The shelter was a joke.
A collapsed parking structure, half-sunk into the Zone's corrupted soil. The ceiling leaned at a twenty-degree angle. Water, or something that looked like water, dripped from a crack in the concrete, pooling in a rusted hubcap. The smell was gasoline, mold, and the sweet rot of something that died here last week.
Luzian dropped onto a slab of broken concrete. His legs gave out before he could sit. More of a collapse, really.
Classy. Real classy.
The two cores pressed against his thigh through the jacket pocket. Warm. Persistent. Like carrying two embers that refused to die.
[MENTAL LOAD: 94%]
[STABILITY: CRITICAL]
[DUPLICATION BUFFER: SATURATED]
He blinked the words away. They came back. Blinked again. Still there.
The glitch was stuck. Like a pop-up on a cracked phone screen. Swipe left, swipe right, didn't matter. The notification sat in the corner of his vision, pulsing slow and ugly.
"Fine." His voice echoed off the wet concrete. Hollow. "I get it. Rest."
He leaned back against a support pillar. The cold bit through his jacket. The same jacket Kai's goons had sliced open during the ambush. Three neat cuts across the ribs. Another on the shoulder. The fabric hung loose, flapping whenever he moved.
They planned it. The ambush. The disposal. Kai didn't just wake up and decide to be an asshole today. He'd been waiting for the right run. The right moment.
That meant Kai had been talking to someone. S-Ranks didn't operate solo. They had networks. Handlers. People who greased the wheels so they could focus on being powerful and stupid.
Which meant someone else knew.
Luzian closed his eyes. The darkness behind his lids was the same as the darkness in front of them. The Zone didn't believe in light pollution.
His brain kept running. That was the problem. The mental load wasn't just the glitch, it was him. Twenty years of being the smartest F-Rank in the district, and his reward was a skull full of broken glass and a nervous system that wouldn't shut the hell up.
So I duplicate cores. So I steal physiques. What's the ceiling? What happens when I try to duplicate something bigger? A building? A person? The System itself?
His eyes snapped open.
A figure stood at the entrance of the parking structure.
Silhouette against the Zone's perpetual twilight. Tall. Too tall. The proportions were off, arms too long, shoulders too narrow, head tilted at an angle that made Luzian's brain scream wrong before he could even process why.
"Thought you might be dead."
The voice was familiar. Gravelly. The kind of voice that sounded like it had been dragged through a mile of bad decisions.
The figure stepped forward. The dim light caught her face.
Luzian's hand went to his belt. No weapon. Of course. Kai's crew had stripped him before the ambush. Took his knife, his backup knife, even the cheap brass knuckles he kept in his sock.
They missed the one in the boot. Always carry three.
"You're supposed to be dead," Luzian said. His voice didn't shake. He was proud of that.
Enara snorted. The sound was wet. She was favoring her left leg, he noticed. A dark stain spread from her thigh to her knee. Blood or corruption juice. Hard to tell in this light.
"I got left too, genius." She limped closer. Dropped onto a chunk of rubble across from him. Her jacket was shredded. One sleeve missing entirely. The arm underneath was a mess of shallow cuts and drying blood. "Kai's a professional. He doesn't leave witnesses. He leaves corpses."
"And you're not a corpse."
"Observant." She pulled a cigarette from somewhere. Lit it with a flick of her thumb, a cheap ignition skill, barely C-Rank. The flame cast shadows up her face. Sharp cheekbones. Dark eyes. The look of someone who'd been running on spite and bad sleep for about three years. "You got something that belongs to him."
Luzian didn't move.
"The core." She took a drag. Exhaled smoke that curled toward the cracked ceiling. "Eighty-four percent. That's not a retirement fund. That's a power base. Kai wasn't going to sell it. He was going to use it to buy his way into the Inner District. Get himself a patron. Real S-Rank status. Not just district-level strongman shit."
"And now?"
"Now you've got it. And Kai's got a hole in his chest and a story about how the Zone ate you." She tapped ash onto the concrete. "He's not going to tell anyone the truth. You know why?"
Luzian waited.
"Because if he admits an F-Rank took his core and broke his ribs, he's done. His crew turns on him. His rivals circle. The whole house of cards comes down." She smiled. It wasn't friendly. "So congratulations. You're officially a ghost. The System says you're F-Rank. Kai says you're dead. That's two layers of invisibility right there."
She's smart. She's always been smart. That's why Kai left her too. She knew too much.
"What do you want, Enara?"
She crushed the cigarette on the rubble. Ground it out slow.
"I want in."
