Elijah closed his eyes. He leaned his head back against the wall. He focused his mind on the green light of the Admin Key. He pushed his consciousness down the wire, leaving the cold, quiet office in the Real World behind, and diving back into the magical, violent reality of the Crucible. Elijah’s mind snapped back into his digital avatar. He was no longer a skinny boy in a paper gown. He was the King of the Grey again. He stood ten feet tall, a magnificent giant of dark obsidian glass and burning Star-Matter. The bright silver circuits on his skin pulsed with massive power. He took a deep breath. The air here did not smell like sterile rubbing alcohol. It smelled like sharp, freezing pine needles and ancient ice. He opened his purple eyes. He was standing high in the Swiss Alps. Massive, jagged mountains covered in thick, white snow surrounded him. The sky above was a dark, bruised purple, heavy with a coming storm. But the mountains were not peaceful. A hundred feet below where

"Set loop reset to zero point zero one seconds," Elijah yelled. [COMMAND EXECUTED. OVERWRITING LOOP.]The world broke. Elijah did not get hit by the train. He did not get hit by the Logic-Cannons. He had stepped inside the glitch. He edited the code so that the time loop no longer reset every ten seconds. He made it reset every hundredth of a second. And he pulled the twenty Debuggers into the loop with him. The result was absolute, mind-shattering chaos. Elijah was frozen in place. The train was frozen an inch away from his back. The twenty beams of corrective code were frozen an inch away from his chest. But they were not actually frozen. They were resetting so fast that time could not move forward. The sound was a continuous, deafening screech of breaking physics. The visual world blurred into a terrifying smear of rusted metal, white light, and snowy mountains. Elijah’s mind was being ripped apart. He was experiencing a hundredth of a second, over and over, thousands of ti

Suddenly, Elijah heard a strange, high-pitched humming sound. It did not sound like the glitching water. It sounded like the whine of a very powerful machine powering up. He stopped running. He looked ahead. In front of him, the ocean floor dropped off into a deep, dark trench. It was a massive underwater cavern. But there was no water in the cavern right now. The glitching physics had sucked all the water out, leaving a deep, dark hole in the earth. The red corrupted code was glowing at the very bottom of the cavern. Elijah walked to the edge of the trench and looked down. "System, scan the cavern," Elijah ordered. [SCANNING...][WARNING: MULTIPLE HOSTILE ENTITIES DETECTED.][IDENTIFICATION: DEBUGGER UNITS.][QUANTITY: FIFTY.]Elijah’s starry skin flashed with a warning light. Fifty Debuggers. The tall, faceless figures made of flickering white light and static were waiting for

"Select All," Elijah commanded. He didn't throw a tiny spark this time. He unleashed a massive, roaring tidal wave of pure Erasure Flame. The black fire exploded outward, filling the entire inside of the gray bubble. The fire washed over the fifty Debuggers. Because they were disconnected from the main server, they had no defense. The black fire tore through their active system code. They did not even have time to scream. In a fraction of a second, all fifty Debuggers were completely incinerated. They shattered into millions of tiny black pixels and deleted themselves from existence. The gray bubble was empty, except for Elijah. Elijah let out a long, tired breath. The black fire faded away from his hands. He looked at his system interface. [HOSTILE ENTITIES DELETED.][LOCAL CORRUPTION PURGED.]He had fixed the broken code. The red error in the ocean was gone. The server was stable

Elijah ran onto the bridge. The wind howling from the fracture was so strong it almost blew him backward. He planted his heavy obsidian boots onto the stone, leaning forward against the gale of static. He reached the edge of the glowing white tear. He didn't bother trying to use magic. He knew the commands wouldn't work here. He had to patch the code manually, just like he did in Berlin. Elijah plunged both of his starry hands directly into the roaring white static. The pain hit him instantly. His hands began to un-write. The white noise chewed on his fingers, trying to turn his cosmic skin into useless data. Elijah screamed in agony. He grabbed the blue code of the Real World on the left side of the tear, and the red code of the Crucible on the right side. They were impossibly heavy. It felt like trying to pull two speeding trains together with a rope. "Move!" Elijah roared, his voice cracking. The green light of the Admin Key pulsed wildly in his chest, giving him the raw stre