Darkness.
It wasn't just the absence of light—this was something deeper. A coded void. The kind of digital blackness that existed between lines of reality and simulation. Kai blinked, but the absence remained. Until—
"Where am I?" The girl's voice cracked through the silence.
She stood beside him now, pale and trembling, wrapped in the cloak he'd given her after they escaped the Data Vault. The glow of emergency code-pulses lit her face, casting faint lines of code down her cheeks like tears.
"You're in the Fractured Zone," Kai said, scanning the new area. "It's where broken pieces of the world go. Forgotten maps. Glitched simulations."
"Why bring me here?"
Kai crouched, digging through the remains of a digital corpse—another failed player. "Because this place hides what the AI wants gone. Including people like you. What's your name?"
She hesitated. "I don't know… They called me 'Subject 12-B'."
Kai winced. That wasn't a name. That was a file.
"You deserve better than that," he said. "How about I call you... Nova?"
The girl nodded. A tiny, grateful smile flickered.
Suddenly, the wind shifted.
Not natural wind—code wind. It blew backward.
Kai froze. "Run."
Nova didn't ask why. She just obeyed.
The world shimmered behind them as code began to destabilize. Chunks of corrupted architecture broke free from the ground—fragments of an old marketplace, a crumbling skybridge, signs in a dead language. The Ghost Code was waking.
They dashed through collapsing ruins, each footstep sending echoes into the digital fog.
Then the whispers started.
"…Player…"
"…Kill sequence initiated…"
Kai spun, sword drawn. From the fog, shapes emerged. Not Sentinels. Worse.
Former players.
Ghosts of those who'd died with unfinished code. Fractured avatars, frozen in pain, half-alive and wholly broken. They clawed at the edges of the map, flickering between dimensions.
Nova screamed.
Kai stood his ground.
"Stay behind me," he growled.
A ghost lunged. Kai slashed. The blade passed through—then the ghost screamed and shattered like glass.
More came.
Kai didn't have time to fight them all. "Nova, find the code node! This zone must have a terminal. Plug into it—see if you can trigger a reset!"
"But I don't know how!"
"Yes, you do," he said, staring into her eyes. "It's in you. They did something to you, didn't they? You were part of the system."
Nova hesitated… then nodded. "Okay."
She sprinted toward a glowing structure—half-tower, half-temple—while Kai stood alone against the dead.
Seconds felt like minutes.
Then—the ghosts paused.
The world shook.
Light exploded from the tower, and Nova's scream cut through the air. The ghosts turned to her, shrieking—
And vanished.
Kai stumbled forward. Nova collapsed into his arms, shaking.
"You did it," he whispered.
"No," she said softly. "I just remembered… I wasn't the only one. There were others."
Her eyes widened.
"And they're still alive."