The Cleaners moved with a nightmarish, synchronized precision that made the previous Admin's power feel almost abstract. This was different. This was personal. There was no wasted motion, no grand pronouncements, just the relentless, piston-driven advance of three machines built for one purpose: deletion. Their featureless silver helms didn't track Ash and Nova; they simply acquired them, like targeting systems locking on.
"Run!" The word was out of Ash's mouth before his brain had fully processed the new, more visceral terror. This wasn't an Admin with convoluted protocols to exploit. This was a scalpel, and they were the infection.
He and Nova broke into a desperate sprint, crashing through the undergrowth. Behind them, the lead Cleaner raised its arm. There was no energy net, no fancy spell effect. A port on its wrist irised open and a projectile the size of a dart shot out with a sound like a suppressed cough. It wasn't aimed at them. It shot past Ash's head and embedded itself in a tree trunk directly in their path.
The tree didn't freeze or shatter. It simply… unraveled. The bark, the wood, the leaves—everything within a three-foot radius of the dart dissolved into a cloud of shimmering, disconnected pixels that then winked out of existence, leaving a perfect, silent hole in the world.
"They are utilizing a localized matter de-rendering algorithm!" Nova cried, her voice pitched high with a terror that was now entirely her own. "Physical cover is not a viable strategy!"
"You think?!" Ash yelled, swerving to avoid another tree that was suddenly missing its middle. The Cleaners weren't even running. They were marching, a steady, unhurried pace that was somehow gaining on them. They didn't need to hurry. They were just pruning.
Ash's mind raced, scrabbling for purchase against the sheer, overwhelming efficiency of their hunters. His beta knowledge was a map of a world that didn't exist anymore. These things weren't part of any game he'd tested. They were new. They were specific.
He fumbled the [Phoenix Down] feather from his pocket, its warmth a tiny comfort against the cold dread. The quest. An Echo of Dawn. It had to be the key. The ping he'd felt—the dormant tutorial server, the Sanctuary. It was their only hope.
"The signal!" he gasped, dodging as another de-rendering dart turned a patch of ferns into nothingness. "The ping from the tutorial instance! Can you trace it? Can you navigate?"
Nova's eyes flickered, her internal systems struggling against the overwhelming threat data. "The signal is faint. It is buried under layers of active world data. It is… a whisper." A dart sizzled past her shoulder, erasing a bird mid-flight from the sky. She flinched. "I cannot triangulate and run simultaneously! The processing load is too great!"
An idea, born of pure desperation, hit Ash. It was the dumbest thing he'd ever considered, and that was saying something. "Then don't run! Stop!"
He grabbed her arm and skidded to a halt, turning to face the advancing Cleaners. They were twenty yards away and closing, their blank faces offering no quarter.
"What are you doing?!" Nova shrieked, trying to pull him forward.
"Trust me!" Ash begged, his heart hammering against his ribs like it wanted out. He thrust the [Apprentice's Staff] into her hands. "You're connected to the world stream! I'm not! Channel the signal! Use the staff as an antenna! Find that whisper!"
He turned to face the Cleaners, putting himself between them and Nova. He had his pathetic leather tunic and his fists. He was a speedbump. A very, very squishy speedbump.
The lead Cleaner's arm rose again, the wrist-port taking aim directly at Ash's chest. This was it. He was about to be unmade.
And then he smiled. A wild, crazy, Player Zero smile. "Hey, tin can! You ever play a game called 'Tag'?"
He didn't wait for an answer. He dove to the left, behind a thick oak tree. The Cleaner's dart shot past where he'd been standing, vaporizing a harmless rock. Ash popped up on the other side of the tree. "You're it!"
The Cleaners paused. Their programming was simple: identify target, sanitize target. This target was now exhibiting erratic, unpredictable movement patterns. It was inefficient. It required recalibration. All three helms focused on him, tracking his sudden, zigzagging sprints. They were ignoring Nova.
It was the most terrifying game of peek-a-boo in history. Ash weaved and dodged, using trees as momentary shields, knowing each one could be erased the second he left its cover. He was buying seconds. That was all.
Behind him, he heard Nova chanting, her voice a low, desperate hum. The [Apprentice's Staff] in her hands was glowing, the faint spark he'd ignited now flickering like a weak candle flame. Streams of golden data, like liquid light, flowed from her fingertips into the wood. "I sense it… the signal… it is old. Pre-launch. It is a ghost in the machine…"
A de-rendering dart took out the entire left side of Ash's cover tree. He yelped and scrambled away, the world dissolving at his heels.
"It is fragile… a memory…" Nova's voice was strained, the effort immense. "The path is not a physical one. It is a conceptual route. A series of waypoints that must be triggered in sequence!"
Another dart. This one grazed Ash's arm. He didn't feel pain, exactly. It was a cold, null sensation, like his very existence was being locally anesthetized before being switched off. The leather of his bracer and a tiny patch of his skin were just… gone. He stared at the perfect, smooth absence on his arm, a cold horror washing over him that was deeper than any fear of pain.
"NOVA!" he screamed, his voice cracking.
