The air inside the Grand Opera didn’t smell like the wasteland. Instead, it reeked of a sickeningly sweet perfume called "Civilization." Suger leaned against a velvet-covered wall, his stomach churning—not just from the aftereffects of overextending his power, but from a genuine physiological revulsion to the garish opulence surrounding him.​Hey, genius. You look like a mutant lizard that got run over by a truck and then left to bake in the sun for three days, the Voice chimed in, sounding more energized than ever. But good news: the Disassembler System just hit Level 10. You don’t have to play 'tag' with metal anymore. You’ve unlocked a little thing called distance.​Suger squinted, and a flickering blue frame appeared in his vision: [Remote Disassembly: Effective Range - 5 Meters].​"Five meters? That’s barely a spit's distance," Suger grumbled internally, but his eyes immediately locked onto the heavy blast doors at the end of the corridor.​Claire was already on one knee by the a

The massive, pulsating core of the Inner City Hive looked less like a masterpiece of engineering and more like a giant, glowing hemorrhoid made of fiber-optics and stolen dreams. It hummed with a low-frequency thrum that made Suger’s teeth ache and his eyeballs vibrate in their sockets. Every few seconds, a surge of violet fluid pumped through the transparent pipes, glowing with the kind of radioactive intensity that screamed "I will give you cancer just by looking at me."​Oh, look. A giant, glowing heart. How poetic, the Voice drawled in Suger’s head, sounding like a bored teenager at a funeral. I’m sure if you ask it nicely, it’ll stop turning people into cyborg slaves. Or, you know, you could try using that thing in your chest called a brain, though I know it hasn't seen much use lately.​"Shut up, you bucket of binary trash," Suger hissed, wiping a fresh smear of blood from his lip. He looked at his hands. The blue sparks were dancing between his fingers again, but this time they

The silence that followed the explosion of the Hive Core wasn't the peaceful kind. It was the heavy, suffocating silence you get when you’ve just accidentally insulted a mob boss at his own mother’s funeral. Suger stood in the center of the pitch-black laboratory, his chest heaving, his right arm glowing with a rhythmic, violet pulse that looked like a neon sign for a bar that had long ago gone out of business.​Congratulations, Suger. You’ve officially upgraded from ‘annoying scavenger’ to ‘walking ecological disaster,’ the Voice crackled inside his skull. It sounded like a late-night talk show host who had just finished a bottle of cheap scotch. I hope you’re happy. You didn't just break the machine; you personally offended the entire concept of electrical engineering. Look at your hand. You look like a rock star’s bad trip.​"Shut... up," Suger croaked. His voice felt like it had been scrubbed with a wire brush and rinsed with battery acid. He tried to flex his fingers, but they di