The words hung in the damp air. Luzian's brain, despite the screaming pressure in his skull, started running calculations. Enara was D-Rank. Combat spec. Good with a blade. Better with information. She'd been Kai's fixer, the one who knew who to pay, who to threaten, who to disappear.
She was also dangerous. Not physically. Physically, she was a scraped-together mess bleeding out in a dead zone. But dangerous in the way a scalpel was dangerous. Precise. Intentional.
"You don't even know what 'in' means," Luzian said.
"Doesn't matter." She leaned forward. Her eyes caught the dim light. Hard. Calculating. "I know what Kai's crew looked like when I left them. I know the sound you made when you hit him. I've been running combat analysis for six years. I know what an S-Rank falling sounds like."
She paused.
"I also know what a System glitch sounds like. The screech when you copied the core. That wasn't a skill. That wasn't an artifact. That was something breaking that wasn't supposed to break."
Luzian's jaw tightened.
She heard it. From how far away? She was tracking us. The whole time.
"So you're either the luckiest F-Rank in history," Enara continued, "or you've got something the System doesn't know how to handle. Either way, I'd rather be next to that than in front of it."
She reached into her jacket. Slow. Deliberate. Luzian's hand twitched toward his boot.
She pulled out a knife. His knife. The one Kai's crew had taken.
"Found this on Vic when I caught up to him." She tossed it. The blade spun once, twice, landed point-first in the concrete between Luzian's feet. "He was crying, by the way. Kept saying your eyes were bleeding. Kept saying you changed."
Luzian looked at the knife. Then at her.
"You're bleeding out," he said. "Your leg. If that's corruption juice, you've got maybe six hours before it reaches your core. Then you're D-Rank with no rank."
Enara's smile didn't waver. "That's why I'm negotiating from a position of weakness. Makes you trust me more."
She's not wrong. That's the problem.
The notification was still there. Pulsing. Waiting. But something else flickered in the corner of his vision now. A new option. Small. Almost hidden beneath the mental load warnings.
[SCAN: ENARA VOSS – RANK D]
[CONDITION: CRITICAL – CORRUPTION SPREAD (22% – CORE PROXIMITY)]
[ASSET IDENTIFIED: CORRUPTION TOXIN (FOREIGN ENTITY)]
[DUPLICATION COST: 15% MENTAL LOAD]
[WARNING: CURRENT LOAD EXCEEDS SAFE THRESHOLD]
[PROCEED? Y/N]
He stared at it.
It wants to copy the poison. Not remove it. Copy it. What the hell would I do with,
No. Wait.
If he could copy the poison… could he copy the absence of it? Could he duplicate her uninfected blood cells? Flood her system with clean copies until the corruption was diluted to nothing?
The glitch pulsed. Almost eager.
It's learning. Or I'm learning how to ask it better questions.
Enara was watching him. Waiting. Her hand had drifted to her thigh, pressing against the wound. Trying to slow the spread.
"You've got about five seconds before I pass out," she said. "So if you're going to kill me, do it now. If not…" She shrugged. The motion cost her. Pain flickered across her face. "Help would be nice."
Luzian made a decision.
He pushed off the concrete. Staggered. Caught himself on the pillar. The mental load was a vice, but his legs, Kai's legs, held. He crossed the space between them in three steps.
"Show me the wound."
Enara raised an eyebrow. "That's not an answer."
"It's the only one you're getting."
She held his gaze for a long moment. Then she pulled her hand away from her thigh.
The cut was deep. A gash from the outside of her thigh to the knee. The edges were black. Corruption veins spiderwebbed out from the wound, crawling up toward her hip. Toward her core.
It's feeding on her. Converting her own mana into more corruption.
He crouched. The notification expanded. More options. More data. The glitch was dissecting the poison like a frog in a biology class, breaking it down into components he could almost understand.
[DUPLICATION TARGET: ENARA VOSS – BIOLOGICAL STATE (PRE-INFECTION)]
[COST: 45% MENTAL LOAD]
[WARNING: EXCEEDS CURRENT CAPACITY]
Too much. He'd fry his brain trying to copy her entire body state.
But,
[DUPLICATION TARGET: BLOOD CELLS (UNINFECTED – LOCALIZED)]
[COST: 8% MENTAL LOAD]
[FEASIBLE: YES]
Eight percent. He was at ninety-four. That would push him to one hundred and two. Over capacity.
Unless he dropped something else.
He focused on the S-Rank physique. The thing he'd stolen from Kai. It was still there, humming in his muscles, his bones, his tendons. But it was heavy. Too heavy. An F-Rank skeleton trying to support an S-Rank frame.
(It's going to break me anyway. Might as well use it.)