"I have it!" she cried out, her eyes snapping open. They were blazing with pure, golden light. "The first waypoint! The Grieving Willow in the Valley of Whispers! We must touch its heartwood!"
A waypoint. A physical location to activate a digital path. It was insane. It was perfect.
Ash didn't need to be told twice. "Let's go!" He sprinted toward her, grabbing her hand as he passed. The staff in her other hand was now acting like a dowsing rod, pulling them in a specific direction.
The Cleaners, their recalibration complete, resumed their march. But the brief delay had cost them. Ash and Nova had a head start and a destination.
They ran for what felt like hours, the staff's pull their only guide. The forest began to change, the colors leaching out, the sounds dampening. They entered the Valley of Whispers, a low-level zone known for its spooky ambiance and forgettable collection quests. Now, it felt truly haunted. The whispers seemed to coil around them, and the air grew thick and heavy.
And there it was. The Grieving Willow. A massive, sorrowful tree at the valley's heart, its branches trailing into a murky pond. It was a landmark. A set piece. Nothing more.
"The heartwood!" Nova urged, pointing the staff at the massive trunk.
Ash didn't hesitate. He slammed his palm against the rough bark of the willow.
Nothing happened.
The Cleaners emerged from the tree line behind them, their silver armor stark against the desaturated gloom. They fanned out, cutting off any escape. The lead Cleaner raised its arm for the final shot.
"No, no, no!" Ash muttered, pressing his hand harder against the tree. "Come on, you stupid tree! Work!"
A de-rendering dart shot through the air.
Nova moved with a speed that defied her programming. She shoved Ash aside and thrust the glowing [Apprentice's Staff] forward, intercepting the dart's path.
The dart didn't hit the staff. It was absorbed by the glow. The staff flared with a blinding, white-hot light, the conflicting energies—the ancient signal of dawn and the nullifying power of deletion—warring within it. The wood cracked, splintering from the strain.
And then the Grieving Willow screamed.
It wasn't a sound heard with ears. It was a data-shriek that ripped through the local instance. The tree's form glitched violently, flickering between its current state and something else—something older, with brighter leaves and a trunk carved with beta-test runes.
The world around them stuttered. The Valley of Whispers pixelated, its low-res textures tearing to reveal a brighter, simpler landscape underneath—the original tutorial zone from Build 0.4.
The lead Cleaner, its aim thrown off by the sudden temporal-spatial glitch, fired again. But the shot went wide, slamming into the now-flickering willow.
The ancient tree, already stressed by the re-emergence of old code, could not withstand the de-rendering algorithm. It didn't just unravel. It detonated.
A silent shockwave of raw, corrupted code erupted outwards. It wasn't a physical force; it was a digital tsunami. It hit the Cleaners first. Their perfect silver forms glitched, their movements seizing up as error messages scrolled across their visual sensors. They weren't destroyed, but they were stunned, trapped in a recursive loop trying to process the impossible data corruption.
The wave hit Ash and Nova. It didn't hurt. It scrambled them. Ash's vision was a mess of broken UI elements and system alerts. He felt a nauseating lurch, like his entire being was being uploaded and downloaded at the same time.
When his vision cleared, the world had snapped back to normal. The Valley of Whispers was once again just a dreary low-level zone. The Grieving Willow was gone, replaced by a perfect, silent circle of nothingness.
But the Cleaners were down. They were on their knees, twitching, silver smoke curling from their joints as their systems tried and failed to reboot.
Nova was on the ground beside him, the [Apprentice's Staff] lying shattered in pieces beside her. The light in her eyes was dim. "The waypoint… is activated," she whispered. "The path is open. But the key… is broken."
Ash crawled to her side. "Nova? You okay?"
"I am… functional," she said, though her voice was staticky, faint. "The energy feedback was… significant. I believe I have corrupted several non-essential personality subroutines."
Ash almost laughed. She'd nearly been deleted and she was talking about corrupting her non-essentials. He helped her to her feet. They had to move. The Cleaners wouldn't be down for long.
He looked at the shattered remains of the staff. Their key. Their only way to activate the next waypoint. It was gone.
A glint in the grass where the staff had shattered caught his eye. Amid the splinters of wood lay a single, perfect, crystalline shard, glowing with the same soft light as the original signal. It was all that remained of the staff's power. A shard of a key.
He scooped it up. It was warm in his hand. [Crystalline Shard - Quest Item]. It wasn't much. But it was something.
A low, mechanical groan came from one of the downed Cleaners. Its head twitched. They were rebooting.
"Time to go," Ash said, pocketing the shard and pulling Nova's arm over his shoulder.
They stumbled away from the valley, leaving the twitching, smoking Cleaners behind. They had survived again. They had activated the first waypoint. But they had lost their key, drawn the direct attention of the system's janitors, and now Nova was damaged.
Ash clutched the crystalline shard in his pocket. A shard of a key for a ghost server. The path was open, but they had no way to walk it.
The victory felt hollow. They had escaped the sanitization protocol, but they were still infected, and the system was now learning how to be a better doctor.