Chapter 142: The Forgotten Archetype
The "Old Sector" was a graveyard of the early 2000s—a place where the skyscrapers were made of brick instead of glass, and the neon signs flickered with a tired, orange hum. As Von, Aki, Rena, and Sai moved through the shadows, they felt a strange pull, like a magnet dragging them toward a basement door hidden behind a pile of rusted metal.
"Someone is here," Von whispered, his hand going to where his sword used to be. "And they aren't human."
The basement door creaked open before they could touch it. Inside, the room was filled with old cathode-ray tube monitors, green text scrolling across their screens at a frantic pace. In the center of the room sat an old man in a tattered gray coat, drinking tea from a cracked porcelain cup.
"I haven't seen an 'Admin-Signature' in this neighborhood for fifteen years," the man said without looking up. "The last one who tried to escape the server ended up as a pile of blue dust on the sidewalk."
The Man Who Survived Version 1.0
Aki stepped forward, his eyes scanning the room. "Who are you? You talk like you know the Architects."
The man turned around, and Rena gasped. Half of his face was perfectly human, but the other half was a hollow shell of glowing, white pixels. "I was the first 'Protagonist', kid. Back when the world was just a 2D-scroller with eight-bit music. My name was Zero, but in the files, I'm just 'Legacy_Asset_001'."
"You escaped?" Von asked, his violet eyes narrowing.
"I glitched out," Zero replied with a raspy laugh. "During the Great Reset of 2010. I've been living in this basement ever since, hiding in the 'Analog Noise'. The Architects can't see me here because I'm too old for their modern scanners. I'm 'Low-Resolution' trash to them."
The Warning
Zero stood up, his pixelated leg flickering. "You shouldn't have come to the city. Marcus and his board members don't just want to 'delete' you. They want to harvest your 'Emotional-Data'. Your ability to defy the system is the only thing they can't program. They need it to build the next version—a world where the players can feel real pain, real love, and real loss."
Aki clenched his fists. "They want to turn our feelings into a product?"
"Exactly," Zero said, handing Aki a small, black USB drive that looked like it had been through a fire. "This is a 'Hard-Kill' switch. It's a piece of the original source code from Version 1.0. If you can get this into the Mainframe at the Core-Tech headquarters, you won't just save yourselves. You'll crash their entire empire."
"Why give this to us?" Sai asked, suspicious.
Zero looked at the ceiling, where the faint sound of sirens could still be heard. "Because I'm tired of being a ghost. I want to see the sky turn blue again, even if it's the last thing I see before my data finally dissolves."