The two Lealists entered the optician's shop with the cautious, sweeping movements of men clearing a room of live wires.
Their boots avoided the edges of the null-craters with a precision that spoke of training.
The one on the left, his face a grim blur behind the visor, spoke. His voice was filtered, calm, relentlessly logical.
"Anomaly-Zero. Your capacity to generate disruptive data-interference has been documented. Continuing resistance is statistically futile. Surrender is your only logical pathway to resolution."
The words were clean, sterile.
They moved with purpose. The Lealista on the right flanked wide, his energy-lance held low, its tip crackling with a static that made the fine hairs on Leo's arms stand up.
The one who spoke moved center, his glowing amber shield a wall of solid light between him and any desperate lunge.
They had him triangulated.
The window behind them was a maw of darkness after the jammer's pulse, but now filled with the shifting shadows of more units taking position outside.
The lab door at his back was his only route, and it led only deeper into a toxic closet.
Leo pressed his spine against the cold laminate of the counter. His mind, the useless engine, spun frictionless wheels.
No glitches. The scars of the failed erasure were inert, just deadly geography.
No strength. No tricks.
Just the final, tightening corral of consequence.
His gaze dropped, skittering away from the advancing shields. It landed on the sad, scattered remains of the Fixer.
Among the rags and metal, a twisted piece of polished casing from some long-lost machine lay like a forgotten mirror.
In its distorted, concave surface, he saw the reflection of the room.
He saw the two Lealists, their forms warped into looming giants of light and armor.
And behind them, framed in the jagged window, a third figure resolved from the gloom.
It didn't step through. It seemed to coalesce, as if the darkness itself had decided to take a shape.
A man, tall and painfully thin, draped in a long coat of a material so matte it seemed to swallow the scant light.
His face was obscured by an antique gas mask, its round eye-lenses a deep, blood-red glass.
In his hands, he cradled not a weapon, but a chaotic nest of technology—a crude box of welded metal plates, sprouting a wild bouquet of exposed wiring, cracked resistors, and a single, crooked antenna that twitched like an insect's feeler.
The Lealists hadn't seen him. Their focus, their sensors, were all on Leo.
The thin man lifted the device. His thumb, clad in a frayed leather glove, found a large, mismatched toggle switch on its side.
He flipped it.
The sound that erupted was not a blast. It was a nail driven directly into the brain.
A single, sustained shriek of digital feedback, so high-pitched it bordered on ultrasonic, yet layered with a grinding, sub-bass harmonic that vibrated the fillings in Leo's teeth.
It wasn't loud in the traditional sense; it was invasive. It bypassed the ears and screamed directly into the mind.
The effect on the Lealists was instantaneous and catastrophic.
Their disciplined advance shattered. Both men staggered as if struck by a physical blow.
Their sleek, glowing HUDs, visible as translucent overlays to Leo's cursed sight, erupted into a storm of violent visual noise—scrambled glyphs, inverted colors, frantic error messages.
One clapped his hands to the sides of his helmet, a raw, human scream tearing from his throat.
The other dropped his energy-lance, which clattered and died on the floor, as he stumbled sideways into a worktable, knocking over trays of rusted lenses.
"Neural pulse attack!" one of them managed to gargle out, his voice raw with pain and disbelief. "Apóstata! Apostates in the sector!"
The thin man in the gas mask stepped through the window.
He moved with an unnatural, gliding calm, his long coat whispering against the broken glass.
He walked between the two incapacitated Lealists as if they were inconvenient furniture. He didn't look at them.
His red-lensed gaze was fixed on Leo.
He stopped a meter away. The feedback scream died abruptly, leaving a ringing, vacuum silence in its wake.
From outside, shouts of confusion and alarm began, but they sounded distant, muffled.
The Apostate looked down at Leo. Up close, Leo could see the cracks in the old rubber of the mask, the stains on the red glass.
He could smell ozone, old dust, and a sharp, coppery scent like hot circuitry.
The voice that emerged from the mask's filter was metallic, synthesized, yet carried an odd, conversational cadence.
"The System screams your name, Anomalia-Zero," it said. The words were flat, but the tilt of the masked head gave them a sardonic weight.
"It offers a bounty for your flesh and your data. A transactional conclusion."
He paused, the red lenses boring into Leo's. One gloved hand gestured vaguely at the groaning Lealists, at the ruins of the shop, at the invisible weight of the hunt outside.
"We offer a question."
He leaned forward, just slightly. The antenna on his crude device twitched.
"Do you wish to live only to be hunted?" The synthesized voice dropped to a whisper, a secret shared in the aftermath of the scream.
"Or do you wish to learn how to erase the hunter?"
The choice hung in the toxic air. Not a promise of safety. Not an offer of power.
An offer of a different kind of knowledge. A violent, heretical arithmetic.
Before Leo could even form a thought, a new alert pulsed in his vision, soft and deadly.
[Passive Location Ping in: 00:00:30.]
In thirty seconds, his red dot would bloom across every screen in the area.
The Lealists outside would shake off their disorientation. The Apostate's window of eerie calm was closing.
The masked man saw the change in Leo's eyes, the flicker of the impending ping in his interface. He didn't hurry.
He simply straightened up and took a single step back, towards the deeper darkness at the rear of the shop.
"The hunt is a clock," the metallic voice stated. "We are the sand that jams its gears. Choose now, Zero. Run with the seconds, or step out of time."
He turned and walked, not towards the street, but towards the shadowy 'LAB' door, as if expecting Leo to follow.
Leo looked at the moaning Lealists, struggling to reboot their scrambled systems.
He looked at the street, now alight with renewed, angry white beams as the perimeter regrouped.
He felt the ghostly translucence of his own hands, his reality synchronization still a ticking bomb.
He had no stats. No strength. Only a cursed sight and a head full of stolen memories.
The Apostate offered a question that was also a path. A path that led away from the logic of the hunt, into the chaos that broke it.
The countdown in his vision reached twenty seconds.
With a final glance at the broken Fixer, Leo pushed off from the counter and followed the specter in the gas mask into the chemical dark.