The storm came from the Glitch-Zones, a howling front of charged particles and strobing lightning that turned the sky into a cracked mirror. Gareth watched it from the throne room of Terminus, the light painting his still, scarred face in pulses of purple and green. His workshop below was tidy, his latest Hunter dissections cataloged, his defenses flawless. The culling, the cruelty, the dark artistry—it had become routine. A satisfying craft, but a craft nonetheless. The hollow hum in his chest had begun to resonate with a new, deeper frequency. Not boredom. Anticipation. For what, he didn't know.
As the storm's fury began to ebb, leaving behind a strange, electrically-charged calm, he descended to the lower levels. The building had a pulse during such storms; old, shielded systems in the sub-basements sometimes flickered to life, vomiting up ghosts of data. He was hunting for a specific ghost.
In the deepest sub-level, in a flooded server vault now home only to blind, albino scavenger-rats, he found it. The door was warped, sealed by a century of rust. He peeled it back with a shriek of metal. Inside, the air was dead and cold. A single workstation, built into the wall, was illuminated by the faint, dying glow of a bioluminescent fungus creeping across its screen. A thick layer of dust and crystalline mineral deposits covered everything.
He brushed the deposits away from the console. Beneath was a data-slate, its surface fused to the desk by time. He pried it loose, the ancient composite cracking in his hands. A hairline fracture split the dark screen.
He touched the power node. Nothing. He channeled a minuscule, precise current from his own [COUNTER] systems into the slate's dead port.
The screen flickered. Once. Twice. Then, with a pained, electronic sigh, it glowed to a sickly, unstable grey.
Lines of corrupted text scrambled across it, fighting with glitch-artifacts—geometric shapes, fractal snow, fragments of faces that weren't human. It was pre-Collapse data, scrambled by the very event that had ended the world, then further mutated by decades of Glitch-Zone radiation.
He scrolled. Most of it was gibberish. Logistical reports for "Terminus Financial" that dissolved into strings of prime numbers. Personnel files that became screaming sound-wave patterns.
Then, a string of characters, repeated in fragmented headers, partially redacted lines, and corrupted document tags, caught his eye. It was a word that seemed to repel the corruption around it, remaining stark and clear amidst the digital entropy:
ARBITECH.
Seeing it was like a synaptic lightning strike. A physical jolt went through him. His own internal systems, the deep, hidden architecture of his [COUNTER] ability and the viral essence of his creation, thrummed in resonance. It wasn't a memory. It was a key turning in a lock he hadn't known was there.
He leaned closer, his breath fogging the cracked screen. He forced more power into the slate. It hissed, threatening to die.
More fragments coalesced.
"...Arbitech oversight mandatory for all Erebus-class research..."
"...containment breach of the Erebus vector led to catastrophic cascade..."
"...Arbitech solutions deployed for population stabilization..."
"...final Arbitech protocol: sanitization of compromised zones..."
Erebus.
The word landed in his gut like a lump of cold lead. Erebus. The name of the variant abilities at Arcadia. Lyra's photonic sculpting. Riven's kinetic mastery. His own [COUNTER]. They'd always just been… powers. Gifts. Curses.
This data suggested they were something else. A class. A category of research.
And "Arbitech" was the overseer. The authority. The… sanitizer.
His mind raced, making terrible, intuitive leaps. The "bionic virus" that had created the Zombots, that he carried within him—was that the "Erebus vector"? A tool of this "Arbitech"? Was his very existence, and the apocalypse that followed, not an accident, but a containment breach? A failed experiment that "Arbitech solutions" had tried to "stabilize"?
And the "final protocol: sanitization"... Did that mean the Zombot plague, the extermination of 95% of humanity… was that Arbitech's solution? Its way of cleaning up the mess?
Was he not a failed experiment, but a piece of evidence? A surviving sample from a lab that had decided to burn itself down?
A new, all-consuming fire ignited in the void where his heart used to be. It was not rage. It was a need so profound it dwarfed his hunger for violence, his sadistic curiosity. It was the need for origin.
Who made him? Why? What was the purpose of the power in his veins? Was he a weapon, a mistake, or a target?
He looked down at his hands. The hands that could unravel machines and break men. Were they shaped by the same cold, vast intelligence that had possibly engineered the end of the world?
The obsession shifted. The Hunters, Chaos, The Burrow, even his own solitary reign in Terminus—it all suddenly felt like… set dressing. A local drama played out on the scorched stage of a much larger, more horrific crime scene.
He had to know. He had to find more. He had to find Arbitech.
A new directive overwrote all others in his mind. A primary objective.
UNRAVEL THE SOURCE.
The data slate finally died with a soft pop, the screen going dark forever. He dropped it. It shattered on the floor.
He stood in the silent, dark vault, the ghost of the word Arbitech hanging in the air, a hook in his soul.
The predator was still there. The scourge was still there. But now they had a direction. The violence wasn't an end in itself anymore. It was a tool. A means to carve a path through the lies and the ruin, back to the first, terrible truth.
He turned and walked out of the sub-basement, back up towards his throne. The storm was gone. The wastes outside were quiet. But inside Gareth Lancer, a hurricane of purpose had begun to spin. He wasn't just playing Chaos's game anymore. He was looking for the rules. And he had a terrifying suspicion they were written in the source code of his own damned existence.