"Kaelen... wait... who is... who am I talking to?" Miri’s voice suddenly crackled through my earpiece, but the sharp, frantic tone was completely gone, replaced by a terrifying, hollow confusion. "The monitors... there’s a signature outside the hull, but the registry is completely blank. Why am I holding this ladle? Elara, do we have an unranked passenger on the hull?""I don't... I can't look at the directory, Miri," Elara’s voice cut into my mind through our shared soul-tether, but the connection was violently fraying, sputtering like a dying flame. "There’s a violet line in my thoughts, but it’s tracking toward an empty slot. Kaelen? Is that... is that name a real profile? The system is telling me the file is corrupted. It hurts, Miri. The math is rewriting my childhood memory logs!""Elara! Miri! Hold onto the link!" I roared into the void, my heart slamming against my ribs as I felt the agonizing strain on our permanent connection.Down on the bridge of the flagship, the vivid vi

"This is the final staging ground, unranked!" Elara’s voice boomed through the shattered cargo bay doors of our transport vessel, her words cutting through the grinding mechanical hum of the Core Matrix. She stepped forward onto the pristine, polished white floorboards, her silver hair catching the blinding, absolute glare of the golden servers. "There are no more respawn points! There are no backup servers! We either free the cosmos right here, or we get formatted into non-existence! Draw your blades!""We're with you, Commander!" a thousand voices from the unranked militia roared in absolute unison as they surged out of the cargo bay. They didn't have glittering divine armor or S-Rank titles floating above their heads, but their hands gripped their matte-black weapons with terrifying, absolute grit."Miri, stay by the console and keep that soul-tether locked down!" I yelled, my boots clicking sharply against the white floor plates as I stepped up beside Elara, my heavy iron wrench r

"Miri! Drop the ladle and reach for my hand!" I screamed, my voice barely cutting through the deafening roar of the explosive decompression.The gale-force vacuum tore through the shattered threshold of the engine room, dragging her light frame through the air like a piece of loose scrap. Below her, the spinning, exposed gears of the primary core processor churned violently, crackling with billions of volts of raw, blinding white deconstruction energy."Kaelen! I can't reach! The magnetic pull is too strong!" Miri shrieked. She threw her arms outward, her fingers brushing against the roaring vortex of raw code as the gravity fields of the main engine tried to drag her into the teeth of the gears. "The processor... it's pulling my physical files straight down!""I've got you!" I roared.I lunged over the shattered platinum threshold, planting my heavy iron boots into the cracking white floorboards. I reached down into the open abyss, my left arm flaring with a fierce, burning violet li

"Ten minutes, Kaelen! The steam is clearing, but the internal registries are spiking again!" Miri’s voice exploded through my earpiece, her breathing ragged over the static-filled comms channel. "The underflow exception is losing its hold on the primary buffer! The core is forcing a manual override to clear your negative level variable!""He's going to pull it!" Elara shouted, her boots slamming against the slick white tiles as she took a defensive stance right beside me. Her unranked matte-black blade spit fierce violet sparks into the damp air. "Kaelen, look at his hand! His fingers are completely locked around the manual override!"Founder Syntax, the Final Supreme Architect, stood shaking at the edge of the smoking, ruptured core processor. He stared blankly at the empty white floorboards where Founder Prime’s physical avatar had just unraveled into raw, dead text strings. Above his trembling geometric head, his golden status screen blinked a frantic, terminal red, throwing off en

The roaring, reality-warping screech of the core processor completely snapped. The terrifying pressure, the black static, and the blinding white light of the Core Matrix violently imploded inward, collapsing into a pinpoint of absolute nothingness. It completely vanished, replaced by a profound, absolute silence that rippled across every single corner of the cosmos."Kaelen?"Elara’s voice didn't echo. It didn't bounce off pristine white tiles or rumble through towering golden server blocks. It traveled flat and clear through an empty expanse. She slowly opened her eyes, her silver hair drifting loosely around her face in slow motion.The entire Core Matrix was completely gone. There were no golden walls, no administrative partitions, and no flashing red error alerts."We're... we're floating," Miri gasped, her hands flailing wildly as she drifted out from the crumpled hatch of our transport vessel. The ship itself was entirely open to the elements, yet none of us were suffocating. Th