The ghost of Danilo dropped its phantom coffee mug.
The translucent shape didn't shatter. It dissolved into a shower of pixelated dust that faded before it hit the unreal floor.
The echo took a step forward. Then another.
But it wasn't walking. Its movement was a series of jarring, truncated teleports, snapping from one position to the next six inches ahead, leaving faint afterimages of glowing green code that hung in the sterile air like toxic smoke.
Leo stumbled back, his heel catching on the seamless junction between floor tiles.
His [Glitch Reading] was screaming, a raw, nerve-deep thrum.
The entire environment was tagged with flickering, semi-transparent warnings his mind translated without words: Unstable Buffer Geometry. Data Cohesion Failing. Reality Anchor: Absent.
The Danilo-echo's featureless face resolved. Not into features, but into a flat, shimmering screen.
On it, text scrolled, a system log in the same acidic green.
[Anomaly Detection: Unauthorized Consciousness Echo.]
[Source: Primary Reality Layer. Contaminant Vector: Leo Kenzan (Anomaly-Zero).]
[Protocol: Quarantine and Re-assimilate.]
It spoke.
The sound wasn't a voice. It was a jagged, overlapping mashup of every phrase the real Danilo had uttered in the office that day, spliced together into a single eerie sentence.
"Thelatencyontheclusterisunacceptable Leowaitjustneedto therewardwouldsaveuseveryone confirmacceptance?"
The words bled into each other, a digital corpse groan.
It snapped forward another foot. The air around it grew colder, a dry, biting chill that had nothing to do with temperature and everything to do with absence.
Leo's eyes darted, not at the thing, but at the floor, the walls.
His ability showed him the sickness of this place.
Bubbles of distorted reality, like translucent boils, swelled and popped randomly across the muted carpet. A faint pop sound, like a key being pressed on a broken keyboard, accompanied each one.
Where they burst, the world glitched for a microsecond—a patch of wall repeating like bad wallpaper, a stretch of floor turning into a sheer, pixelated drop.
He had no stats to fight. No strength to run.
Only the cursed sight.
He took another step back, aiming for a wider space between cubicle ghosts.
His foot came down on a swelling bubble he hadn't seen.
It didn't pop.
It burst.
The world didn't glitch. It lurched.
One moment he was in the gray, silent corridor of echoes.
The next, he was slammed back into a cacophony of sound and panic.
The red dark of the server room. The smell of ozone and sweat.
The real Danilo's back was to him, three feet away, shouting, "—he just vanished! Find where he went!"
Harris, wielding the fire extinguisher, was staring directly at the spot where Leo now momentarily stood, his eyes wide with confusion. "I just saw… a flicker. Like a—"
The connection was a physical wire hooked behind Leo's navel.
It yanked.
He was back in the buffer corridor, staggering, the transition so violent he vomited a thin, bitter bile onto the perfect, textureless carpet.
It vanished a second later, deleted by the environment.
His HUD pulsed a warning red.
[Base Reality Synchronization: 79%]
[Data Corruption Detected in Bio-logical Processes.]
The Danilo-echo was right in front of him.
It had used his disorientation to close the gap. He could see the individual pixels of its form, the scrolling lines of code that made up its being.
The cold radiating from it was the cold of a dead hard drive.
It reached for him.
The hand didn't have fingers. It bifurcated, splitting into dozens of jagged, green lines of command-line text, stretching toward his face like skeletal vines.
"Processidentification eliminationauthorized."
Leo didn't scream. His throat was locked.
He threw himself sideways, not in a graceful dodge, but in a clumsy, desperate sprawl.
The code-lines brushed his shoulder.
Agony. Not pain. It was a null-sensation. A feeling of his own data being read, cataloged, and marked for deletion.
The spot on his shoulder didn't go numb. It just felt… less there. The fabric of his cheap shirt was perfectly intact, but his skin beneath tingled with a terrifying emptiness.
He scrambled on hands and knees, slipping on the unnaturally smooth floor.
The echo teleported again, cutting off his retreat down the corridor.
The other ghosts were all facing him now, a silent, shimmering audience. Their loops were still broken.
They were just watching. Waiting for the anomaly to be processed.
His back hit a wall. A cubicle partition.
He was cornered.
The echo advanced, its code-hand reforming, reaching.
Leo's vision, blurred by panic and the corrosive wrongness of this place, swept the wall behind the creature.
