The Syndicate Adjuster didn't explode. It simply unravelled. Under Kenji's touch, the liquid mercury form lost its cohesion and spilled into the Gutter's dust, becoming nothing more than inert, silver puddles. The massive geometric needle in the sky retracted, its blue lasers flickering out as it realized its scout had been neutralized.
"Kenji!" Elara reached him first, but she stopped an inch away.
The air around Kenji was vibrating. It wasn't mana; it was the sound of a thousand overlapping realities. He looked solid, but if you stared too long, you could see the stars of the Aether-Reach shining through his skin.
"It's okay," Kenji said, his voice finally losing its multi-layered echo. He took a breath, and the vibration settled. He looked at his hands solid, scarred, and real. "I'm back. Mostly."
"What did you see up there?" Mateo asked, his Synapse-Hub recording data at a rate that threatened to melt his processor. "When you merged with the Source-Throne, where did you go?"
Kenji sat down on a rusted engine block. He looked up at the sky, where the violet aurora was being pushed aside by the cold, black void of the "Outer Rim."
"I saw the 'Shelf'," Kenji said. "The Three Layers the Gutter, the Jade Empire, the Steam-Wastes, they aren't the whole world. They're just a single 'Drive.' I saw a thousand other 'Drives' floating in a dark ocean. Some are filled with fire, some with cities made of glass, some are nothing but screams. The Syndicate... they are the ones who swap the drives when they get bored."
[KNOWLEDGE UNLOCKED: THE MULTI-DRIVE ARRAY]
"So the Architect was just... a file?" Bjorn asked, his brow furrowing.
"A very sophisticated one," Kenji nodded. "But to the Syndicate, we are just 'Cache Data.' They don't hate us. They just want the space back for a new project. That needle in the sky? That was a 'Format Tool.' It's coming back, and next time, it won't just send one Adjuster."
[SYSTEM ALERT: EXTERNAL SCAN IN PROGRESS]
[ESTIMATED TIME TO 'DEFRAG': 72 HOURS]
"We can't stay here," Kenji said, standing up. "If we stay, they'll just delete the sector around us. We have to go to them. We have to take the Scrap-Venture into the Over-Void."
"Into the void?" Mateo laughed nervously. "Kenji, the ship is made of Recursive Iron and Spirit-Silk. It's 'In-Game' material. The moment we hit the Over-Void, the vacuum will pull the data apart. We'll turn into raw code in seconds."
"Not if we upgrade the 'Hardware'," Kenji said, his white eyes flashing toward the silver puddles of the Adjuster.
[SKILL ACTIVATED: TRANS-DIMENSIONAL FORGING (RANK 1)]
Kenji knelt by the silver mercury. He didn't use heat. He reached into his chest and pulled out a sliver of the Seventh Star. He dipped the indigo-light into the mercury.
The liquid didn't just react; it screamed. The silver began to grow, climbing up the hull of the Scrap-Venture like a living vine. It didn't replace the iron; it "Enamelled" it. The ship began to take on a matte-black finish that seemed to swallow the light.
"I'm giving the ship a 'System-Proof' coating," Kenji explained, his hands moving with a speed that blurred the air. "We're using the Syndicate's own mercury to hide our signatures. From now on, the Scrap-Venture isn't a ship. It's a Ghost-Drive."
[SHIP UPGRADE: THE GHOST-VENTURE (RANK: ???)]
[SPECIAL PROPERTY: VOID-SHIELDING (IMMUNE TO EXTERNAL FORMATTING)]
"Kenji, your Rank," Elara noted, looking at her HUD. "It's still showing as 0. But you just manipulated Syndicate-grade mercury like it was mud. How?"
Kenji looked at the Rank 0 Locket around his neck. "The Architect's System was built on 1 to 99. The Syndicate runs on a different scale. My Rank is 0 because I'm not on their scale yet. I'm the 'Null Value.' And in programming, Null can be anything."
Suddenly, the ground shook. A massive, blue-ringed portal opened in the sky, much larger than the previous one. From it, dozens of smaller, needle-like ships began to descend.
[TARGET DETECTED: SYNDICATE HARVESTER-SWARM]
[RANK: 100+ (OUTER-RIM SCALE)]
"They're early," Mateo gasped. "They're not waiting for the defrag. They're coming to 'Manually Delete' the Anomaly!"
Kenji jumped onto the ramp of the Ghost-Venture. "Bjorn, man the main cannons they're loaded with 'Density-Shells' now. Elara, I need you to frost the engines; we're going to run them at 400% capacity. We're not fighting them here."
"Where are we going?" Priya asked, strapping herself into the med-bay.
Kenji gripped the helm. The violet veins in his arms lit up, connecting directly to the ship's new mercury nervous system.
"We're going to the Scrap-Moon of Xylos," Kenji said. "The Syndicate's trash-heap for the Outer Rim. If we're going to win a war against the hardware owners, we're going to need a lot more junk than what's in the Gutter."
The Ghost-Venture ignited its engines not with fire, but with a silent, violet pulse of Void-Energy. The ship vanished from the Iron Graveyard, leaving only a ripple in the air as the first Syndicate Harvester slammed into the empty ground.
[LOCATION: TRANSITIONING TO THE OVER-VOID]