The T-34 didn't roar. It hummed like a giant, angry refrigerator.
"Hold onto your teeth!" Taranov screamed over the whine of the hover-pads.
The tank drifted sideways, smashing through a grove of petrified trees. The wood didn't splinter; it burst into showers of grey polygons.
Jake stood in the commander's hatch, wind tearing at his face. He looked back.
The bunker they had just left was gone.
Not destroyed. Gone.
A wall of absolute white nothingness was eating the world. It moved steadily, silently deleting the swamp. The mud, the fog, the toxic reeds—everything the white wall touched simply ceased to exist.
"The Purge isn't an attack!" Jake yelled down into the turret. "It's a format command!"
"It's fast!" Valentina shouted, her hands flying across the gunner controls. "It's moving faster than we are!"
"Push the engine!"
"I'm at 110%!" Taranov yelled back. "The fusion core is glowing red! If I push it harder, we turn into a nuclear bomb!"
"Better a bomb than a null variable!" Jake snapped.
A screech tore through the air above them.
Jake looked up.
Three shapes dropped from the purple clouds. They looked like fighter jets, but their wings were jagged, unfinished wireframes. They trailed exhaust that looked like black ink.
"Hunter-Killers!" Yuri's voice buzzed from Jake's wrist. "The Director has allocated air support."
The lead jet dove. A beam of red light erupted from its nose.
ZZZ-CRACK.
The beam hit the swamp water ten yards to their left. The water didn't boil. It turned into glass instantly, then shattered into a million pixels.
"They're rewriting the terrain!" Oppenheimer shrieked from inside the tank. "They're trying to trap us in geometry!"
"Valentina, shoot!" Jake ordered.
"The railgun takes five seconds to charge!" she yelled. "They're too fast!"
"I'll buy you time!"
Jake scrambled out of the hatch onto the hull of the moving tank. The wind threatened to blow him off, but his magnetic boots—loot from the bunker—locked onto the armor.
He grabbed the barrel of the pintle-mounted heavy machine gun.
He racked the slide.
"Eat lead!" Jake roared.
He opened fire.
The gun chugged, spitting glowing green tracers.
He aimed for the lead jet. The bullets hit the wireframe wing.
-5 HP. -5 HP. -5 HP.*
"It's barely scratching them!" Jake cursed. "Their armor value is too high!"
The jet banked, coming around for another pass. Its red eye-lens locked onto Jake.
"Dad, incoming!" Yuri warned.
The jet fired a missile.
It wasn't a physical missile. It was a ball of chaotic, glitching code.
"Brace!"
Taranov jerked the steering yokes. The hover-tank drifted hard to the right, sliding over the mud like a hockey puck.
The glitch-missile hit the spot where they had been.
VOOOOM.
A sphere of silence expanded. A radius of fifty feet was instantly deleted. A perfect spherical hole appeared in the swamp, cutting through trees and water down to the bedrock.
"That wasn't an explosive," Oppenheimer whimpered. "That was a texture void!"
"Valentina!" Jake slammed his hand on the turret. "Now!"
"Charged!" she screamed.
The main gun hummed with a terrifying blue light. The coils along the barrel screamed.
THOOM.
A railgun slug—a solid bar of tungsten accelerated to Mach 7—tore through the air.
It hit the lead jet dead center.
There was no damage number. There was just a blue flash.
The jet disintegrated. It turned into a cloud of binary rain that fell harmlessly into the swamp.
"One down!" Taranov cheered. "Two to go!"
"Battery drain critical!" Yuri reported. "That shot cost us 15% power. We cannot sustain fire."
"We need speed," Jake looked at the map on his HUD. "Where is the highway?"
"Two miles!" Yuri said. "But there is a terrain gap."
"A what?"
"The map didn't finish loading," Yuri said calmly. "There is a chasm between the Swamp Biome and the City Biome."
"How big?"
"Fifty meters."
Jake looked at the heavy tank. It hovered, but it couldn't fly.
"Taranov," Jake said into the comms. "Do you trust me?"
"With my life, Boss. Not with my vodka."
"We're going to jump it."
"Jump a tank?" Taranov laughed. It sounded manic. "Okay. Let's get air."
The white wall of deletion was closing in. The swamp was almost gone. They were racing on the last strip of rendered land.
The remaining two jets dove again.
"Ignore them!" Jake yelled. "Eyes on the horizon!"
The trees cleared.
Ahead, the world simply ended.
The swamp stopped in a straight line. Beyond it was a black void. And fifty meters away, a broken highway hung in space, leading toward the glowing skyline of Neo-Moscow.
"We're not going to make it!" Valentina shouted. "We don't have the velocity!"
"We have the Admin," Jake said.
He kneeled on the hull. He placed his chrome hand on the engine vents.
Heat radiated into his palm. It burned, but he didn't pull away.
"Yuri, reroute the life support systems," Jake ordered. "Dump everything into the thrusters."
"That will disable the gravity stabilizers," Yuri warned. "The ride will be... turbulent."
"Do it!"
The jets fired again. Lasers scorched the armor plate next to Jake's leg.
"Punch it, Taranov!"
Taranov slammed the pedals.
The tank hit the edge of the world.
For a second, silence.
They sailed into the void. The heavy machine hung in the darkness, suspended between two realities.
Gravity tried to pull them down into the endless black. The nose of the tank dipped.
"We're falling short!" Valentina screamed.
Jake closed his eyes. He visualized the code. Not the physics, but the rule set.
OBJECT: TANK.
MASS: REDUCE.
His chrome arm flared white. Pain shot up his shoulder, burning through his nervous system. His vision pixelated.
The tank shuddered.
For one second, it weighed nothing. It was a feather made of steel.
The thrusters roared, pushing the feather forward.
CLANG.
The treads smashed onto the asphalt of the highway. Sparks showered the road. The suspension groaned, metal screaming against metal.
They skidded sideways, screeching across the broken pavement, before slamming into a rusted guardrail.
They stopped.
Jake lay on the hull, gasping. His Admin arm was smoking. His health bar in the corner of his eye was flashing red. HP: 40%.
"We... landed," Taranov wheezed from inside.
Jake sat up. He looked back.
The chasm was wide. The two jets pulled up, unable to cross the boundary line. They circled in the air, screeching in frustration, before turning back toward the swamp.
The white wall of the Purge stopped at the edge of the void. It couldn't cross the gap.
"We're safe," Jake whispered.
He looked forward.
Neo-Moscow loomed ahead.
It was terrifying.
The city was a fortress of black glass and red neon. Massive hologram towers projected propaganda into the sky.
OBEY THE DIRECTOR.
OPTIMIZE YOUR ROUTINE.
REPORT GLITCHES.
And surrounding the city was a wall. Not stone. Laser grids. Red laser grids that reached into the clouds.
"That's a lot of security," Menzhinsky's trembling voice came over the radio.
"It's a firewall," Oppenheimer corrected. "A physical one."
Jake climbed down into the hatch. The inside of the tank smelled of ozone and sweat.
"Is the railgun operational?" Jake asked.
"One shot left," Valentina said, patting the breach. "Before the battery dies completely."
"One shot," Jake nodded. "That's all we need to knock on the door."
"Knock?" Taranov grinned, wiping blood from his nose. "I think we're going to kick it in."
"Let's go," Jake said. "Drive."
The tank lurched forward, rolling down the highway toward the city that was waiting to delete them.
But Jake wasn't planning on being deleted. He was planning on rewriting the script.
And he had a tank.