The deeper she moved into the city's infected zone, the more the world unraveled.
Gravity flickered in brief waves. Some streets tried to run uphill. Traffic lights blinked colors that didn't exist. Broken reflections shivered inside puddles, showing skies from dead worlds.
She didn't slow.
The world sensed her. And it hated her.
[Access Denied]
[Entity Classification: Unknown. Interface Rejection]
[System Defense. Activating Node Firewall]
The tower reacted.
From the surrounding blocks, the buildings moaned. Stone cracked, windows shattered, and something began to rise from beneath the concrete. Not creatures. Constructs. Bodies grown out of code and bone. Veins that wrapped around rebar. Skulls filled with wire and rust.
Six of them. Towering. Rooted to the city like tumors. Their hollow faces turned toward her.
She tilted her head.
"Firewall," she said. "Ironic."
They moved.
Not fast, but deliberate. Like executioners with purpose.
She raised her hand. The sky above dimmed, just for her.
And then they struck.
One lunged with jagged limbs. She stepped aside with no effort. Her palm brushed its chest as it passed.
The construct shattered inward. No explosion. No scream. Just erasure.
Another came from her left. She turned her head slightly and it simply crumpled, like a building folding into dust under the weight of time.
The other four paused. Conflicted. The system behind them flickered.
They weren't just guards. They were algorithms given flesh. Programs set to kill intrusions.
And she was more than intrusion.
She was an anomaly.
The sky above her cracked once more.
Far away, inside a place no human had ever reached, an alarm rang across something ancient and watching.
[High-Level Contamination Detected]
[Deploying Tier Two Cleanser]
[Administrator Attention. Requested]
The girl stopped in the center of the street and looked up.
A rift opened above her.
And something stepped through.
Not a crawler. Not a node creature. Not even system-born.
This was different.
White like bone. Smooth like glass. A humanoid frame wearing a mask of shifting symbols. It didn't breathe. It didn't speak.
It pointed a finger at her.
A single word appeared in the air above its hand.
[Cleanse]
She narrowed her eyes.
"Try."