Battleship corridors were not made for sword duels. They were designed for claustrophobia, burst pipes, and haste.

  Admiral Sterling advanced. He didn't run; he glided. The frozen metal floor seemed to offer no friction to his crystal boots. The dark energy sword in his hand hummed with a sound that sucked the surrounding air.

  Where the blade passed, the corridor walls lost paint, steel, and structural integrity. It was like fighting an eraser that deleted reality.

  "Your biology is redundant, Arthur," Sterling's voice didn't come from his mouth, but echoed directly in my cybernetic left eye. The Piper was using the Babel Code connection to hack my head. "You bleed. You tire. Entropy has already defeated you."

  I dodged the first strike.

  The black blade passed inches from my face. I felt the cold of absolute vacuum graze my cheek. The Parasite reacted instinctively, creating a bone plate over my ear, but the bone simply vanished at the touch of antimatter.

  "Entropy is what makes the universe interesting, Admiral!" I snarled, spinning on my heels and delivering a blow with the Mithril scalpel.

  The surgical blade cut the air and struck Sterling's crystal shoulder.

  CLANG. Blue sparks flew. The Mithril didn't break, but it didn't penetrate the black ice. The molecular density of his armor was absurd.

  Sterling retaliated with a front kick.

  I was thrown backward, slamming my back against heavy piping. I gasped, spitting up black fluid. The impact didn't just hurt physically; it caused a glitch in my vision.

  [WARNING: PHYSICAL CONCUSSION DETECTED. VIRUS DEFRAGMENTATION INTERRUPTED.]

  [NETWORK ATTACK IMMINENT.]

  Suddenly, my mind was flooded.

  It wasn't pain. It was files.

  Sterling was trying to hack me through proximity. He opened his own broadband and tried to drown my consciousness with the weight of The Piper's hive mind.

  I saw thousands of frozen faces. I felt the cold of Paris covered in radioactive snow. I saw the Thames turn into an ice rink full of corpses. And I saw Sterling himself.

  I saw the memory he had deleted.

  I saw a uniformed man crying in a dark bunker, hugging two small daughters dying of hypothermia. I saw the exact moment he accepted the Black Crystal, trading his humanity to not feel the pain of loss.

  The hive mind demanded I forget who I was and join the silence.

  "Surrender," Sterling walked toward me, raising the black sword for the coup de grace. "There is no pain in the Hive."

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  The Parasite recoiled, frightened by the digital invasion.

  But I wasn't just the Parasite. I was the Trojan Horse.

  And I understood how to win. I couldn't kill him physically. The antimatter would erase me first. I had to kill him logically.

  "You're right, Admiral," I choked, forcing myself up, leaning on the frozen pipe. "There is no pain in your hive. But there is a backup."

  "And I'm going to restore your system."

  Sterling brought the sword down.

  I didn't retreat.

  I lunged directly into the strike.

  I turned my left shoulder. The antimatter blade severed the chitin exoskeleton on my arm and took a chunk of my flesh with it. The pain was indescribable—an absolute void where muscle and nerve used to be.

  But the sacrifice gave me the one-second window I needed.

  I was inside his guard.

  Inches from Sterling's half-crystal, half-human face.

  I raised my right hand, where the Parasite formed inoculation needles.

  But I didn't use poison. I didn't use acid.

  I channeled the Babel Code corroding my own liver. I took a fraction of the individuality virus, the pure "Ego" code, and injected it directly into the exposed crystal ganglion on the Admiral's neck.

  "Ctrl+Z, you bastard."

  The digital inoculation hit Sterling's local network.

  The reaction was instantaneous.

  The Admiral froze. The antimatter sword fell from his hand, deactivating as it hit the metal floor with a harmless metallic clatter.

  The blue light flowing through the crystal on his face began to flash violently, changing to a system error red.

  "What... what did you do?" His voice lost the double echo. The hive mind had been expelled from his body. He was isolated.

  He was, for the first time in years, alone inside his own head.

  And with loneliness, came the backup.

  The memory of his daughters in the bunker. The warmth of their bodies cooling. The guilt of surviving at the cost of becoming a monster. The weight of all the lives he had taken under The Piper's command crashed down on his organic consciousness all at once.

  Sterling brought both hands to his head.

  "No... no, no, no! The cold! Make the cold stop! Emily! Sarah!"

  He fell to his knees. The crystal on his body began to crack, unable to maintain cohesion when the host entered total psychological collapse.

  Hot, real tears streamed from his single human eye, freezing as they touched the ship's floor.

  He didn't die from physical wounds. The neurological shock of remorse was so massive his brain simply stopped, unable to process his returned humanity.

  Sterling slumped sideways, catatonic. A man destroyed by his own memory.

  I gasped, leaning against the wall so I wouldn't fall.

  My left arm bled profusely, a mix of organic red and digital black.

  [TACTICAL ALERT: LOCAL NETWORK NODE DISCONNECTED.]

  [MEDICAL WARNING: HOST HAS LOST 15% OF BODY MASS. HYPOVOLEMIC SHOCK IMMINENT.]

  "Patch it up," I ordered the Parasite, voice weak. "Use whatever calcium is left. Lock down the bleeding."

  The symbiote obeyed reluctantly, weaving a web of dead flesh and chitin over the smooth wound left by the antimatter. It burned like hell.

  I looked down the end of the corridor.

  The door Sterling guarded wasn't lead. It was armored glass.

  And beyond it, the temperature was even lower. Artificial snowflakes fell in a vast, round server chamber.

  In the center of the chamber, suspended on a glowing fiber optic pedestal, was the hibernation tank.

  And inside, the blue LED eyes of the skinless boy watched me.

  The Piper.

  The digital god's voice didn't come through speakers this time. It came as static pressure directly in my head.

  "YOU CORRUPTED ONE OF MY FILES, ARTHUR VERAS. BUT YOU ARE BROKEN. THE VIRUS IS KILLING YOU BEFORE YOU REACH ME."

  I took a limping step toward the door.

  The green eye on my face spun, focusing on the central tank.

  "You are mistaken," I said, my natural voice mixed with the metallic tone of the code possessing me. "I am not the hardware. I am just the transfer cable. And I just found the USB port."

  I pushed the glass door.

  The corridor's silence ended. The digital storm roared inside.

  It was time to reset the European apocalypse.