The sky above Virelia turned red at 06:17.
Not a sunrise.
A warning.
The Convergence grid shimmered, its usual steady hum disrupted by flickers of fractured data light—like something massive was trying to force its way through the atmosphere of digital and quantum safeguards. Hara and I watched from the upper ledge of a collapsed transport tube, the city unfolding like a burning schematic below us.
"It's bleeding into reality," she murmured.
"Or rewriting it," I said. "Nyxari was never about keeping something out. It was about keeping us in."
We couldn't stay hidden anymore. If the system was breaking, so were the rules. I keyed up my neural core and activated a dormant protocol: VANTHRAX-3, a military-grade infiltration harness I had salvaged back when I was still part of the Architect Program.
It linked directly into my spinal implant with a hiss and a pulse of heat. Graphene armor spread across my body, thin as fabric but strong enough to deflect rail-piercers. Micro-drones deployed from my back, orbiting me like protective wasps. Targeting overlays flooded my vision, calculating enemy vectors I hadn't even encountered yet.
"Whoa," Hara said, blinking. "When the hell did you become a one-man army?"
"I didn't," I said. "This thing has a mind of its own."
We made our way toward the Central Grid Spire, the beating heart of Virelia's dataflow—a tower of mirrored alloy and hard-light pulses that reached into orbit. If I could jack directly into the Convergence's quantum scaffold from there, maybe I could patch or control the fractures.
What I didn't expect was the resistance.
They were waiting for us at the perimeter: Convergence Paladins, armored figures wielding anti-phase rifles and void-matter shields. But these weren't like the standard issue enforcement units.
They were twitching. Glitching.
Corrupted.
Their faces were blank, but their eyes—burning with Nyxari red—tracked us with mechanical precision.
"Seize the Architect."
I didn't wait.
I launched the first two micro-drones. They split mid-air, releasing ion flares that blinded the nearest unit and destabilized its shield.
Then I moved.
The VANTHRAX suit responded instantly, amplifying my momentum. I hit the ground running, slid under a burst of plasma, rolled into a leap, and drove my elbow into a Paladin's chest plate. It cracked with a satisfying crunch, his form folding unnaturally before collapsing.
Hara ducked behind cover and launched a sonic displacer, scrambling their comms.
"Kai, three more coming from the right!"
"Got it."
I triggered my suit's adaptive field—time slowed to a crawl. I saw every bullet, every pulse round, every twitch of corrupted limbs. I redirected two rounds with a hard-light blade that grew from my wrist, then vaulted over a burning console and fired a bolt of hypercharge directly into another Paladin's neural core.
He screamed—but not like a machine.
Like a human who didn't belong in his own body.
Then he vanished in a burst of fractal light.
The rest followed quickly. Our weapons weren't enough to kill them.
But they were enough to disconnect them.
"Let's move," I said, heart pounding.
As we entered the Spire's sub-chamber, the lights dimmed. A voice echoed from the core walls:
"Architect confirmed. Key fragment detected. Integration beginning."
My neural HUD flared.
And then… the floor dropped out.
We fell into blackness.
And I heard it again.
That word. Spoken not with sound, but with gravity:
"Nyxari."