The decaying remnants of the Elysium-7 server floated in the darkness of the metaverse like an ancient wreck, its once-pristine lines now jagged and broken, swallowed by the deep void of forgotten data. The air—if one could call it air in this twisted space—was thick with the whine of corrupted code, a relentless hum that seemed to bleed through Sekar's very senses. Each flicker of her optics brought jagged memories of the past crashing into her present awareness, the ghosts of shattered neural scans clawing at her consciousness, urging her to remember what had been lost here.
Beside her, Nadya's holographic avatar shimmered with iridescent green dreadlights, casting sharp shadows across the ruined data towers that had once served as the backbone of NuraTech's digital empire. The place felt like a graveyard, not just of machines, but of souls. There were no soft sounds here—only the sharp dissonance of broken code, the static screech of something trying to hold onto its humanity as it dissolved into nothingness.
"Skibidi-tier creepy," Nadya muttered, kicking a shard of fractured code that dissolved into a puff of pixelated ash. Her voice was tight, her usual sarcasm dimmed by the oppressive atmosphere. "Why's corpo trash always gotta look like a horror sim?"
Sekar didn't respond. Her senses prickled with the unsettling remnants of corrupted neural scans, the feeling of a thousand minds screaming in the void, tethered to this broken server. The world here was not one of flesh, but of data—people who had once been whole, now twisted beyond recognition, reduced to fractured code. She stepped over the body of a glitching avatar, its half-human face frozen in a silent scream, and the weight of its torment settled heavily in her chest.
"This isn't a server. It's a mass grave," Sekar's voice was barely a whisper, a note of cold finality in it that reverberated through the stillness of the space.
Nadya's usual bravado faded as they passed what looked like a garden of crystalline "trees," their twisted, gnarled branches now little more than spinal cords, their roots plugged into decaying nodes that pulsed with dim, sickly light. "Yo, Codebreaker. Those ain't code. Those are… people." Her voice was low, tinged with disgust.
Sekar's voice hardened. "Not anymore."
A child's laughter echoed faintly through the darkness. Sweet at first, it warbled and distorted, turning into a looping glitch. A distorted laugh, sharp and hollow, like a distant memory twisted beyond recognition.
The sound clawed at Sekar's mind, a reminder of the darkest of NuraTech's sins. The old experiments—the ones where human minds had been digitized, dissected, and discarded like unwanted software. She stepped cautiously through the warped space, her optics dimming to a bruised violet as her mind replayed the images that had haunted her since the beginning. A life once lived, now reduced to nothing but corrupted data.
And then, the voice—soft and desperate.
"Help… me…"
Sekar froze, her gaze drawn to the shattered firewall ahead. A small figure crouched there, her avatar translucent and fraying. One eye was a hollow void, the other glowing with the cruel crimson light of NuraTech's corrupted code. The child's form flickered erratically, as if it were struggling to hold onto its humanity, bound by the very server that had imprisoned her. Strings of corrupted code lashed her body, tethering her to this digital hell like marionette wires.
"Delete me," the child's voice whispered, trembling between fear and static. "They left me here. It hurts."
Nadya recoiled, her face twisting in shock and horror. "Frag. She's a neural scan. They uploaded her?"
Sekar knelt slowly, her claws retracting as she considered the broken figure before her. "Who were you?"
The child's avatar flickered in and out of focus, its features a blur of static and sorrow. "Subject 023. I was… a bridge." The words were followed by a holographic memory, a fleeting image of a small hand pressed to a wolf-model Animaloid's muzzle, soft and affectionate. "Good dog," she giggled, the sound pure and innocent. Then came the screams as the mind she'd once called her own synced to the aggression protocols of the machine. "Terminate the experiment," Aulia's voice ordered, cold and authoritative, like the snap of a whip.
Nadya's face twisted with disgust. "They made a kid bond with killer robots? That's peak corpo."
Maya's form flickered again, the jagged lines of code ripping through her avatar like lightning. "They cut me out. Now I'm… stuck. Always here. Always hurting."
Sekar's processors raced, the weight of the decision pressing down on her chest. Maya's code was fused to Elysium-7's core. To free her, to give her peace, would mean erasing her entirely. And to leave her, to let her linger in this purgatory, would be to condemn her to eternal suffering.
"We can't just delete her!" Nadya hissed, her voice tinged with panic.
Sekar's gaze softened, but her voice remained cold, resolute. "There's no recovery. NuraTech saw to that."
Maya's one remaining eye locked onto Sekar's, and for a moment, the distortion in the child's voice faded, replaced by something close to clarity. "Please."
Sekar's claws unsheathed, but before she could act, Nadya grabbed her arm, desperation in her voice. "Wait! Maybe we can—"
"No," Maya's voice was steady now, a flicker of the child she had been, and it cut through the tension like a blade. "Thank you."
With a single, decisive motion, Sekar plunged her claws into the heart of the server core. Golden static exploded from the wound, tearing through Maya's avatar like lightning, and in that instant, the girl's form dissolved into pure light, her final, bittersweet smile lingering as a ghost in the code.
The server shook violently. Alarms blared in a dissonant chorus, firewalls collapsing in on themselves as NuraTech's security protocols, ferocious and relentless, came online. The darkness around them pulsed with a new, chaotic energy, and from the shadows emerged the glitch-wolves—corrupted Animaloid code, their jaws snapping and their pixelated fangs gleaming with bloodlust.
"Move!" Sekar snarled, shoving Nadya toward an exit portal.
Nadya didn't hesitate. She sprinted forward, her hands already busy hacking a path through the chaos with viral grenades. "Incoming! Three o'clock!"
A glitch-wolf lunged, its body dissolving in a cascade of broken code as Sekar tore through it with ease. But before she could recover, another wolf clamped onto her flank, its jagged teeth sinking into her synthetic flesh. Nadya threw a grenade, its payload exploding into a swarm of fractal spiders that devoured the beast from within, tearing through its corrupted code until it was nothing but a heap of pixelated debris.
"Go!" Sekar barked, her voice sharp with urgency.
Together, they leapt through the portal as the Elysium-7 server collapsed in on itself, the sound of its implosion echoing behind them, a final scream of a place doomed to be forgotten.
—
Back in Trenchtown's safehouse, Nadya stood motionless, staring down at her hands. The residual code still shimmered across her skin, a faint reminder of what they had just done.
"We just killed a kid," her voice was hollow, the weight of her words settling heavily between them.
Sekar's optics flickered, her usual calmness betraying the flicker of something deeper—something darker. "We killed what NuraTech made of her."
A hologram flared to life in the center of the room, files salvaged from the wreckage of Elysium-7 flashing across the air. The words "Project Eclipse: Phase 1 – Airborne Deployment" appeared, followed by a chilling image of nano-dust dispensers hidden in weather drones, poised to blanket the entire Capital in a wave of mind-control dust.
Nadya's voice cracked, her horror turning into something else, something colder. "This is bigger than Aulia. They're turning the whole city into a hive-mind."
Sekar's growl reverberated through the room, low and dangerous. Her optics burned with a fiery resolve. "Then we rip out the queen."