The South Docks were a graveyard of rusted iron and salt-cracked concrete. As Arthur and Sarah approached the Silvano Cartel's main warehouse, the atmosphere shifted. The air didn't just feel cold; it felt thin, as if reality itself were being stretched too far.
A low-frequency hum vibrated through the pavement, rattling Arthur's teeth. His Spirit Vision flickered violently, struggling to process the visual data.
[WARNING: ENTERING INSTANCED ZONE – 'THE SILVANO NEST']
[REALITY STABILITY: 64% AND DROPPING]
"Instanced zone?" Arthur whispered. "The System isn't just watching us anymore. It's claiming territory. It's eating the city."
Sarah checked the slide of her 9mm. Earlier that evening, Arthur had used Ghost Reach to "tune" the weapon. The metal now pulsed with a faint, pearlescent sheen, and the bullets inside felt heavier, laden with the weight of erased timelines. "Boss, the guards at the gate... they aren't breathing. Look at their auras. They look like static on a dead TV."
Arthur looked. The two guards didn't have the flickering gray auras of humans. They were jagged silhouettes of neon-green code. Their eyes were vacant, leaking a faint, glowing vapor.
"They aren't men anymore, Sarah. They're 'Thralls'—hollowed-out shells serving as System nodes. Don't aim for the head. Aim for the green flicker in their sternum. That's the pilot."
[The Breach]
They didn't sneak. Stealth was for the weak, and Arthur was a Hunter.
Two blocks away, a series of gas mains "accidentally" detonated. It wasn't luck; it was Arthur's Market Intuition predicting the exact structural weakness of the city's aging infrastructure. As the guards turned toward the roar of the fire, Sarah moved.
She was a blur of lethal, augmented grace. She closed the thirty-yard gap in three seconds. With Timeline Echo feeding her the guards' next moves, she moved like a dancer in a room full of statues.
Crack. Shatter.
She drove her "Ghost-tuned" knife into their chests. Instead of blood, a spray of green pixels erupted. The guards collapsed like puppets with their strings cut.
"Inside," Arthur commanded. "Before the System sends a patch."
[The Geometry of the Void]
The interior of the warehouse was a nightmare. Logic had been discarded. Dozens of massive shipping containers were floating in mid-air, rotating slowly in a gravitational current that didn't exist. The walls were covered in pulsating violet veins that looked like a digital nervous system.
In the center of the room, held within a cage of laser-wire that hummed with a lethal frequency, sat the Core Fragment.
It was a jagged shard of obsidian and light, the size of a human heart. It didn't just glow; it throbbed. Every pulse sent a shockwave through the room that made the floating containers groan.
"It's beautiful, isn't it?" a voice echoed from the rafters.
Elena dropped from a height of forty feet, landing silently on a floating crate. She looked different—shaper, colder. Her eyes were a piercing violet. "You're late, Ghost. The Don isn't human anymore. He didn't just find that Fragment; he consumed a piece of it. He's become a System Elite."
[The Boss: Silvano the Void-Born]
From the darkness at the back of the warehouse, a titan emerged. Don Silvano had once been a man of silk suits and cigar smoke. Now, he was a seven-foot-tall horror of distorted muscle and obsidian skin. His right arm had fused into a crystalline blade three feet long, humming with the sound of a thousand screaming voices.
[BOSS ENCOUNTER: SILVANO THE VOID-BORN (LVL 15)]
"Arthur Vance..." the creature boomed, the sound vibrating in Arthur's very bones. "The Admin told me you would come. He said if I offered him your heart, I could keep the Fragment. I could stay... like this... forever."
"He lied to you, Silvano," Arthur said, his hand beginning to glow with the cold, blue light of Ghost Reach. "He's just using you to stress-test my new abilities. You're not a King. You're a bug-report."
"Then let us see if you can debug me!" Silvano roared, his feet cracking the concrete as he charged.
[The Battle of the Docks]
"Sarah! Suppressive fire! Elena, take out the gravity anchors!" Arthur barked.
Sarah opened fire. Her "Ghost-tuned" rounds carved lines of white light through the dark. Each hit didn't just wound Silvano; it acted as a "Reality Anchor," slowing his supernatural speed. Elena moved like a shadow, planting charges on the floating containers above the Don's head.
Arthur activated Timeline Echo.
He saw the next five seconds: Silvano would swing the crystal blade in a wide arc, Sarah would try to parry and be crushed, and the floor would give way.
"Sarah, slide! Five degrees right!"
She moved perfectly. The crystal blade whistled through the air, shearing a steel pillar in half as if it were butter.
Arthur lunged. He didn't go for the Don's chest. He used Ghost Reach to grab the gravity around the Core Fragment itself. He yanked it toward him.
The Fragment shrieked. The sudden shift in gravitational force pulled Silvano backward, throwing off his center of gravity.
"Now, Elena!"
The charges detonated. Three multi-ton shipping containers slammed down onto the Don, pinning him to the floor in a symphony of screaming metal. Arthur leaped onto the pile, his hand glowing like a dying star. He thrust his hand through the obsidian skin of Silvano's chest.
"I'm taking back what you stole," Arthur growled.
He didn't pull out a heart. He pulled out a pulsing, violet parasite—the piece of the System that had been hollowing out the man's soul.
[ELITE DELETED. +5,000 EXP. CORE FRAGMENT SECURED.]
[The Final Revelation]
As Silvano's body dissolved into gray ash, the warehouse stabilized. The containers fell to the floor with a series of deafening thuds. The violet veins on the walls withered and died.
Arthur stood in the center of the wreckage, holding the glowing Core Fragment. It felt warm. It felt... familiar.
[CORE FRAGMENT 1/7 ACQUIRED]
[SYSTEM ACCESS: LEVEL 2]
[NEW ABILITY: 'REALITY EDIT' (RANK: F)]
Elena walked up to him, her expression unreadable. "You did it. But do you know what you're holding, Arthur? These Fragments aren't just power sources. They are 'Save Files'. They are pieces of the 'Original' 2025—the world that existed before the System reset everything to hide the truth."
Arthur looked at the Fragment. It felt like a piece of his own soul. "The world was destroyed? By who?"
Elena looked him dead in the eye, her voice a whisper that felt like a scream. "By the person who created the System to save what was left. The person the Man in White calls 'Father'. Arthur... in the original timeline, the Great Disaster wasn't an accident. It was your masterpiece. You are the one who ended the world."
The Core Fragment in Arthur's hand pulsed once—a beat of pure, terrifying recognition. He didn't just remember the future anymore.
He remembered the blood on his hands.