The corridor lights froze into blinding points of static. Geometry began to unfold where space shouldn’t exist—panels sliding into fourth-dimensional pockets as the System began to rewrite the room around us.

  “Nuxx is here…! Everyone… Take these bubbles and jump!” Oruun’s command was a roar.

  He exhaled gravity, encasing each of us in a shimmering, translucent sphere. Below our feet, the silver ground rippled.

  A dark blue wave, six feet high, surged through the floor—a physical manifestation of a deletion command. Those prisoners unlucky enough to be caught were flicked into the air like dust.

  “No! Broth—!” The youngest Nuxxani brother screamed as the wave took him. He was flipped upward, hurtling twenty feet into the ceiling before crashing down onto another body.

  “Everyone! Float over the bodies! Get down the hall!” I screamed, my voice cracking.

  Oruun was already leaning against the interior of his bubble, fighting the drag to push us over the carnage below.

  “No way, Bǎo doesn’t trust you idiots…” Bǎo hissed, but her bravado died in her throat.

  She was staring at the floor, paralyzed.

  From the liquid metallic surface of the ground, a presence emerged. It didn't rise; it formed, a towering monochrome nightmare taking shape from the boots upward.

  A man in a top hat with black glasses that reflected nothing but the void.

  “No, no… look, he’s forming…! We need to escape!” I shouted, paddling the air within my sphere as we drifted toward the exit.

  Nuxx stood unmoving. “So, 316 prisoners have betrayed my rules and will now be punished by your own Kal Dem law,” he said, his voice echoing from the walls themselves.

  He looked at Oruun—the relic of his creators. “You hold on to the past; a lot has changed since you made me. Though you have become weak and old, I have only grown in strength.”

  “I’m still a lot stronger than a soulless machine,” Seraphel’s voice rang out, ancient and defiant.

  In a burst of blinding radiance, she was reborn. A magnificent celestial dragon of solar flame and iridescent light soared into the sky of the corridor. Her wings spanned the width of the hall, leaving trails of white-hot cinders in her wake.

  She let out a searing cry—a challenge to the monochrome man who stood below.

  Her flames carved arcs of light that clashed against Nuxx’s impossibly black, nanite blade.

  Nuxx was unfazed. He swung a colossal sword with precision that defied physics, cutting through the air to intercept the dragon. Seraphel pushed him back, her spirit-fire searing into his metal arm, causing it to fall away in clumps of decaying silver matter.

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  “For your mistake, I won’t grant you a hero’s death,” Nuxx said coldly.

  His right sword arm fell off completely, but as it dropped, he caught the hilt with his left hand in a single, fluid motion.

  He cleaved the dragon in two.

  The blade didn’t stop at her light. It kept going, a widening line of absolute deletion through the corridor.

  As the sword expanded, my bubble burst.

  My right arm flung upward.

  I stared at it in a daze.

  Cleaved.

  A torn stump spurting green blood. The pain didn't hit at first—it was too large, too absolute. Then it arrived, an overpowering scream of the nerves.

  Seraphel vanished in a final, blinding flash of light.

  “My… my arm…” I couldn't breathe. My legs gave out.

  Bǎo caught me. She had already donned a pair of designer sunglasses to block the glare, but her face was pale, stripped of all its usual mockery.

  “Don’t look at it!” she screamed, her voice cracking with genuine terror as she dragged me off my feet. “Arata, move! We have to go!”

  “Thank you…” I tried to gasp, but the world was spinning.

  “Don’t look back, Arata! Keep your eyes forward!” Oruun commanded, his jaw set in a line of controlled fury. “We’re at the exit! The wind will take us over!”

  I looked back once. Nuxx’s arm was already regenerating, silver matter knitting together as if Seraphel’s sacrifice had never happened.

  It ripped my heart in two—she had died fighting for a world that had rejected her.

  I fell into a dark cloud of agony, Bǎo pulling me faster than a cheetah toward the silver disc-shaped craft waiting in the emptiness below.

  “There she is! Quickly!” Oruun shouted, waving the ramp open. “He’s cutting bandwidth! If we don’t launch now, he’ll own the ship!”

  “You said you’d protect me,” I whispered, clutching the stump of my arm as we scrambled onboard. “Please, Oruun. Don't let me down.”

  We breached the quarters, and Oruun immediately began tapping at holographic screens, his fingers a blur as he fought Nuxx for control of the sky.

  “He’s sealing the orbit,” Oruun warned.

  Bǎo slammed her palm against the console. “Then go through it. We’ll force our way out.”

  “You’re insane,” I said, gritting my teeth against the pain.

  “Maybe,” she shot back. “But I’m not the one who picked a fight with a sentient filing cabinet.”

  “You literally hunted me for a paycheck.”

  “Yeah, and now I’m protecting the merchandise. Don’t make me regret it.”

  He didn’t argue. The Sanctum pitched upward, slicing toward the light. The heat washed through the hull. Taste went metallic, like chewing a battery.

  “Correction in progress.” The ship glowed.

  “Bǎo…”

  “I know that voice. I know how sweet it can sound.” She reached over, shaking me by the shoulders. “Don’t let that thing in!”

  Too late. The world became calculation. Every atom demanded to be counted.

  Then something pushed back. Oruun. He wasn’t shouting, but gravity warped around him. The lattice met the field, and hesitated.

  We broke through.

  Silence.

  Bǎo exhaled. “You owe me dinner, piggy.”

  Oruun stayed at the console, watching the sensors roll static. “We’re out,” he said. “But not free.”

  “What does that mean?” I asked.

  He turned, eyes catching the faint reflection of Edenfall still burning in the distance. I didn’t understand. Nothing made sense.

  “... Please, guys, we need to get the ship as far away as we can!” I said.

  “She can’t because it’s not just metal, and neither is this ship,” Oruun said.

  “What do you mean…?” I asked, confused.

  “This entire planet isn’t metal. It is… made of nanites. So are Bǎo’s metallic enhancements. And so is this ship,” Oruun whispered.

  “Nuxx doesn’t need to pursue us. I need to be honest with the risk to you all. There’s a good chance we will not leave this planet alive.”

  The sense of dread hit the group, enveloping me.

  “Just fly the ship and let’s get going! And you, piggy! Why are you acting like that, too!?” Bǎo shouted.

  “Nuxx can rip this ship into two, and leave us in the void, if he wants to,” Oruun said lowly.

  “Pick a God and pray.”

  The ship began to rumble. We were already out of time.

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