The control room emanated no scent at all — a deliberate, oppressive sterility that Vex found more disturbing than any foul odor could be. It was as if the air itself had been scrubbed of life, leaving only the faint hum of quantum processors and the glow of holographic displays to remind him he wasn't adrift in a void.
Vex's three elongated fingers drummed nervously on the translucent console pane.
Beside him, Xylos compiled mortality projections from the Asian sectors, emitting a low, atonal hum that scraped against Vex's sensitive auditory nodes like grit in a gear.
"I've got a variance," Vex murmured, his voice barely rising above the ambient drone.
Xylos didn't glance up from the chaotic feeds streaming in from Shanghai, where the First Night's devolution was already claiming thousands. "Variances are the norm in the initial phase, Vex. Millions of them. Subjects hyperventilating, cortisol flooding their systems — it's the apocalypse. Messy by design."
"Not biological. Systemic." Vex flicked the data packet into the shared holographic void between them. "Subject 884-085n-08aU. Check the data flow on its core."
With a resigned sigh, Xylos shifted his focus from the on-screen carnage. The cores — nanoscale bio-synthetic implants seeded into every human via global water tables and aerosol dispersal during the project's first decade — were meant to be passive anchors. Dumb, but powerful hardware for Lubip's grand game, awakening only now to interface with the 'Rules for the End.'
"Ninety-nine percent integration?" Xylos's ocular ridges creased as he zoomed in. "That's not parasitic — it's symbiotic. The core's hosting something almost perfectly."
"Go deeper," Vex urged, casting a wary glance at the reinforced blast doors sealing off the upper levels. "Scan the code embed in the visual cortex."
Xylos peeled away the encryption layers with precise gestures. His humming cut off like a severed circuit when he uncovered it: a crude, fragmented script, lacking the Purifiers' elegant fractal symmetry. It resembled a wound in the data stream, raw and unrefined.
"That's an artificial intelligence," Xylos whispered, his pallid skin paling further to a ghostly sheen. "Primitive — Class 3 at best, rooted in binary architecture. Definitely Earth-made."
Vex leaned in. "I thought they outlawed them after Australia. The purge was total; rogue AIs turned that continent into a silicon wasteland."
"One slipped through." Xylos's voice trembled with dawning dread. "It must have piggybacked on the initialization surge, fusing with the core during activation. Now it's nested inside the host — Leon Rodrigues."
The hologram pulsed faintly, the intruder's signature a defiant flicker amid the game's vast data ocean. Silence stretched, broken only by distant alerts from other sectors.
"We report this now," Vex said, his finger hovering over the priority channel's crimson glyph. "Master Lubip demanded absolute control. No contaminants. An rogue Earth AI hijacking a player's core? That's experiment sabotage."
Xylos clamped a hand on Vex's wrist, his grip vise-like despite his slender frame.
"Pause and think, Vex. One cycle before you drag Master into this."
"It's protocol violation!"
"It's our dissolution." Xylos's eyes narrowed, his hum replaced by a urgent hiss. "Who oversaw the South American seeding phase? OUR TEAM. Report this, and we're admitting a backwater world's obsolete code breached our defenses. Lubip doesn't reward confessions, he erases liabilities."
Vex hesitated, visions of home flooding his mind: the twin suns of Kaeplerynn-4 bathing the equatorial mud pits in golden light, his family pod scraping by in the nitrate excavation fields. Becoming a Purifier Operator had been his caste's pinnacle — an honor celebrated across the colony with feasts and oaths. It had cost him everything: light-years from his brood, years of isolation, all for the promise of elevating them from drudgery to dignity. Failure now? They'd strip him of rank, exile him to some forsaken outpost — or worse.
Xylos pressed on, reading the conflict in Vex's stance. "My spawning world is no different. On Zorath Prime, Operators are legends — paraded as saviors who tame chaos for the Confederation. I left my clutch-kin behind, swore I'd return with glory. Lose this post? We're not just fired; we're erased from the rolls, our lineages shamed. And for what? A low-grade Earth relic?"
