T-60 seconds.
The notification glowed in his vision with the finality of a tombstone. Kaelen was falling through an abyss of raw data. The space had no up or down. Only an endless stream of static and corrupted light.
His body felt like it was being unmade, his [Physical Integrity] critically low. His mind was on fire with the poison of his own [Entropy].
Terror gave way to a cold fury. His emotion was clear: he was angry.
He had not survived a god of time only to be deleted by a janitor program. He was not a corrupted file to be tossed in the recycling bin.
He was Kaelen. He was an Archivist.
And he would not be erased.
T-59 seconds.
His first action was instinct. He tried to fight with his usual tools. He tried to edit the protocol hunting him.
[user.kaelen] Initiate command: [cancel_protocol]. Target: [emergency_sanitation_protocol].
The System's response was instant and absolute. His authority was null in this domain.
[ACCESS DENIED. INSUFFICIENT KERNEL PRIVILEGES.]
T-52 seconds.
He tried to escape. His mind formulated a transfer command, targeting the coordinates of the alley where he'd left Lyra.
[user.kaelen] Initiate command: [transfer_coordinates]. Destination: [Coordinates: Aethel.DockWard.Alley04].
[ACCESS DENIED. MOVEMENT RESTRICTED BY SANITATION PROTOCOL.]
He was a prisoner in a cell whose floor was rising to crush him against the ceiling. His keys didn't work. His strength was useless.
His emotional state shifted. Fury gave way to an icy focus. His plan had to change.
He analyzed the problem with a debugger's logic. The System wasn't attacking him personally. It was attacking his corruption. The [sanitation_protocol] was a cleaning program.
Its target was his [Entropy: 12.5% (Cascading Corruption Active)].
If he was no longer the bearer of the corruption, perhaps the program would ignore him.
He couldn't delete the Entropy. But maybe, just maybe, he could move it.
T-45 seconds.
He needed a container. A vessel strong enough to hold the pure poison that was killing his soul. His inventory was empty. The Runic Stabilizer was gone. But his mind was an archive. And an archive held records. Records of recent objects.
He dove into his own system activity log. It was a torrent of data, but he found what he was looking for. The data-signature of the object that had caused all of this.
The Void Grenade.
The object itself was destroyed, but its information, its "data-ghost," still existed in the System's short-term memory cache.
His new plan was audacious. It was likely suicidal. Kaelen felt a spike of fear but suppressed it. His motivation was simple: survive.
[user.kaelen] Initiate command: [restore_object_from_cache]. Target: [Object_ID: Void_Grenade_77B].
This wasn't a normal Edit. This was a hack. It was like pulling an item from a computer's trash bin and trying to make it run again.
[system.kernel] WARNING: Accessing temporary event data violates systemic integrity protocol. Action not recommended.
Kaelen forced the command. Confirm.
The pain in his mind intensified. His Entropy, the very thing he was trying to expel, surged as fuel for his desperate action.
[Entropy Generation: +2.0%. Total Entropy Level: 14.5%]
His body screamed in protest. But in his hand, a shimmering, translucent sphere materialized. The ghost of a Void Grenade. It was unstable, but it was there. He had his container.
T-30 seconds.
Now, the most dangerous part. The transfer.
He was about to take the digital poison corrupting him and pour it into a miniature black hole. The logic was insane. It was the only logic he had.
He could feel his own body fraying. The [Cascading Corruption] was deleting his data from the extremities. His fingertips looked blurry, his hearing was just static. He didn't have long.
He focused his entire will on the command.
[user.kaelen] Initiate command: [transfer_variable]. Origin: [user.kaelen.status.entropy]. Destination: [cached_object.void_grenade.containment_field].
The System screamed with warnings.
[PROTOCOL VIOLATION] [INCOMPATIBLE SIGNATURES] [RISK OF CASCADING DETONATION]
He ignored them all. EXECUTE.
The sensation was an exorcism.
An excruciating pressure that had been consuming him from the inside was suddenly ripped away. Kaelen screamed, a silent sound in the void. He felt the corruption, the static, the pain—all of it flow out of his being and into the ghostly sphere in his hand.
His mind cleared. The pain stopped. He felt… clean. Empty.
But the Void Grenade in his hand was no longer translucent. It was now an absolute, opaque black, a blot of solid darkness that absorbed all light and data around it. It vibrated with a malevolent, unstable energy—Kaelen's Entropy, contained and amplified by its Void nature.
He was holding a reality-antimatter bomb.
T-15 seconds.
His body was stabilizing. His [Cascading Corruption] had halted. But the sanitation protocol's counter continued to descend. Unforgiving.
T-05 seconds.
He had to get rid of it. With a final effort of will, he hurled the sphere of darkness away from himself, deep into the backend.
T-04. T-03. T-02.
He closed his eyes, accepting whatever came next. He had done all he could.
T-01.
[...Sanitation Protocol activated. Target: entity [kaelen].]
T-00.
A wave of pure white energy washed over him. It wasn't painful. It was cold, clinical, and absolute. It was the Hand of the System, wiping away what didn't belong.
[...Analyzing entity...] [...Entropy Signature: 0.1% (Residual)] [...Threat Level: Null] [...] [...Anomaly detected. Entity does not match original sanitation profile.]
[SANITATION PROTOCOL SUSPENDED.]
[ANOMALY RECLASSIFIED. AWAITING NEW DIRECTIVE.]
Kaelen opened his eyes. He was alive. He had done it. He had cheated digital death. An exhausted grin spread across his face.
It was then that the bomb he had created went off.
The Void Grenade, now supercharged with pure Entropy, didn't explode with light and sound. It did the opposite. It detonated in an event of absolute silence and darkness.
Where the grenade had been, there was now a perfect hole in the texture of the backend. A tear.
And the tear didn't close. Instead, it stabilized, coalescing into a shimmering rift, a portal that showed not corrupted data, but a place… elsewhere. The colors were stable. The shapes were cohesive.
Before Kaelen could process what he was seeing, he felt a pull. The rift, the hole he had punched in the wall of his prison, had its own gravity. It was sucking him in. He had no strength left to fight.
He had been reclassified by the System. But his desperate hack had created a new door.
And now, that door was taking him, helpless, to a destination unknown.