The shimmer faded as quickly as it had come.
Whatever had passed across the ceiling didn't return—not visually, not audibly—but I felt it recede all the same. A system tick. Or maybe a breath. Either way, something had exhaled. And now it expected me to move.
I wasn't ready.
But I moved anyway.
Patch kept close. Her leg was still compromised, but her gait had improved—whether from self-repair or pure stubborn instinct, I couldn't say. She moved with that feline defiance I'd come to associate with her in both forms: damaged or not, she would walk.
The far wall didn't open with code or animation. It opened with absence. One moment, it was textured—rusted steel caught mid-glitch. The next, it was hollow. Like the wall had never existed at all. Just pretended to, for our sake.
I stepped through first.
And into silence.
This wasn't like the earlier rooms—unfinished scaffolding, broken render layers. This was complete in its lack of detail. A corridor that wasn't a corridor. No walls. No ceiling. No floor.
Just horizonless grey.
I took another step and felt something beneath my shoes. Texture. A surface—soft and grainy, like sand passed through a filter of code.
"What is this?" I asked aloud.
Patch didn't answer right away.
When she did, her voice was quiet. "It is space between. There are no rules here."
I looked around. No boundaries. No signals. No signposts. Even Nullspace's usual corruption had vanished. No wireframe tears. No biomech tubing. No data scars.
Just… flat grey.
And then, ahead of us, a shape.
It didn't sharpen at first. It hovered in the distance like a mirage—too symmetrical to be random, too still to be natural. My feet moved without instruction, each step pushing through the static underfoot. Patch followed, a few paces behind now. Her presence was steady but unobtrusive, like a sentinel trailing a ghost.
It took nearly two minutes to reach the structure.
From a distance, it had looked like a door.
Up close, it was something else.
A wall panel. Familiar architecture—faux-glass texture on metal struts, a seam splitting it vertically down the centre. A soft pulse of light at its base, like a heartbeat under steel. For one brief, glorious moment, I believed it might be another node. A backdoor. A way back to the debug room.
My fingers itched toward the controller before I even realised what I was doing.
I stepped close.
The overlay didn't respond.
I touched the surface.
Nothing.
Not rejection.
Just… nothing.
It didn't resist my touch. It didn't shimmer. No glitch. No error message.
It simply didn't exist in the way doors were supposed to.
I knocked. No echo.
Pressed both palms to the seam.
Closed my eyes and focused, trying the same mental override I'd used before.
Still nothing.
Patch moved to my side, silent. Watching.
"I think it's pretending to be useful," I said, voice flat. "Like it was rendered just enough to give me hope."
"System wants response," Patch said. "It does not offer solution."
"Then what's the point?"
"To watch what you do next."
I let my forehead rest against the panel. It was cool. Not cold. Just passive.
Neutral.
Indifferent.
That was somehow worse.
"I can't go back," I whispered. "Not like this. I don't even know if the room's still there. If the tether's still active. I don't know if we're even in the same instance anymore."
Patch said nothing.
I slid down the wall. Landed in a crouch. Then finally sank all the way to the ground. My legs folded awkwardly under me, muscles twitching. My ribs ached again. My hand pulsed with slow, rhythmic pain.
"I don't know what the system wants me to do."
Patch sat beside me.
"You're not meant to do anything," she said.
"Then why am I still here?"
"Because you haven't given up yet."
I didn't respond. Just stayed where I was—legs folded, one hand braced against the cool, indifferent panel. My thoughts drifted. Not with clarity. With jagged spirals. Everything hurt. My ribs flared with every breath. The skin on my palm throbbed under the torn fabric of my sleeve. My shoulders ached with the weight of nothing in particular—just existence.
I stared at the empty space in front of me and wondered how many others had sat like this before me. Not players. Not survivors.
Just glitches with nowhere else to go.
The worst part wasn't the pain. Wasn't even the absence of a way forward.
It was the fear that this was the outcome.
This room. This wall. This flickering expanse of void. That all my choices had led here. Not to escape. Not to some final stand. Just a crawlspace, wrapped in a non-event, catalogued in some debug process that would eventually expire. No salvation. No rescue.
Just slow, silent deletion.
Patch remained beside me.
She hadn't laid down—not yet—but her posture had changed. She wasn't the poised predator anymore. Not the biomech guardian. Just… present. Her legs folded neatly beneath her. Her tail curled close. Her eyes dimmed slightly, their glow receding like even she had accepted the system wasn't responding.
And yet, she stayed close.
Her frame occasionally brushed against mine in that quiet, feline way that always said more than words could.
I closed my eyes. Not to sleep. I wouldn't dare.
But to surrender the burden of looking.
There was nothing to see here. Just the flicker of broken assets and the smear of logic that led nowhere. A failed render. A failed return path. And I—still breathing, still conscious, still aware—was somehow meant to make sense of it.
The thought of solving a puzzle felt distant now.
Laughable.
I couldn't even find the start of one.
Then, faintly, the sound returned.
Not a voice. Not a system tone.
Just a single, subtle tick.
Like a heartbeat.
Not mine. Not Patch's. But something embedded in the floor. It pulsed again—quiet, irregular, but unmistakable.
I opened my eyes slowly, breath shallow.
The weight of exhaustion hadn't lifted.
But something had shifted.
Beneath me—where my clenched fists rested against the ground—a small, dark stain had begun to pool.
Fresh blood.
Dripping from the cracked dressing on my palm. I hadn't noticed it reopening. Hadn't noticed how tightly I'd curled my fingers in that moment of despair.
The drop struck the smooth surface with a soft tap.
Then another.
Then—
The geometry changed.
Not dramatically.
Just beneath my hand, something shimmered. Not an interface. Not a prompt.
A pattern.
Barely visible.
Circular.
The blood didn't absorb. Didn't vanish.
It reacted.
It traced the grooves of an invisible symbol etched into the floor, revealing them as it spread. Thin lines bloomed outward like veins, forming the start of a circuit. Or maybe a glyph.
Patch shifted immediately. Her eyes lit brighter, snapping to the floor with sharp, precise focus.
"Blood-activated surface trigger," she said. "It was buried."
I exhaled, body tight with sudden clarity. My fingers brushed the floor beside the stain, tracing the outline now visible beneath the blood. It wasn't decorative. It wasn't part of the architecture.
It was intentional.
An embedded logic thread. Circular. Incomplete.
My voice came out hoarse. "It needed pain. A cost."
Patch nodded. "The system required proof of persistence."
I leaned forward, ignoring the twinge in my ribs. One hand on the edge of the symbol. The other hovering just above it. The overlay didn't appear. There was no menu.
But the pattern glowed faintly under my presence now.
The blood smeared like wet ink across silicon.
"This isn't a puzzle," I murmured. "It's a dare."
Patch pressed closer. Her flank brushed mine. She didn't speak. Didn't move.
Just stayed.
Present.
I let out one long breath, then whispered into the void:
"We're not done."