The city reacted before it could think.
That was how Qin Mian knew something had gone wrong.
Systems that prided themselves on patience, calculation, and layered authorization skipped entire chains of approval and jumped straight to a response buried deep in their oldest logic.
Eliminate before destabilization spreads.
No negotiation.
No analysis.
Just action.
Kill-Response Protocols Activate
Across six sectors, lights died at once.
Not flickering—cut.
Emergency red flooded corridors as blast shutters slammed down with bone-shaking force. Transit shafts sealed. Elevation locks reversed direction mid-cycle, crushing anything inside them.
Yin Lie felt the shift immediately.
The air changed density.
Space grew hostile.
"They didn't just deploy units," Kai said sharply. "They rewrote the environment."
The first kill-response team emerged from the walls themselves—panels peeling back to reveal armored figures stepping out of spaces that had not existed a second earlier.
No insignia.
No identification.
They raised weapons and fired.
There Is No Warning Shot
The corridor detonated.
A kinetic round tore through reinforced concrete, vaporizing steel supports like paper. The shockwave hurled Yin Lie sideways, slamming him into the far wall hard enough to crack ribs.
The drift surged instinctively.
Ice burst outward, freezing debris mid-flight as Yin Lie twisted, kicking off a suspended slab and flipping over another incoming round that shredded the space where his head had been.
Kai fired while moving—clean, efficient, brutal.
Two visors shattered.
The bodies hit the ground already dead.
The remaining units didn't hesitate.
They stepped over their fallen without breaking formation.
Hunters That Do Not Chase
These weren't hunters.
Hunters pursued.
These units anticipated.
Their targeting didn't follow Yin Lie's movement—it tracked probability. Shots detonated ahead of him, collapsing gravity wells and shredding corridors before he arrived.
"They're firing at futures!" Kai shouted.
Yin Lie slammed his palm into the floor.
Ice raced outward, freezing the suppression grid just as it activated. The floor cracked violently, jagged spikes erupting upward and catching one unit mid-stride, impaling it through the chest.
Another leapt.
Too fast.
Yin Lie grabbed it.
The drift howled.
Space folded inward.
The unit's body twisted unnaturally, bones snapping as geometry collapsed around it. Its weapon fired uselessly as it died.
The others adjusted again.
Below the City, Qin Mian Breaks in Real Time
Qin Mian screamed.
Not because of fear.
Because something inside her failed to route correctly.
Her Anchor convulsed as the foundational layer beneath the city shifted again, rerouting immense structural stress through her body like a living conduit.
Something tore.
She felt it.
A tearing sensation across her chest, deep and wet.
She coughed blood.
"No— stop— please—!" she sobbed, fingers clawing uselessly at the smooth floor.
The presence beneath her did not retreat.
It compensated.
Load redistribution required.
Structural integrity prioritized.
Pain exploded through her spine.
Her body arched violently as muscles locked and nerves screamed. Her vision fractured into shards of light.
The First Human Limit Is Passed
Her left arm went numb.
Not tingling.
Gone.
She stared at it in disbelief, watching her fingers lie still as if they belonged to someone else.
"I can't feel it," she gasped.
"I can't move it—!"
The city tried to intervene.
CRITICAL MEDICAL FAILURE DETECTED
ALIGNMENT RECOMMENDED
The suggestion was crushed instantly.
The pain returned sharper, colder.
Her bones screamed.
Her heartbeat slowed—unnaturally slow.
Something inside her clicked.
Yin Lie Feels the Change
Yin Lie staggered mid-fight.
The resonance snapped sharp and wrong, sending a spike of nausea through him.
"She's collapsing," he snarled.
Kai rolled behind a shattered support beam, reloading without looking. "Then move faster."
Another squad dropped in behind them.
Then another.
The corridor was no longer a path.
It was a grinder.
He Stops Holding Reality Together
Yin Lie stopped restraining the drift.
Not fully.
But enough.
He slammed both fists forward—not at the hunters, but at the structure of the corridor itself.
Reality buckled.
Walls twisted sideways. Floors folded upward like sheets of metal. Space misaligned violently, crushing three units instantly as geometry collapsed around them.
The survivors adapted again.
Containment fields flared, trying to reassert order.
Yin Lie roared and pushed harder.
Blood streamed from his nose.
His vision doubled.
But the corridor broke.
Qin Mian Stabilizes… Wrong
Back in the chamber, Qin Mian screamed as sensation flooded back into her dead arm.
Wrong sensation.
Her fingers twitched—then curled.
Her arm moved.
"…What's happening to me?" she whispered in terror.
Her heartbeat slowed further.
Her breathing stabilized despite the damage.
Pain remained—but it no longer threatened unconsciousness.
The presence answered without mercy:
Stabilization achieved.
Human thresholds exceeded.
Tears streamed down her face.
"I don't want this," she sobbed.
Irrelevant.
The Director Watches the Mistake Unfold
The Director stared at cascading feeds.
Casualties rising.
Reality deformation spreading across nine sectors.
And Qin Mian's vitals—
"They're not human parameters anymore," an analyst whispered.
The Director's jaw tightened.
"…We forced the foundation to compensate," she said.
She exhaled slowly.
"We didn't suppress an anomaly," she said quietly.
"We created a structural one."
The City Bleeds Geometry
Above Yin Lie, the city warped.
Floors bent at impossible angles. Corridors twisted into overlapping paths. Gravity shifted in pulses, slamming bodies into ceilings one second and pinning them to the floor the next.
Hunters continued advancing—disciplined, relentless.
But now they were dying slower.
And learning less.
End of the Chapter
Yin Lie stood amid shattered corridors and frozen corpses, breath ragged, power ripping dangerously close to collapse.
Above him, the city bled geometry.
Below it, Qin Mian lay broken—but holding something vast, something that refused to let her die.
Her body was no longer entirely hers.
The cost had arrived.
Not as theory.
Not as systems.
But as blood, broken flesh, and a reality that had started to bite back.
And this time—
no one could pretend this was reversible.
Somewhere deep inside the city's core, systems that had never failed before began issuing delays measured not in milliseconds, but in uncertainty.
Containment maps no longer matched real space. Predictive models lost confidence ratings. Entire blocks of the city were quietly flagged as unstable, not because they were collapsing, but because they no longer obeyed expected causality.
No alarms sounded.
That silence was deliberate.
Because sounding an alarm would mean admitting something the city was not designed to say:
That the problem was no longer spreading.
It was anchoring.
And at the center of that anchor lay a girl whose body was breaking, whose humanity was thinning, and whose existence had already begun to rewrite the definition of stability itself.
Far above, the Director closed her eyes for half a second.
Then she opened them—and prepared the city for a decision it had never wanted to make.