Wealth Accuracy

Chapter 8. Fracture Field

The air in the hidden archive was thick with the scent of ozone, dust, and a new, terrifying tension. Myra’s sanctuary had become a war room. Roewi sat on the floor, his back against a server rack, its rhythmic hum a feeble counterpoint to the chaos in his mind. The adrenaline of the escape was fading, leaving behind a bone-deep exhaustion and the psychic residue of the Division Zero agents' systems, cold, efficient, and utterly devoid of mercy.

Myra didn’t offer false comfort. She worked, her fingers a blur across multiple terminals. "I'm creating a ghost profile for you in the maintenance logs. You're a glitch, a duplicated entry for a sanitation drone that was decommissioned last year. It's not perfect, but it should make their automated scans skip over you." She shot him a glance. "How are you... holding up?"

He didn't know how to answer. How could he explain the feeling of another consciousness nestled against his own, a presence that was both a shield and a cage? "The whispers... they're quieter in here," he said, which was true. Myra's hidden server farm seemed to generate its own white noise, a digital buffer against the academy's psychic static.

[The enclosure emits a dampening field. Primitive, but effective. This unit's cognitive functions are operating at 12% increased efficiency.]

"It's shielded," Myra confirmed. "One of the perks of building your own network from scavenged parts. Division Zero can't eavesdrop here." She paused, her eyes fixed on a screen showing a schematic of the academy's upper levels. "But they're not giving up. They've locked down the entire campus. No one in or out. They're conducting room-to-room searches. They'll sweep the sub-levels eventually."

Roewi closed his eyes. "So this is just a postponement."

"It's a chance to think," she corrected him sharply. "To plan. You can't just run. You need to understand what you're doing. What happened back there with the fire suppression system? That wasn't just 'disruption.' You commanded it. You rewrote its emergency protocol on the fly."

He had. In that moment of pure survival, it hadn't felt like a conscious decision. It felt like an extension of his will. "Vextor showed me the code. The weak points. I just... pushed."

"Vextor?" Myra asked, her voice carefully neutral.

"The protocol. That's its name."

She absorbed this, her face unreadable. "And it talks to you."

[She seeks to quantify me. To reduce me to data.] Vextor's tone was dismissive.

She's trying to help, Roewi thought back, a spark of defensiveness flaring. We need her.

[Her utility is acknowledged. Her trust is not.]

Myra interrupted the silent exchange. "We need to test the limits. Safely. In here." She pulled up a simple diagnostic program on a secondary screen, a basic animation of a rotating crystal, its stability monitored by a dozen different metrics. "This is a closed system. Can you interact with it? Not break it. Influence it."

Hesitantly, Roewi focused on the screen. He let his awareness, guided by Vextor, brush against the program's code. It was like feeling the texture of a fabric with his mind. He could sense the loops and commands that made the crystal spin.

[Target acquired. Complexity: Minimal. Suggestion: Alter rotational axis by 3.7 degrees.]

Roewi focused, imagining the crystal tilting. On the screen, the animation stuttered. The crystal wobbled, then slowly, definitively, began to spin on a new, slightly skewed axis. The stability metrics flickered, reporting the impossible change. He had edited reality, on a microscopic scale, without a single line of code.

Myra stared, her breath catching. "You didn't hack the program. You... persuaded it." The implications were staggering. This went beyond any known system ability. This was low-level reality manipulation.

Before she could say more, every screen in the room flashed red. A silent, priority-one alert.

"They've found us," Myra whispered, her blood draining from her face. "They're not searching randomly. They're tracing my power draw. They're at the door."

A thunderous boom shook the reinforced door, the sound of focused kinetic charges. The physical bolt groaned in its housing.

[Hostiles detected: Six. Heavily armed. Lethal ordnance authorized.] Vextor's report was swift. [Their orders have changed. Termination is now the primary objective.]

"Back door!" Myra yelled, slamming a hand on a hidden panel. A section of the wall behind the servers slid open, revealing a narrow, pitch-black maintenance shaft. "It leads to the old geothermal vents! Go!"

Another boom. The door bent inwards, the metal screaming.

Roewi didn't move. A strange calm settled over him. The fear was still there, a cold knot in his stomach, but it was being smothered by a rising tide of cold, analytical fury. They wouldn't let him run. Myra would be executed for helping him. This ended now.

"Roewi, what are you doing? RUN!" Myra screamed, grabbing his arm.

He shook her off, his eyes fixed on the buckling door. "They'll just keep hunting us. They'll find us in the vents."

[Proposing tactical solution: Fracture Field.] Vextor presented the data in his mind—a complex energy matrix that didn't attack systems, but attacked the space between them. The connections. The bonds. [High risk. Neural load will exceed 90%.]

Do it.

He stepped forward, placing himself between the door and Myra. He raised his hands, not in surrender, but as a conductor. He poured every ounce of his will, every shred of the power Vextor offered, into a single, devastating concept: Disconnect.

The air in front of the door began to shimmer, not with heat, but with a terrifying absence. It was a localized void, a patch of reality where the fundamental rules of energy and data frayed into nothingness.

The door exploded inwards.

But the shrapnel didn't reach them. The metal fragments, the concussive force, the very light from the corridor—it all hit the shimmering field and unraveled. Wires in the walls behind the door sparked and died. The comms units on the Division Zero agents' armor fizzed into uselessness. The advanced optics in their helmets shorted out, leaving them blind.

For a terrifying second, there was only silence and the shimmering void. Then, the field collapsed.

Roewi gasped, stumbling backward. The headache was no longer a throb; it was a white-hot blade cleaving his skull. Blood trickled from his nose and the corner of his eye. He had paid the price.

Through the ruined doorway stood the six Division Zero agents, but their flawless coordination was gone. They were disoriented, stripped of their technological advantages, their systems utterly fried. They were just men and women in armor, momentarily vulnerable.

And standing behind them, having clearly followed the team to witness the capture, was Ereun Solas.

His Prime Chrono Drive was inactive, its golden glow extinguished by the Fracture Field's backlash. He wasn't looking at the agents. He was staring at Roewi, his face a canvas of utter, world-shattering shock. He had seen it. He had seen Roewi not just disrupt a system, but shred the fabric of localized reality. The absolute certainty in his eyes, the belief in his own superiority, in the infallibility of the established order, was gone, replaced by a horrifying, fundamental doubt.

The lead agent, shaking off his disorientation, raised his sidearm, a purely ballistic weapon, unaffected by the digital carnage. He aimed it directly at Roewi's head.

"Anomaly confirmed. Terminating," the agent stated, his voice a flat, mechanical monotone.

His finger tightened on the trigger.

But Ereun was faster. In a movement born of pure, unthinking instinct, his hand shot out and knocked the agent's arm upward. The gunshot roared in the confined space, the bullet embedding itself in the ceiling.

"Solus! Stand down!" the agent roared, turning his fury on Ereun.

Ereun didn't back down. He stood between the agents and Roewi, his body rigid with tension, his eyes still locked on Roewi. He didn't say a word. He didn't have to. His actions were a scream of denial against everything he had just witnessed.

In that frozen, chaotic moment, as Division Zero faced a traitor in their ranks and their target still standing, Roewi understood. The fracture wasn't just in the field he had created. It was in the world. It was in Ereun Solas. And it was only beginning to spread.

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