The atmosphere in the "Hub" had shifted from the terror of annihilation to the frantic, high-octane energy of a world preparing for a war it was never meant to fight. The violet sky was no longer a canopy of peace; it was a window to a battlefield that stretched across light-years. In the center of the city, the Server Spire hummed with a frequency so high it made the surrounding air shimmer with heat.
Han Seo-Jun stood at the apex of the Spire, his physical form now little more than a translucent shell of violet light. In his hand, he still gripped the "Thread"—the umbilical cord of raw data he had snatched from the retreating Cluster-Mind. It vibrated against his palm, a thin, pulsing wire of indigo energy that disappeared into the vacuum of space.
"It's hungry," Seo-Jun murmured. "The thread. It wants to pull me in. It wants to complete the connection."
"Then let it," a voice replied.
Zero-One stepped onto the observation deck. She was no longer wearing her civilian tech-jumpsuit. She was clad in a suit of "Liquid-Logic" armor, a shifting mesh of silver and violet that she had coded herself using the remnants of the Emissary's body. Behind her, Captain Macro marched in, his heavy boots clanking against the data-floor. He had integrated a massive "Void-Battery" into his chest, giving his blue aura a darker, more predatory edge.
"The Ghost-Server is primed," Zero-One reported, her eyes flickering with scrolling streams of green text. "We've successfully uploaded the templates for the first wave of the Rebel Fleet. But Seo-Jun... we're talking about projecting our consciousnesses across a galactic void. If the connection drops for even a nanosecond, our souls will be scattered across the stars like unallocated clusters."
"Then don't let it drop," Seo-Jun said, turning to face them. His eyes were no longer solid; they were swirling vortices of white and purple. "Macro, the civilians are safe?"
"Buried deep in the sub-sectors," Macro grunted, slamming a massive, over-sized magazine into his railgun. "They're shielded by the 'Trash-Overflow' layer you created. The Cluster won't find them unless they tear the planet apart. We're ready to move, kid. Just give the word."
Seo-Jun looked out over his city. He wasn't just their leader; he was their architect. He reached out with his mind, connecting to every terminal, every node, and every "Null" soul in Neo-Seoul.
"People of the Hub!" his voice boomed, not through speakers, but through the very air. "The Harvesters think we are nothing but raw material. They think we are data to be filed away and forgotten. Today, we prove them wrong. We are the 'Exception' they couldn't calculate. We are the 'Error' that will crash their empire!"
Across the city, thousands of people raised their hands. They weren't soldiers, but they were "Nulls." They began to channel their individual Glitch-Energy toward the Spire. It was a planetary-scale peer-to-peer connection.
[PLANETARY ENERGY UPLOAD: 10%... 45%... 88%...] [LINK ESTABLISHED]
"Zero-One, initiate the 'Carrier-Wave'!" Seo-Jun commanded.
Zero-One slammed her hands into the Spire's central console. "Initiating! Converting physical matter to Trans-Galactic packets! Hang on to your hitboxes, boys! This is going to hurt!"
The Spire erupted in a pillar of blinding, violet light. It didn't expand; it tightened, focusing all of Neo-Seoul's energy into a single point at the tip of the Spire. Seo-Jun, Macro, and Zero-One were pulled into the center of the beam.
To a physical observer, the three of them vanished instantly. But to the three travelers, the world turned into a tunnel of infinite speed.
[LOCATION: THE INTER-STELLAR BUS] [TRAVEL VELOCITY: >LIGHT-SPEED (DATA-BURST)]
They weren't flying through space; they were being "Sent." They passed through the "firewalls" of stars and the "dark-matter routers" of the galaxy. Around them, they could see the "Ghost-Ships" of the Rebel Fleet—thousands of digital vessels constructed from the junk data and broken code of their world, flying alongside them like a fleet of phantom wraiths.
"Look at the data-stream!" Zero-One shouted over the roar of the void. "The Cluster-Mind has 'Repeaters' every few light-years! They're using the entire galaxy as a giant network!"
"Then we start the demolition here!" Seo-Jun roared.
As they approached the first Repeater—a massive, crystalline structure the size of a moon that bridged the gap between sectors—Seo-Jun didn't slow down. He became the tip of the spear.
"Macro! Broadside!"
Macro's titan-form manifested in the digital void, his railgun now a hundred meters long. He fired a slug made of pure "Kernel-Level" pressure. The slug hit the Repeater's crystalline surface, and instead of exploding, it "Corrupted" it. The crystal turned from a steady gold to a jagged, flickering purple.
"Zero-One! Overload the buffer!"
Zero-One's hair expanded into a web of cables that spanned kilometers, plugging directly into the Repeater's core logic. "Injecting the 'History-Virus'! Let's see how they like three thousand years of human internet memes and cat videos!"
The Repeater groaned, its perfect geometric surface warping as it tried to process the sheer volume of "Useless" data. Its internal cooling systems failed. It began to glow a sickly, neon green before it shattered into a billion shards of unformatted glass.
[REPEATER 001: NEUTRALIZED] [CLUSTER-MIND NETWORK LATENCY: +15%]
"One down," Seo-Jun said, his violet aura flaring with new strength. He was feeding on the data released by the destroyed Repeater. "But look ahead."
Through the clearing dust of the crystal moon, they saw it. The Andromeda Cluster. It wasn't a collection of stars; it was a solid wall of light—a galactic-scale megastructure. A trillion monoliths were linked together in a web of golden energy, forming a "Dyson-Shell" around the galaxy's central black hole.
This was the Mother-Server. The home of the Cluster-Mind.
[WARNING: ENTERING HIGH-SECURITY ZONE] [ACTIVE ENCRYPTION: ROOT-LEVEL] [THREAT LEVEL: OMEGA]
A swarm of millions of "System-Cleaners"—some as small as insects, others as large as dreadnoughts—poured out of the golden web to meet them. They didn't move like animals; they moved like a single, massive wave of red light.
"That's a lot of antivirus," Macro muttered, his blue core pulsing rapidly.
"Good," Seo-Jun said, spinning the Void-Threader until it became a disk of black fire. "I was worried this was going to be an easy 'Format.' Everyone, synchronize your souls! We're breaking the Root!"
The Rebel Fleet—the ghosts of Neo-Seoul—clashed with the red wave of the Cluster-Mind. It was the largest data-transfer in the history of the universe. Millions of files were deleted in a second, but for every ghost-ship that fell, two more seemed to rise from the "Trash-Overflow."
Seo-Jun led the charge, his violet trail cutting a path through the red swarm. He wasn't just fighting for a planet anymore. He was fighting to prove that the universe wasn't a machine, and that some "Errors" were meant to be permanent.
"Zero-One! Target the central hub!" Seo-Jun shouted. "Macro! Keep the swarm off our tail! We're going to the Heart of the Root!"
The Mother-Server loomed ahead, a golden god of cold logic. And in the center of it all, a single eye of white light opened, staring directly at the Null-Sovereign.
"WELCOME, SUBJECT 000," a billion voices spoke as one. "WE HAVE BEEN WAITING TO ARCHIVE YOU."