He pushed. Not at the physique directly, he didn't know how to drop it yet. But he pushed at the glitch. At the mental load. At the screaming pressure in his skull.
[RELEASE: S-RANK PHYSIQUE (PARTIAL – 40%)]
[LOAD REDUCTION: 22%]
[CURRENT LOAD: 72%]
The relief was instant. His legs buckled. His arms went weak. He crashed to one knee, gasping.
But the pressure was down. His brain could think again. The edges of his vision stopped fuzzing.
Enara was staring at him. "The hell was that?"
"Experiment." He reached for her leg. She didn't pull away. "Hold still."
He placed his palm over the wound. The corruption veins pulsed under his fingers. Warm. Wrong. Alive in a way flesh shouldn't be.
[DUPLICATION: BLOOD CELLS (UNINFECTED – LOCALIZED)]
[COST: 8% MENTAL LOAD]
[PROCEED?]
Yes.
The glitch whispered this time. No screech. No pressure wave. Just a soft, digital hum that vibrated up his arm, through his chest, into his teeth.
He felt her blood. Not metaphorically. He felt the individual cells, the clean ones, the ones untouched by the corruption. And then he felt them multiply. Duplicate. The new cells flooded her system, pushing against the black veins, diluting the poison.
Enara sucked in a breath. Her hand shot out, grabbing his wrist. Hard.
"What,"
"Shut up," Luzian grunted. His nose was bleeding again. The mental load ticked up. Seventy-four. Seventy-six. Seventy-eight.
The corruption fought back. He felt it lashing out, trying to infect the new cells, trying to spread. But the glitch was faster. Every cell it corrupted, he duplicated three more. A war fought in capillaries and arteries, invisible and brutal.
[MENTAL LOAD: 88%]
[STABILITY: DECLINING]
He was going to crash. He could feel it. The black was creeping in at the edges again, and this time it wasn't the Zone's twilight. It was his brain pulling the plug.
One more push.
He focused everything on the wound. On the corruption. On overwhelming it.
[DUPLICATION: BLOOD CELLS (UNINFECTED – MASS PRODUCTION)]
[COST: 12% MENTAL LOAD]
[WARNING: CURRENT LOAD 88% – FINAL COST 100%]
One hundred percent. Max capacity. Full saturation.
If this doesn't work, I wake up as a vegetable. If I wake up at all.
He did it anyway.
The glitch screamed.
Not out loud. In his head. A digital shriek that went on and on, drowning out everything else. His vision went white. His nose gushed. His ears popped, and for a second he was blind, deaf, floating in a void of pure data,
And then it stopped.
He was on his hands and knees. Concrete under his palms. Blood dripping from his face onto the grey slab. His whole body was shaking, fine tremors running through every muscle.
[MENTAL LOAD: 100%]
[STABILITY: CRITICAL]
[SYSTEM PROTECTION: ENGAGED]
[FORCED REST: 00:04:59:59]
Five hours. The glitch was locking him out for five hours.
But when he looked up, Enara's leg was clean.
The gash was still there, he hadn't healed it. But the black was gone. The corruption veins had receded. Her skin was pale but clean, the wound already starting to close with normal, healthy blood.
Enara was staring at her thigh. Then at him. Then back at her thigh.
"You," she said slowly, "are the most terrifying thing I have ever seen."
Luzian collapsed onto his side. The concrete was cold. His whole body was numb. The mental load notification had been replaced by a single, pulsing word:
[RECOVERING...]
"I'm not terrifying." His voice came out slurred. Tired. "I'm just a guy with a broken interface."
Enara laughed. It was a shaky sound. Unsteady. The laugh of someone who'd just watched their understanding of reality get rewritten.
"Yeah," she said. "That's what's terrifying."
She reached out. Grabbed his jacket. Pulled him closer to her, away from the cold concrete. Her arm was warm. Solid. The arm of someone who knew how to fight and wasn't afraid to use it.
"Sleep, glitch-boy." Her voice was quieter now. Almost gentle. "I'll watch."
Luzian's eyes were already closing. The black was coming back, but this time it wasn't the void. It was just sleep. Heavy and warm and inevitable.
Before he went under, one last notification flickered across his vision. Small. Almost apologetic.
[SYSTEM STATUS: OFFLINE – FORCED REST]
[GLITCH STATUS: ACTIVE – BACKGROUND PROCESSES RUNNING]
[NEW DATA ACQUIRED: CORRUPTION TOXIN – ANALYSIS 37%]
It's still working. Even when the System shuts me down, the glitch keeps running.
He smiled. Or thought he did. His face wasn't listening to him anymore.
Let them patch me. Let them try.
The darkness took him.