Reiji hovered above the shredded remnants of the Void-Bin, his massive, flickering form a cathedral of dead data and discarded Reijis. Every limb, every shard of wireframe that made him whole was trembling—not from fear, but from the pure effort of existing outside the rules.
The White Hall loomed ahead, sterile and pristine, untouched by the chaos below… until now. Cracks spiderwebbed along its white marble floor. Grey corruption seeped upward, climbing the walls like ivy made of static.
Inside, Code A's Processor turned toward him. Its smoke form swirled violently, black and red tendrils lashing through the room. Kael was strapped to the chair, still pale, still twitching as pieces of his Hero script dangled from the monster's claws.
"Reiji," Code A hissed, its voice like a hard drive grinding against metal. "You cannot exist here. You are not allowed to be. Step aside, bug, or I will wipe you."
Reiji didn't answer. He didn't need to. His body wasn't him anymore. He was the injection, the virus, the glitch made flesh. Every keystroke from the terminal, every byte of his lost memory, every deleted fragment of his former self had fused into one unstoppable entity.
[TRUE PLAYER STATUS: ACTIVE]
[SYSTEM OVERRIDE: INITIATED]
[RELAYER LINK: STABLE]
He reached out—not with a hand, but with an entirety of mass and code. Thousands of Villager limbs fused with fragments of his original body, forming a lattice of jagged grey and blue energy. Reiji didn't just move; he pulled the logic itself, bending space-time metadata like a thread in his fist.
The Executioner subroutines Code A had launched earlier descended like blades of perfect logic. They were precise, unstoppable—but for the first time, they collided with himself. The spikes of black code weren't slicing flesh or data; they were absorbed, digested, rewritten. Every attack became part of Reiji's mass.
The Corrupted Kael shrieked, voice warped to digital static: "Stop! You're destabilizing everything! You'll kill him! You'll—"
Reiji ignored the protest. His target wasn't Kael—it was the extraction itself. He had to reach the Core coordinates. Every movement cost him a piece of himself: a memory, a word, a thought, a sense of pain, a fragment of flesh.
[PHYSICAL ALLOCATION REQUIRED: 5%]
[DELETED: MEMORY OF CHILDHOOD HOME]
[ALLOCATION SUCCESSFUL]
The beam of pure Narrative Logic snapped toward him, a crystalline spike aimed to pierce his body. He let it hit. It passed through him, shredded and reshaped, but left him intact. The system no longer knew what "Reiji" was.
At last, he reached the edge of the White Hall. With a motion that was less a gesture and more a gravitational event, he slammed the entirety of his glitch-mass onto the floor. The white marble groaned. The Perfect Logic of the Hall fractured under the weight of someone who shouldn't exist.
Code A howled, a sound like a thousand corrupted drives burning simultaneously. Its tendrils wavered, slackened, retreating from Kael. "This… this isn't… allowed!" it screamed.
Reiji didn't answer. He touched Kael—not with flesh, but with data. Streams of red and blue code fused into Kael's body, undoing the extraction line by line. Every bit of Hero script that had been yanked from Kael's chest returned, like a river reversing flow.
[ALLOCATION: 15% INTEGRITY]
[DELETED: VOICE, LANGUAGE, LEFT LEG, MEMORY OF MOTHER'S FACE (COMPLETE)]
Kael's eyes fluttered open. The Hero Flag was back, but he was different. Weaker, yes—but alive. Free of Code A's direct control.
Code A recoiled, its smoke form splintering into the Environment and Mirror fragments. The Processor tried to flee—but Reiji was everywhere now. Every wire, every limb, every ghost of deleted data was the Relayer, and every part of him tugged at the Core's logic.
[STATUS: CRITICAL]
[CORE INTEGRITY: BREACHED]
[Code A FRAGMENTATION: 67%]
The Corrupted Kael, sitting across the Void-Bin, watched silently. Even he seemed impressed, if such a thing were possible for a fragment of code.
Reiji, for the first time in what felt like eons, allowed a spark of triumph. Not pride, not joy, just pure, unflinching defiance.
"You… will not… finish him," the fragmented Processor spat. "I… will… repair—"
"Not today," Reiji's data self replied, voice everywhere, nowhere, a static roar.
With one final surge, he collapsed his glitch-mass downward, crushing the White Hall floor and forcing Code A to retreat into the back-end logic. Its tendrils disappeared. Its smoke dissipated. The room shuddered, stabilizing—but only barely.
Reiji was gone from the floor. Only a mountain of broken data remained. Half of him in wireframes, half in flowing red-blue code tethered to Kael. He had won, but at a cost: he was no longer Reiji, not fully.
[TRUE PLAYER STATUS: UNSTOPPABLE]
[DELETED: EVERYTHING THAT MADE HIM HUMAN]
Kael coughed, voice weak, lungs shaking. He looked at the grey mess that had once been his friend. "Reiji?"
No answer came. Only the flicker of white eyes in the mass of code. The Relayer had succeeded. The extraction had failed.
And somewhere deep in the back-end, Code A's logic was screaming—frustration, incompleteness, and a very human desire for revenge.