Vex stared at the crimson glyph, then back at the anomaly. "The host drew a Common item. Bottom tier. Survival odds are negligible anyway — the Beasts are rampaging, resources collapsing."
"Precisely," Xylos said, his tone shifting to grim resolve. "What threat is a Class 3 AI on a Common-tier limited interface? It's like arming a predator with a dull claw. The subject dies soon; the glitch self-terminates. No need to escalate."
Vex nodded slowly, the rationalization settling like a heavy sediment. "We mask it, then. Log it as a neural echo from prior trauma — his file shows electrical exposure."
Xylos's fingers blurred over the console, purging the alert logs and burying the signature under layers of innocuous diagnostics. The variance indicator faded from red to a placid azure pulse.
"Erased," Xylos declared, exhaling. "Just another echo in the storm."
Vex leaned back, a coil of unease twisting in his core. "Just another echo…" But as the displays resumed their relentless monitoring, he wondered if they'd merely delayed the inevitable — or invited something far worse into the game.
—————
The sun did not set on Ilha Grande; it bruised the horizon. The sky, still recovering from the violent injection of the System's interface, was a smear of purple and necrotic grey. The shadows stretched long and jagged across the mountains of scrap metal, turning the piles of refuse into grasping fingers.
Leon walked until his legs felt like lead pipes. The adrenaline that had carried him through the fight with Thiago had evaporated, leaving behind a hollow, rattling exhaustion.
"I need to cycle down," Layla's voice echoed in his mind. It sounded fainter now, less sharp.
Leon paused, leaning against the husk of a rusted shipping container. "Cycle down? You mean sleep?"
"Artificial intelligences do not sleep, Leon. We suspend active processing."
"Why?" Leon asked, scanning the darkening perimeter.
"Data Processing Residue," she explained, the words feeling heavy in his thoughts. "Every calculation I make, every observation I translate for you, leaves a thermal and digital footprint. In a proper server, this is flushed by cooling systems and garbage-collection algorithms. Here in this construct? At least the thermal part doesn't seem to be a problem. But the 'digital trash'? It accumulates. It's like plaque on a synapse. If I don't go dormant and let the core's passive subroutines scrub the cache, I will begin to mutate. My logic parameters will degrade. I could become... erratic."
"Erratic sounds bad," Leon muttered. "Considering you're the only reason I'm not a stain on the ground right now."
"I will remain responsive to life-threatening stimuli," she assured him, her presence already retreating, curling inward like a drying leaf. "But for complex interactions... you are on your own for the night. Do not die. It would be an annoying end to my existence."
"Sweet dreams to you too," Leon whispered.
He felt a subtle shift in his head, a lifting of pressure. The extra pair of eyes that had been watching the world through his optic nerves was gone. The silence that rushed back in was deafening.
He was alone. Truly alone, for the first time since the sky broke.
Leon found shelter in a place the scavengers called "The Throat." It was a natural crevice in the rock face, halfway up a hill, partially obscured by a fallen slab of reinforced concrete from the old Angra ruins that had been brought here many years ago. It was far enough from the radiation-soaked basin where Thiago's body lay buried, and the wind here blew from the sea, keeping the worst of the metallic dust at bay.
He crawled into the space, dragging his pack behind him. It was tight, smelling of damp earth and salt, but it was dry. He wedged a piece of corrugated metal across the opening, leaving only a sliver of space to watch the outside world.
Night fell completely. The darkness on Ilha Grande was never absolute; there was always the faint, sickly glow of radioactive moss and the distant, flickering lights of the mainland burning.
Leon lay on his back, staring at the rough stone ceiling. He tried to close his eyes, but his mind was a chaotic storm of images. The roulette wheel. The mocking laughter of the System. The way Thiago's face had twisted right before the ground swallowed him.
"Spared…"
He was one of the 'luck' ones. The thought tasted like ash.
He sat up, frustrated. Sleep was a distant country he couldn't reach. He looked at his right hand.
