The Bombay Stock Exchange ruins bled static. What had been the Ghost Code headquarters – a sanctuary of flickering holograms and humming resonance generators – now burned with the acrid stench of melted circuitry and blood. Acid rain hissed against collapsed marble columns where the golden statue of a bull lay decapitated, its head replaced by a screaming NPC corpse impaled on rebar. Kai shielded his eyes from the phosphorescent graffiti smeared across the trading floor's ruins: TRAITORS in dripping static-paint, MURDERERS in corrupted gold, GIVE US RIN OR BURN in jagged Common System glyphs. "Architect's mind-virus," Selene hissed, her corrupted veins pulsing amber under soaked bandages. "Spread through the resonance network while we were in Sydney." She kicked aside a shattered drone chassis, frost spreading from her boots. "They think we sold them out." Mercy dragged Vox's coral-twisted body behind a bullet-riddled terminal. The boy's human eye rolled wildly, his coral-encased

Rain lashed the Ghost Code skiff like bullets, the cockpit reeking of brine, corrupted blood, and the cloying sweetness of Selene’s deteriorating flesh. Kai gripped the helm with his void-blackened hand, shadows writhing up his arm where Nyx whispered ceaselessly. Selene lay convulsing on a makeshift cot, gold-green veins pulsing beneath skin stretched taut over protruding bones. Coral spores from Lab Seven’s tentacles had colonized her left lung – every cough sprayed bio-luminescent mucus that hissed where it struck the deck. Linda’s ghost flickered near the ceiling, her 8% cohesion barely more than a heat-haze shimmer, unable to stabilize the dying woman or her sanity-shattered husband. "Cut her loose," Nyx murmured as Selene choked on another coral-laced seizure. The spores merge with her corruption. She becomes the Hive Mind’s gateway. End her before she ends you. KAI SANITY: 7% VOID INTEGRATION: 49% Kai’s void-touched fingers tightened on the helm. "Never." The skiff’s

The Lagos dawn bled rust-colored light through a petrified jungle canopy, its once-vibrant foliage now skeletal fingers of obsidian and crumbling pumice. Kai hauled Selene onto the fractured roof of the Static Spring cavern, her body a shuddering deadweight in his arms. Neural tremors tore through her with metronomic cruelty – muscles seizing like over-tuned piano wires, tendons snapping taut beneath skin webbed with lightning-bolt scars left by the Architect’s corruption bomb. Each convulsion rattled her teeth against the leather strap she bit down on, stifling screams that would draw Beauty patrols like jackals to wounded prey. Blood and void-tainted saliva coated her tongue, metallic and sour. Above them, Linda’s ghost flickered erratically – a damaged neon sign sputtering in monsoon rains. Her newly stabilized 10% cohesion warped like heat haze over desert asphalt with every fresh pulse of Selene’s agony. SYSTEM FEED SELENE NEURAL INTEGRITY: 62% TREMOR SEVERITY: 8.3 MAGNITUD

Sydney Harbor wasn’t drowned—it was digested. Where the iconic Opera House once stood, a colossal Coral Spire pulsed like a diseased heart, its grotesque ribs of bioluminescent coral throbbing with gold-green veins that bled Architect void-signature into the churning water. The harbor itself had become a battlefield broth: ruined skyscrapers jutted like broken teeth from water choked with mutated kelp forests and the floating corpses of Architect coral drones—skeletal, crab-like horrors of sharpened chitin and snapping polyps. The air reeked of salt, rotting fish, and the acrid tang of void-corruption. Above it all, the sky wept radioactive rain that sizzled where it struck the polluted waves. GHOST CODE ASSAULT INITIATED OBJECTIVE: BREACH LAB SEVEN (OPERA HOUSE SPIRE SUBLEVEL) TIDAL PHASE: LOW TIDE (DURATION: 17 MINUTES) THREAT DENSITY: CORAL DRONE SWARM (EST. 500+ UNITS) Ghost Code NPCs moved with grim precision across a makeshift flotilla of retrofitted sonic barges. Thes

The chitin door dissolved not with a crash, but with a sigh of released pressure, revealing the Heart Antechamber—a cavernous, biomechanical cathedral that stole the breath from even Nyx-controlled lungs. Vaulted ribs of pulsating obsidian coral arched hundreds of feet overhead, meeting at a central apex where the Coral Heart itself hung suspended. It wasn’t a crystal or gem; it was a living, beating star captured in organic form. Radiant silver light pulsed from its core in rhythmic waves, bathing the chamber in an ethereal glow that made the air hum with pure, resonant Static energy. This was Linda’s final shard, magnified and perfected—a beacon of resurrection that cast long, haunting shadows. The light washed over Dr. Thorne and Elara Vance, their corrupted forms tensed for combat, gold-green veins blazing beneath their biomechanical grafts. "CEASE YOUR INTERFERENCE," Nyx-Kai commanded, Kai’s void-arm already coalescing into a serrated shadow-blade. "THE HEART IS NYX PRIME'S BY R