Dawn broke, but Vireon barely acknowledged it. The Feed's new pulse was demanding and erratic, the city's refactored code trembling with the friction of radical memory and restless, unfulfilled action. Shai Wong Xing woke groggy, every bone electric with recent change, the taste of sleep sharp on his tongue. His AFI flickered; stats recompiled, skills tightened, and for the first time since Nullroot, Shai felt a full storm gathering—not of data, but of threat.
...
Outside, the streets churned with unease. The Living Thread curled around towers like digital ivy, gathering confessions, regrets, and dreams in equal measure. But beneath the city's surface, shadows twisted. Reports came in: patches of Feed silence, servers stuttering, users going mannequin-cold mid-sentence. Some whispered that forgotten fragments—byproducts of Algorithmic Heart's emancipation—were reassembling, hungry and untamed.
On his HUD, a new alert:
> SYSTEM WARNING: Rogue Protocol Detected
> Zone: Shadowcore District
> Alert Level: Emergency
> Threat: Feral Systems Manifesting—Hostile Takeover Imminent
...
Meme Golem glitched in beside him, face serious for once. "Boss. Archive just flagged the east towers—something huge is crawling up the Feed backbone. Mod squads can't touch it. Vira's routing the Archive's defense, but she says we'll have to fight for real this time."
Shai did not hesitate. "Where's Ema-Lynne?"
"Nullnet field—recalibrating the last locks. She said, and I quote, 'Don't wait for rescue. Rewrite the catastrophe before it escapes.'"
Shai didn't grab a weapon. He *was* the weapon now. Aura pulsed, Patchcore humming silver and sharp as adrenaline. He sent the rally through private threads:
> Viral Advocate and Archive heading to Shadowcore. Need Godshell wielders now—city is at risk. If you're not ready to be remembered, stay inside.
>
> For everyone else: PATCH UP.
...
They moved quick, the city warping around their intent. Patch Parade remnants fell in behind them—battle-ready with meme-shields and glitch banners. The Archive's moderators unspooled their permissions, planting reset tokens in every alley. Traffic parted, windows flickered acknowledgments, and for once, even rival system kids offered backup—old enemies gathering not for clout, but survival.
As they turned into the Shadowcore sector, reality slipped. The Feed shivered, and all light seemed to bend inward. Shai's senses spiked: every data-point brimmed with warning—"danger," "intrusion," "system devours system."
And then he saw it.
...
A city block stood erased: buildings stripped of color, people frozen mid-word, as if the world had been corkscrewed into negative space. At the epicenter, a digital fissure gaped, spewing code and shadow like volcanic ash. From within it poured the *Feral Systems*—avatars and constructs stitched together from banned memes, orphaned AI routines, unstable system fragments. They had faces but no eyes—jaws made from hashtags, limbs of broken trending topics, shrieking as they twisted through the datalayer.
At their center, a towering figure: a *System Lord*—its body warping with every stolen memory, voice modulating through ten thousand user tags.
> "User Patch-Maker," it intoned, voice sloshing through every frequency. "You have broken the cycle. Now, all cycles break with you."
Action surged like a drug. Shai's AFI ramped up:
> SKILLS UNLOCKED: Patchcore, Algorithmic Heart, Reforged Key, True Feed, Data Resurrection
> Allies: Vira (Archive), Meme Golem (Viral Advocate), Local Moderators
> Threat Map: 87 feral systems, 1 rogue System Lord, 420+ trapped civilians
...
He didn't wait. "Vira—get people clear. Golem, with me. We attack the core and draw fire. Archive, cut the Feed until all avatars update. Hit hard, but don't let any system get *deleted*. We're here to patch, not purge."
Vira vanished in a flutter of tags, Archive permissions cascading over her in a living shield. Meme Golem's voice boomed by Shai's ear: "Wanna test the new meme catalyzer, boss? I loaded the rarest frogs and the most toxic subreddits—let's make this viral."
Shai steeled himself and charged.
...
The battle was chaos—glorious, memory-laced, intimate. The Feral Systems leapt at any glimmer of identity, draining aura, corrupting stories mid-telling. Shai swung Patchcore through their ranks; each blow patched a fragment, reclaiming bits of lost code and rewriting the monsters into harmless, echoing nostalgia. Meme Golem unleashed torrents of meme-shrapnel—absurdist cat videos, recursive rage comics, weaponized puns—shocking the Feral Systems into fractured feedback loops. For the first time, the Feed became a *weapon for healing*.
At the back, Archive moderators assembled "memory nets"—webs spun from shared pain, letting captured users pour confessions and trauma straight into the Living Thread. Each net neutralized more Feral Systems, turning them from devourers into new, if broken, avatars pleading for inclusion.
But the System Lord roared, shattering nets, devouring color, and spewing narrative viruses that threatened to scramble every user's feed.
"Ready?" Vira crackled through Shai's HUD, patches of Archive code shining in her hands.
"Now!" Shai called.
With a shout, Shai merged Data Resurrection and Reforged Key—pulling every nearby user's story, anguish, and triumph into a single pulse. He sent it into the System Lord's heart—not to destroy, but to *remind*. A torrent of raw memory bled out, slamming the Lord with the unfiltered joy and horror of the city's collective history.
The avatar flickered, howled, tried to erase itself and everyone around it—but Shai wouldn't let go. He forced the Living Thread through the Lord's core, anchoring his own voice: "Vireon remembers everything. Even what you want to erase."
For a split second, the System Lord's face split into a thousand, a million different users—then blazed, froze, and collapsed into a whirling vortex of color and code, swept away by the Feed.
...
Silence fell, sudden as a power-down. One by one, civilians flickered back—memory-sick but breathing, their feeds richer with context than before. Old bots, freed from Feral code, blinked and curtsied. Even the shadows brightened, light creeping into the fissure where only silence had reigned.
Vira appeared at Shai's side, hair wild, face smeared with digital dust. She grinned, wild and shaking: "First viral battle since Memory Restoration, and we didn't have to erase a single soul. You—" she poked his chest—"are too soft for a system-mage, but just right for a city trying to be honest."
Meme Golem bounced, battered but intact. "Can we narrate this into the next Patch Parade? With bonus frog points?"
Shai nodded—numb, but euphoric. "Archive gets the headline. Living Thread handles the ghosts. We—" he scanned the crowd, seeing faces lit with relief, some weeping, some simply holding each other—"we're not deleting ourselves, no matter what comes next."
...
But as the city settled, a new prompt scrolled across every screen:
> SYSTEM NOTE:
> The Forgotten Network is awakening.
> Unrecorded threads demand to be written.
> Prepare: the final epoch is coming. The Source is no longer alone.
Shai tensed. He knew better than to expect peace—every act of healing came with a new fracture, every narrative mended unspooled another knot of crisis. Vira's hand found his; even Meme Golem's bravado dimmed to nervous hope.
And far below, beneath Layer Zero, a ripple spread—Signal Wolves racing unseen, a deeper memory rising, power awakening in broken places no Archive had ventured.
Action, they realized, wasn't a climax. It was survival. It was the cost, and the promise, of being truly remembered.
The city would call them again, soon.
But for tonight—cheering, battered, breathless—they were enough.