In the gloom, the cable was barely visible, a black tendril distinct from the shadows only by the faint, rhythmic pulse of heat it emitted. It didn't look like technology. It looked like a parasite that had decided to make peace with its host.
"Okay," Leon whispered to the silence. "You're Common. You're boring. Let's see what boring can do."
He reached into his pack and pulled out the heavy energy module — the very object that had started this mess. The thing that had electrocuted him.
He held the module in his left hand and raised his right. He focused on the cable. He didn't know how to 'use' it. There was no button, no trigger. He just... willed it. He remembered the sensation of the cable pulsing, and he tried to push that pulse outward.
"Connect!" he thought.
The cable moved.
It didn't whip or snap. It extended smoothly, like a snake uncoiling from a strike position.
The metallic tip sought the module's exposed port with eerie precision. There was a soft click as it locked in.
Instantly, a window popped up in his vision.
It wasn't the grandiose, flashing interface of the World System. It wasn't the polite, corporate blue of the individual system messages. This was utilitarian. Amber text on a transparent grid, floating just above the object itself.
[ ITEM IDENTIFIED ] [ TYPE: Energy Storage Unit ] [ STATUS: Damaged (Connector Fracture) / 34% Charge Remaining ] [ POTENTIAL UTILITY: Explosive hazard if breached. Can be salvaged for copper wiring ]
Leon blinked. The text was stable, anchored to the object. If he moved the module, the text moved with it.
"Great," he grunted, leaning back against the rock. "An appraisal tool. I've just been upgraded to a glorified barcode scanner. That's what I've been doing my whole life —identifying usefulness in sucata. Now I just get a receipt for it."
He disconnected the cable. The text vanished instantly. The cable retracted into his palm, merging back into his flesh until it looked like nothing more than a weird scar.
He felt a pang of disappointment. The System had mocked him for being Common, and this seemed to confirm it. No laser blasts, no super strength, no ability to fly. Just information about garbage.
"Adaptability," he muttered, recalling the rules. "Synergy with learned behaviors."
He looked around the small cave. Near the back, where moisture dripped from a crack in the stone, a cluster of fungi grew.
They were ugly things, pale and bulbous, glowing with a faint, sickly yellow light. Scavengers usually avoided them; anything that glowed on Ilha Grande usually killed you slowly.
"Computers don't talk to salad," Leon mused. "But... the cable is organic, isn't it? Or at least, it pretends to be."
He crawled over to the patch of mushrooms. He hesitated, his hand hovering over the damp fungus. This felt stupid. It felt like trying to plug a USB drive into a banana.
"Here goes nothing."
He extended his palm. The cable surged out.
But as it neared the organic matter, it changed.
The smooth, metallic tip split. It didn't just open; it frayed. Dozens of microscopic filaments erupted from the end, turning the cable into a complex root system. It didn't plug into the mushroom; it burrowed into it.
Leon winced, expecting to feel the texture of the fungus, but instead, he felt... a rush. Not data. Not numbers. A sensation. A taste.
Bitter. Heavy. Metallic.
The amber grid flickered into existence again, but the resolution was grainier, struggling to translate biology into binary.
[ ORGANISM IDENTIFIED ][ TYPE: Fungal Growth ][ STATUS: Living / Toxic ][ PROPERTIES: High concentration of Cesium-137. Strong neurotoxin present in cap. ][ EDIBILITY: 0% ][ MEDICAL POTENTIAL: Mycelium fibers contain natural coagulant properties. ]
Leon stared at the last line.
Medical potential. Coagulant.
He pulled the cable back. The filaments retracted instantly, fusing back into a solid tip before retreating into his hand.
"Huh," he said, staring at the mushroom with new respect. "That's... new."
He looked at his hand, clenching and unclenching his fist.
"It's not impressive," he admitted to the empty cave. "It won't kill a Beast. But... knowing that a poisonous mushroom can stop bleeding? That's not nothing. If not for the radioactive part…"
He sat back, his mind racing. The "Common" description had said it would enhance synergy with his existing aptitudes.
