We didn’t land. We crashed.
There was no floor in the Root Directory. Just a swirling, chaotic hurricane of raw data. It looked like the inside of a tornado, but instead of wind and debris, it was made of billions of lines of glowing green and blue text.
I hit a floating platform hard enough to deplete 15% of my health bar instantly.
[HP: 85%]
[LOCATION: SERVER CORE / ROOT]
[WARNING: UNMAPPED AREA]
"Get up!" Kael yelled, pulling me to my feet.
The environment was screaming. The data streams roared like jet engines. Above us, the hole we had fallen through was sealing shut, stitching itself together like a healing wound. But something was coming through before it closed.
A beam of pure, blinding white light shot down from the ceiling. It slammed into the center of the vortex, silencing the roar of the code.
The light solidified. It grew tall, expanding until it towered over us. It wasn't the man in the suit anymore. It was a giant, faceless titan made of polygons so sharp they looked like they could cut your eyes just by looking at them.
The Admin.
[TARGET: NOVA]
[COMMAND: FORMAT C:]
"You are persistent," the Admin’s voice boomed. It didn't come from the giant figure; it came from everywhere. The air itself was vibrating with his annoyance. "You are a virus in my perfect garden. And I am the pesticide."
He raised a massive hand. The tips of his fingers turned into spinning black voids.
"Move!" Kael tackled me.
We slid across the sleek, glass-like surface of the platform just as the Admin’s hand slammed down where we had been standing. The platform didn't break. It was simply erased. A perfect, circular bite mark appeared in the floor, revealing the endless drop of deletion below.
"He's deleting the geometry!" I scrambled backward, my boots slipping on the data-stream. "We have nowhere to stand!"
"We don't need to stand," Kael panted. He was scrolling through a holographic menu on his wrist, his eyes darting frantically. "We need to crash the server."
"How? He is the server!"
Kael pointed to the center of the hurricane. Beneath the Admin’s massive glowing form, there was a pillar of pulsating gold light. It looked dense, heavy, and ancient.
"That's the Kernel," Kael yelled over the noise. "The brain of the simulation. If you can inject your virus code directly into that, the system will panic. It’ll trigger a hard reset to protect itself. That’s our window to upload your consciousness out."
"And what happens to you?" I asked, looking at his flickering avatar. He was looking worse. His static was glitching hard, showing flashes of a guy in a hospital bed overlaying his digital body.
"Don't worry about me," he snapped, but his voice was gentle. "Just sing, Nova. Sing louder than you've ever sung in your life."
ns216.73.216.10da2
and then Add to home screen.