The revelation of the network flaw landed with the force of a physical blow. The Junction wasn't a fortress; it was a fishbowl. And the System had been staring in, its cold, analytical gaze studying them, learning them, since the moment they had powered up their first light.
Valerie didn't panic. Panic was a luxury she couldn't afford. She became cold. Quiet. Dangerous.
"Anya," she said, her voice a low, clipped command over her radio. "Report to the med-bay. Now."
The next few hours blurred into a tense flurry of activity. The med-bay alcove transformed into a makeshift war room. Anya, her face pale with a mixture of terror and a kind of horrified, professional excitement, confirmed Leo's diagnosis.
"He's right," she breathed, her fingers flying across the keyboard of her own terminal. "The handshake protocol… it's a standard diagnostic tool. A backdoor for remote access. We've been broadcasting our location, our power consumption, our network activity… everything."
"Can you shut it down?" Valerie demanded, her voice a low growl.
"I… I can try," Anya stammered. "But it's a core function of the operating system. It's not a bug. It's a feature. To shut it down, I'd have to… I'd have to rewrite the kernel."
"Then do it," Valerie commanded. "You and him." She gestured with her head toward Leo. "Whatever he needs. Make it happen."
And so began the longest, most terrifying night of Leo's life. He remained a patient, his body a weak, aching thing, but his mind became their only weapon. Propped up on his cot, with Ben and Anya on either side of him, he served as the lead consultant on the most important IT project in human history.
They couldn't risk another direct interface; the bio-pads were melted slag. But Ben, his mind a whirlwind of desperate ingenuity, devised a workaround. He cannibalized a server's sound card and an old EEG machine from Elias's medical supplies. "It's not a direct connection," he explained, his voice a low, urgent murmur as he attached the strange, wired headset to Leo's skull. "It's a passive interface. It won't let you write to their system. But it should… theoretically… translate the data you're seeing in your head into something the computer can understand. You're the scanner. Anya is the surgeon."
It was a clumsy, horrifying, beautiful hack.
The pain was a constant, grinding thing. Every time he focused, every time he tried to parse the corrupted data of his own vision, his head throbbed in protest. But Sarah was there, a quiet, steady presence at the foot of his cot. She didn't speak. She just focused, her [Encourage] skill a constant, golden warmth that acted as a firewall for his fracturing mind, a surge protector against the System's chaotic code.
They worked through the long, dark hours. Leo would describe the alien architecture of the System's malware. Anya, her face a mask of intense concentration, would translate his descriptions into code, writing patches, building firewalls. Ben monitored the Core, rerouting power and managing the unstable energy flows.
It was a strange, intimate, terrifying kind of collaboration. They were a three-person IT department at the end of the world, fighting a war of pure information.
Late into the night, as the rest of the Junction slept a restless, uneasy sleep, Chloe came to check on them. She brought water and a few of their precious, scavenged protein bars.
"How's it going?" she whispered, her eyes dark with a weary concern.
"We're building a wall," Leo rasped, not taking his eyes from the screen, where Anya compiled a new section of code. "And hoping it's high enough."
Chloe looked at him, at the strange, wired contraption on his head, at the pain etched on his face. She looked at Sarah, who was pale and trembling with the effort of maintaining her skill. She looked at Ben and Anya, lost in their world of code and power regulation. "You can't keep this up, Leo," she said, her voice a low, aching thing. "It's killing you."
He knew she was right. He felt it. The deep, systemic damage from his DELETE command wasn't healing. It was… spreading. A slow, creeping corruption that Sarah's skill could only hold at bay, not cure.
He finally looked at her. "Arthur's probabilities," he said, his voice a dry whisper. "What do they say now?"
Chloe hesitated. Her new skill, her [Read Intent], made her a terrible liar. He could see the truth in the subtle, almost imperceptible tightening of her jaw.
"They're better," she said, her voice too bright, too forced. "With the network shielded… our chances of surviving the siege have gone up. Almost… almost double digits."
Double digits. Ten percent. All this pain, all this effort… for a one-in-ten chance of not dying. The absurdity of it was a cold, heavy weight in his gut.
"And you, Leo?" she asked, her voice dropping, her professional mask cracking. "What about your odds?"
He didn't need Arthur to run the numbers. He had the System's own diagnosis, burned into his memory. A 72-hour countdown. He had been unconscious for hours after the beam collapse. He had spent more than a day on the gurney. He did a quick, rough calculation.
Forty-one hours left.
He didn't say it. He didn't have to. She saw it on his face. She saw the truth he tried to hide. Her own face crumpled, a mask of grief and a terrible, helpless anger.
"There has to be another way," she whispered, her voice a raw, broken thing.
Before he could answer, a new sound cut through the quiet hum of the Junction. An alarm. A loud, klaxon horn blared from the main gate. Urgent, shouted commands echoed from the barricade.
Ben's head snapped up from his console. "What is it? What's happening?"
Anya was already typing, her fingers a blur. She pulled up the main gate's camera feed. The tunnel outside was a scene of chaos. The Ogres, the Hounds… they retreated, scrambling back into the darkness. Fleeing.
"They're running," Chloe breathed, her voice a mixture of confusion and disbelief. "Why are they running?"
And then, from the deepest, darkest part of the tunnel, a new shape emerged.
It wasn't a monster of flesh and bone. It was a perfect, geometric cube of pure, shimmering, black energy, ten feet on each side. It floated a few inches off the ground, its movement utterly silent, impossibly smooth. It radiated an aura of cold, perfect, analytical purpose.
It wasn't a creature. It was a tool. A piece of hardware.
Leo knew, with a certainty that was colder and more terrifying than any monster, what he was looking at. He had spent his life fighting them, deploying them, running them.
It was a debugger. A diagnostic tool. A system utility, sent to find and eliminate a piece of corrupted, rogue code.
It had a name, a function, that he understood in his bones.
Scandisk. Defrag. The System's antivirus.
And it was here for him.