and disappearing without a sound.
Its camera lens flashed a frantic, repeating pattern of crimson error codes.
But it held its ground, amplifying its dying shriek, pouring the last of its anomalous, chemical-soaked energy into disrupting the System's pristine signal.
Outside, Sergeant Voss's voice, stripped of its calm by a sharp edge of disbelief, cut through the unnatural quiet.
"Coherence failure! The unregistered entity is emitting a chaotic data-signature! It's destabilizing the pulse! Neutralize the secondary source! Now!"
But it was too late.
The main erasure wave, now riddled with holes and unstable, reached the end of its programmed duration and collapsed in on itself.
Not with a bang, but a… cessation of cessation.
The wild vortices winked out one by one, leaving behind a shop that looked like a dollhouse attacked by a god with a hole-punch.
The Fixer's shriek died, throttling down to a weak, oscillating whine.
Its body, no longer held together by will or directive, slumped. It didn't fall so much as disassemble.
A pile of sodden rags, cracked plastic, and dead metal hit the floor with a series of dull, pathetic thuds. The whine faded to a click, then silence.
The radio in Leo's hand gave a final, sparking sputter. A wisp of acrid smoke curled from its speaker grille.
The plastic casing grew painfully hot, then cold. He dropped it. It shattered into so many pieces of useless, carbon-scorched junk.
For three heartbeats, there was quiet.
The violent, artificial silence of the erased zones mixed with the stunned silence of the Lealists.
Then, the professional machine re-engaged.
"Pulse failed. Anomaly and contaminant entity remain. Switching to physical acquisition protocol."
Voss's voice was tight, humiliated, and therefore infinitely more dangerous.
"Delta-Two, Delta-Three. Forward. Tas-lances and barrier shields. Take the anomaly. Do not touch the residual null-zones."
From the light outside, two new Lealists stepped through the window frame.
They were heavier, clad in bulkier tactical armor. In their hands were not the sleek disconnectors, but stout, meter-long batons that crackled with coiled blue energy.
On their arms, they bore large, rectangular shields made of a translucent, honeycombed material that glowed with a soft amber light.
They moved in a practiced crouch, shields interlocked, covering each other's advance.
They ignored the crumpled heap that was the Fixer. Their focus was entirely on Leo, now backed against the counter, the shimmering, hole-punched reality of the shop between him and them.
One of them gestured with his tas-lance towards a path that skirted the largest floor crater.
They were going to flank him, cordon him off, and close in. No more elegant deletions. This would be a brutal, physical bag-and-tag.
Leo's mind raced, but the map was empty. No glitches here he could use, just the deadly, static scars left by the failed erasure.
His body was a cage of 1s. His time was almost up.
As the first Lealista stepped carefully around the edge of a null-crater, Leo saw movement.
Not in the shop. Outside, in the deep purple gloom of the alley across the street.
A figure stood, watching. It wasn't hiding, but the Lealists' attention was inward, on the breach.
The figure was lean, draped in a dark, non-reflective cloak that seemed to drink the ambient light. No glowing blue Lealist emblem. No obvious armor.
But they had an interface. A faint, shimmering outline of one, visible only because Leo's perception was now tuned to such things.
Their HUD was different. The data was jagged, the fonts irregular.
And in the center of their virtual display, clear even from this distance, was an emblem.
It wasn't a gear. It was a broken gear, one tooth shattered off. And it was dripping, not with oil, but with what looked like digitized blood, a slow, crimson pixel-drip that fell perpetually in their field of vision.
The figure's head was tilted, observing the Lealists' advance, observing Leo's trapped form.
One hand rose, not in a gesture, but in a slow, deliberate tap against their own temple, right where an interface would be.
A message? A signal?
Then the figure's other hand moved.
They threw something small and dark into the street between themselves and the Lealists' perimeter. It hit the asphalt with a clack.
It wasn't a grenade. It was a small, black box with a single, pulsing red light.
The Lealista closest to the window, Delta-Two, noticed it. He half-turned, his shield pivoting.
"Sergeant, we have an unknown object at the perimeter, east side, it's—"
The box's light pulsed once, violently fast.
And every single light in the block went out.
The Lealists' white spots, their blue perimeter beacons, the amber glow of the barrier shields, even the eerie, perpetual twilight glow from the sky—all swallowed by perfect, utter blackness.
In the sudden, absolute dark, Leo heard Sergeant Voss's roar of fury.
"LIGHTS! INFRARED! NOW!"
But in that one second of blinding, disorienting dark, a hand closed around Leo's wrist from behind the counter.
A strong, thin hand. It pulled.
He stumbled backward, through the 'LAB' door, into the chemical reek and deeper darkness of the back room.
The hand didn't let go, leading him, moving with a silent, certain speed he could never match.
Behind them, in the shop, the Lealists' emergency infrared beams snapped on, painting the world in ghostly green and white.
They would see the empty space where Leo had been. They would see the open lab door.
But for now, Leo was moving, dragged by a stranger with a broken, bleeding gear in their eyes, away from the light and into the consuming, unknown dark.