The sound that left my body wasn't human. It was pure audio destruction.
[SYSTEM ALERT: AUDIO DRIVER FAILURE]
[OBJECT INTEGRITY: CRITICAL]
The mirror behind me exploded. Not into glass shards, but into raw binary data. The white velvet walls ripped apart like wet paper. The floor buckled.
The Admin stumbled back. For the first time, he looked off-balance. The white light of his face flickered, revealing—for a microsecond—a skull underneath.
"You little brat!" he roared. He raised his hand, summoning a wall of red firewalls to crush me.
But the sound wave was faster. It hit Kael’s frozen form.
Shatter.
The "Pause" command broke. Kael gasped, unfreezing instantly. He fell to the floor, coughing, but he was moving.
"Kael!" I screamed over the noise of the collapsing room. " The door!"
Kael scrambled up. The mirror was gone. Behind where it used to be, there was a dark, swirling vortex. A hole in the simulation.
The Root Directory.
"Go!" Kael yelled, grabbing his knife. "I’ll hold him off!"
"No!" I grabbed Kael’s collar and yanked him backward. "We go together, or we don't go at all!"
The Admin recovered. He was growing larger now, expanding to fill the room. His suit was tearing, revealing a body made of jagged black spikes.
[DELETE. DELETE. DELETE.]
His voice shook the foundations of the tower. A massive black hand swept toward us, deleting the furniture in its path. The vanity table vanished into void-space.
I grabbed Kael’s hand.
"Jump!"
We threw ourselves into the hole behind the broken mirror.
We fell out of the luxury suite, out of the High-Bit District, and into the roaring, chaotic stream of raw data that ran beneath the world.
As the darkness swallowed us, I saw the Admin leaning over the edge of the hole. He wasn't calm anymore. He was screaming in binary code.
And for the first time in my life—my real life—I wasn't the one who was afraid.
ns216.73.216.10da2
and then Add to home screen.