Not looking for a door.
Looking for a mistake.
And he saw it.
A square patch, about the size of a monitor, where the generic cubicle-fabric texture failed. It wasn't a glitch line or a bubble.
It was a seam. The texture inside the square was stretched, repeating the same four threads of gray and blue in an infinite, impossible loop.
A patch of the world's wallpaper that hadn't loaded correctly.
A failure of rendering. A hole in the simulation's art assets.
The Danilo-echo was upon him. The null-cold of its approach made his teeth ache.
There was no time for a plan. Only a final, stupid gamble.
With a guttural sound that was more a choke than a yell, Leo didn't try to push the echo away.
He planted his feet on the partition behind him and lunged forward, ducking under the reaching code-lines, aiming not for the creature, but for the wall behind it.
For the repeating, faulty square of texture.
He plunged his hands into the stretched, looping fabric.
The sensation was not of breaking through, but of unraveling.
The world didn't tear. It decompressed.
His hands, his arms, his head sank into a kaleidoscope of the same four threads, magnified, repeated, consuming everything.
He felt his body being pulled apart into strands of color and data, his consciousness a file being fed through a broken printer.
[Base Reality Synchronization: 71%]
[CRITICAL LEVEL]
The last thing he heard was the echo's mashed-up voice, flat and final.
"Containmentbreach. Loggingcoordinatesfor"
Then, nothing.
Reassembly was a violent, nauseating act.
He was spat out.
Knees first onto hard, wet concrete. The impact jarred his bones, a solid, brutal reality that was almost comforting in its pain.
He retched, but nothing came up. His body shuddered, trying to reconcile itself.
He was out. Out of the office, out of the buffer corridor.
He was outside.
The air hit him first.
It didn't smell of sterile nothingness. It was a complex, ugly broth of scents: wet asphalt, ozone from overloaded transformers, the distant, sweet-rot smell of garbage left too long, and underneath it all, a metallic tang like spent batteries.
It was the smell of a city that had stopped working but hadn't finished dying.
The light was wrong.
It wasn't day or night. It was a perpetual, sickly twilight, the sky a bruised palette of purples and oranges, lit by no visible sun. The clouds didn't move.
Leo pushed himself up, his hands scraping on the rough concrete.
He was in an alley. Dumpsters lined one wall, overflowing with plastic wrappers and discarded office debris. A flickering neon sign on the building above bled a feeble 'P' and 'T' from the word 'APARTMENTS'.
He stumbled to the alley's mouth, leaning against the damp brick for support.
He looked out onto the street.
Silence. A deep, watchful silence broken only by the far-off hum of… nothing he could name.
The street was littered with abandoned cars, some with doors hanging open. A city bus sat askew on the curb, its interior dark.
No people. No birds.
Then he looked up, and his breath caught in his raw throat.
There, against the fake twilight sky, was the familiar skyline of the Commercial District. The E-Net tower was a needle in the center. He could see his own office floor, tiny windows lit by the steady, mindless glow of emergency lights.
But to the left of it, a chunk of the city was missing.
It wasn't destroyed. There was no rubble, no fire, no smoke.
It was simply… gone.
A perfect, geometric expanse of pure, lightless void, as if a god had taken a cookie-cutter to reality and removed several city blocks.
The buildings at the edge of this nothingness were sheared off with impossible smoothness, their interiors exposed like a dollhouse. Office chairs, desks, potted plants sat perfectly preserved on floors that ended in a cliff of absolute black.
No sound, no light, no movement emanated from the Apocalipse.
It was a hole in the world.
The System's penalty. Apagamento do Distrito. Not a metaphor. A literal, spatial deletion.
It had already happened.
A notification, soft and inevitable, chimed in his skull.
New Environmental Data Logged.
Location: Outer Fringe, Commercial District 7 (Post-Wipe Zone).
Status: Quarantined. Non-Synchronized Reality Detected.
Warning: Base Reality Synchronization currently at 68%. Continued decay will result in permanent designation as [Unstable Echo].
[Passive Location Ping in: 00:03:17.]
Leo stared at the abyss where a part of the city used to be.
Then he looked down at his own faintly translucent hands.
He was outside. He had escaped the hunters, the ghosts, the office.
But he was three minutes from broadcasting his location to anyone left alive in this dead zone.
And he was slowly fading from the world itself.