"It’s not a cage, Kaelen," Miri’s voice shook as she shoved the flickering data crystal into my hands. "It’s a garbage disposal. Look at the code."I gripped the crystal, my eyes racing across the scrolling text. "The quarantine isn't holding us in. It’s shrinking.""They’re formatting our entire solar system," Elara said, her hand tight on the pommel of her unranked blade. "They’re treating our home like infected data. How long do we have?""At this rate? Twelve hours before every living soul in our sector is converted into clean, empty space," Miri said, wiping cold sweat from her forehead. "But I found a flaw in their routing packets. The boundary fence has an anchor point right at the edge of the solar rift. A grounding wire in the system's architecture.""Then we don't wait for them to erase us," I said, slinging my heavy iron wrench over my shoulder. "Elara, pack light. We’re going to the edge of the world.""And if the Council's en

"Elara, fall back! That thing isn't moving like a standard raid boss!" I shouted, the wind whistling past my ears as the ground beneath us dropped another three feet."I can't just stand here, Kaelen!" Elara lunged forward, her unranked blade cutting a violet streak through the thick cloud of rust rising from the shifting trenches. "Look at its chest cavity. That crimson fire isn't mana. It’s screaming!"The colossal Level 99 Ancient Automaton ground its massive obsidian gears together, a sound that threatened to shatter my teeth. A deep, synthesized voice boomed directly into our minds, heavy with ancient malice."Scrapper anomaly identified," the titan droned, its massive hand sweeping across the sky, swatting away entire ridges of junk metal. "You look upon the foundational fuel of Server 00. Do you recognize the resonance within my furnace, child of Silas?""What are you talking about?" I demanded, locking my boots onto a half-buried steel gir

"Kaelen!" My own scream echoed back to me from a ceiling of cold, weeping stone. The void-portal snapped shut with the sound of a thunderclap, severing the space above.I hit the solid iron floor hard, rolling onto my shoulder to break the fall. The air down here was thick, smelling of ozone, burnt code, and decaying data."Well, look what the void dragged in," a harsh voice spat from the dark. "A fresh one. And she’s unranked."I scrambled to my feet, my hand flying to my waist. My unranked blade was still there. I pulled it free, the metal giving off that familiar, sharp violet glow. "Stay back. Where am I?"A massive, hulking figure stepped into the dim light of a flickering data-lantern. He was covered in heavy, rust-covered mechanical plates, his status bar floating weakly above his head: [Overseer Gort: Level 75 - Under-Grid Enforcement]. Behind him stood ten more guards, all carrying heavy, glowing branding irons that hissed with white-hot

"I don't like him, Kaelen," Elara whispered, her hand never leaving the pommel of her unranked blade as we stood in the docking bay of the massive, rusted hyper-freighter. "He smells like grease and broken promises.""We don't have a choice," I replied, keeping my eyes locked on the approaching figure. "Ten thousand people are standing on a dead rock with no oxygen. They don't need to breathe anymore, but they still need a way off Server 00. He’s the only one with a ship big enough to haul them."A stout man with a heavy mechanical eye and a coat lined with illicit data-chips stepped down the freighter's ramp. His status screen hovered unevenly over his shoulder: [Captain Jax: Level 88 - Cosmic Smuggler]."So you’re the billion-credit glitch," Jax sneered, chewing on a piece of glowing synthetic tobacco. He stopped five feet away and spat onto the metal floor. "The 'Janitor.' I’ve seen some strange anomalies in my time, but an unranked brat with a rusted t

"The servers are melting down, Kaelen!" Elara shouted, her voice cutting through the screeching sirens of the collapsing treasury. "The digital static is bleeding out into the surrounding sectors! Look at the monitors!""Let them melt," I said, leaning against the fractured golden podium. My left forearm was white-hot, the violet root administrative key flashing in sync with the emergency red lights flashing across the ceiling. "They built an empire on numerical slavery. Let's see how they run it without their currency numbers.""We've got a massive energy signature coming down from the upper directory!" Miri yelled, gripping her heavy iron ladle with both hands as she pointed toward the center of the shattered diamond lobby. "This isn't an auditor, Boss! This feels like a world-ender!"The shimmering white space outside the vault doors violently turned pitch-black. A colossal pillar of golden, high-density mana pierced straight through the treasury's diam