System Fact #042: The human body naturally produces roughly 20 watts of excess thermal energy. In Version 9.0, this is flagged as an 'inefficient emotional leak' and suppressed. True warmth, therefore, is technically illegal.
Silas hit the grass hard, tumbling across the glowing, bioluminescent turf of his pocket dimension.
The "Sanctuary" was a sprawling, twilight-lit garden floating in an endless void of deleted data streams. It was messy, overgrown, and entirely undocumented by the Global System.
He scrambled to his knees. "Hey! Hey, stay with me."
The girl was lying on the grass, but she was losing cohesion fast. Her legs from the knees down had already turned into floating golden binary code. She clutched her chest, her breathing shallow.
"Error..." she whispered, her eyes flickering like a broken monitor. "Directory not found. Who... who am I? The Archive is... burning."
"You're not burning. You're just disconnected from the main server," Silas said, his mind racing. As a former developer, he knew what was happening. She was a massive database of magic, but without the System to supply her with ambient mana, her physical avatar was starving to death.
"Cold," she whimpered, curling into a ball. "Everything is so cold."
There was only one way to stabilize an orphaned program. It required a physical, manual override—a "Deep Sync." Silas had to act as her temporary server, feeding his own soul-mana directly into her core.
"This is going to feel weird," Silas warned. He took off his gloves.
He gently grabbed her bare shoulders, pulling her against his chest. She gasped at the contact. Silas closed his eyes and forced his mana circuits open, pushing his raw, unoptimized energy into her glitching frame.
The reaction was explosive.
A shockwave of warm, golden light blasted outward, flattening the grass around them. The digital artifacts eating away at her legs froze, then slowly began to weave themselves back into pale, smooth skin.
Silas gritted his teeth. It felt like trying to pour a river into a teacup. The drain on his stamina was immense, but the girl let out a soft, shuddering sigh of relief. The frantic flickering in her cyan eyes stabilized, replaced by a deep, soulful glow. She looked up at him, her face inches from his, her cheeks suddenly flushing with a very human, very un-programmed blush.
"You..." she breathed, her voice finally clear and melodic. "You have terrible firewall protocols. I can feel all of your thoughts."
Silas chuckled weakly, sweat dripping down his brow as he maintained the flow of magic. "Yeah, well, I'm a little out of practice. I'm Silas."
She reached up, her small hand resting hesitantly against his cheek. The warmth of his mana was radiating through her.
"I am the Grand Archive," she said softly, before a tiny, embarrassed smile tugged at her lips. "But... I think you can call me Aria."