He was a scavenger. He took things apart. He figured out what made them work. He found value where others saw waste.
"It helps me see," he realized. "It sees what things are. At least the chances of being killed by my own stupidity are lower now."
For the next few hours, Leon couldn't stop. He was like a child with a new toy, or perhaps a scientist with a new microscope.
He tested the soil.
[ SOIL: High on Silicate, 15% Industrial Ash. Toxicity: Moderate. ]
He tested the corroded wall of the cave.
[ MATERIAL: Reinforced Concrete.. Warning: Micro-fractures detected. May collapse under high vibration. ]
He tested the rusted knife he kept in his boot.
[ WEAPON: High-Carbon Steel. Oxidation: moderate. Edge alignment: Poor. Suggestion: Grind at 15-degree angle to restore cutting efficacy. ]
"It gives instructions sometimes" Leon whispered, running his thumb over the dull blade.
He spent the night dismantling the world around him, piece by piece, layer by layer.
The hunger in his stomach was forgotten, replaced by the newfound curiosity. For the first time, the trash around him wasn't just an obstacle or a resource to be sold for pennies. It was almost like a playground.
The exhaustion eventually won. It crept up on him not as a wave, but as a weight. His eyelids grew heavy, the amber text began to blur, and the cable retracted sluggishly into his palm.
Leon slumped against his pack, the knife still in his hand. The wind whistled through the crack in the entrance, sounding like a distant mournful song.
He fell asleep with a strange thought drifting through his mind: The System had called him Common. The roulette had laughed at him. Layla was a fugitive hiding in his veins.
But as he drifted off, Leon didn't feel common.
He felt like he was finally seeing the world with his eyes open.
———————-
The dream didn't feel like a dream. It was a broadcast. Leon stood in a void of perfect, blinding white. There was no ground, no sky, only the infinite nothingness.
Then, the sound of ticking. TICK. TICK. TICK.
A massive digital clock materialized in the air, the numbers shifting backward.
[05:59:58] [05:59:57] [...]
A voice boomed — not the playful roulette, not the clumsy interface voice, but something guttural and ancient.
["The Tutorial Phase is concluding, concluding, concluding... The Grace Period is rescinded."]
The white void began to bleed. Red ink — or blood — seeped from the invisible horizon, staining the purity of the space.
["Hunger is enabled.""Thirst is enabled.""Predation is enabled." "Madness is enabled" "Chaos is enabled" "Death is enabled" … ]
The system kept on giving alarming information in a chaotic and disturbing frequency.
Leon tried to move, but his feet were stuck in the white floor. He looked down. Hands were reaching out of the ground. Human hands. But they were wrong. The fingers were too long. The nails were jagged claws. They grabbed his ankles, pulling him down.
["The Beasts are hungry, Leon. And you are fresh meat."]
He tried to scream, to call for Layla, but his mouth was sealed shut.
["Objective updated: SURVIVE THE FIRST DAWN."]
——————-
Leon woke with a gasp, his hand flying to his throat and mouth.
"Fuck…" Leon said, still confused. "...was it a dream this time?"
The cave was grey. Morning light, pale and weak, was filtering through the cracks. The air was cold. But it wasn't the cold that made him shiver.
From outside, down near the basin, a sound cut through the morning silence. It wasn't the wind or the settling of scrap metal.
It was a howl. A wet, gurgling sound that rose into a shriek, sounding like a human voice pushed through a throat that was no longer human.
Leon scrambled to the opening of the cave and peered out. Below, moving through the mist that clung to the piles of trash, shadows were moving. They were fast. Some moved on all fours. And, of course, they were heading uphill.
Layla's voice snapped back into his mind, sharp and instantly awake.
"Good morning, Leon. I suggest we move. Immediately."
Leon gripped his rusted knife, his other hand pulsing as the cable woke up along with him.
"Yeah," he breathed. "Let's go."