The light from the street wasn't a searchlight. It was a surgical lamp.
It carved the dusty interior of the optician's shop into stark planes of white and black, leaving no room for shadows to hide.
Through the jagged teeth of the broken window, Leo saw them move.
Not like the ragged man, or the panicked colleagues from the office. These movements were economical, rehearsed.
Three figures in uniforms of a sturdy, matte grey material that seemed to drink the weird twilight. Their armor wasn't scavenged. It was fabricated, with clean lines and seamless joints.
On their left arms, a bright blue emblem glowed softly: a stylized gear interlocked with a circuit path.
Their HUDs were not chaotic splashes of light, but discreet, organized overlays that cast a gentle cyan sheen across the lower halves of their visors.
They didn't speak.
One pointed two fingers forward, then swept a hand left. Another nodded, moving to flank the shop's entrance.
The third remained in the center of the street, raising a device that looked like a cross between a satellite dish and a sculptor's gauge. He aimed it at the building, and a low, pulsed thrum vibrated through the floorboards.
Scanning.
The wounded man on the floor stopped his sobbing. He stared at the blue emblem, his face undergoing a transformation.
The raw pain was still there, but it was now overlaid with a different, deeper fear—one tinged with a terrible reverence.
He pushed himself up on his elbows, his voice a dry croak.
"Lealists…" he whispered.
Then, louder, desperate to be heard.
"Officers! I found it! I found the Anomalia! It's right there!"
He stabbed a grimy finger toward the darkness behind the counter where Leo crouched.
"I contained it for you! I was just… securing it for System compliance!"
He was selling the narrative, bartering his pathetic attempt at murder into civic service.
One of the figures detached from the perimeter and stepped through the window frame.
The crunch of glass under her boots was the only sound she made.
She was a woman, her hair shorn close under the helmet's rim, her face all sharp angles and cold focus in the backwash of her HUD's light. Integrated ocular lenses, like sleek silver beetles, were mounted at her temples.
She ignored the trapped man completely. Her gaze, amplified and analytical, swept the room.
It passed over the broken chair, the scattered lenses, and settled on the darkness behind the counter as if it were a highlighted object in a tutorial.
The wounded man writhed, trying to angle himself toward her. "I contributed! The protocols, right? Contribution points!"
The Lealista woman's head turned toward him, finally acknowledging his existence. It was a slow, mechanical pivot.
"Citizen," she said.
Her voice was flat, clean, devoid of malice or sympathy. It was the voice of a database reciting a field.
"You are obstructing a Tier-2 System Compliance Operation. Your claim has been logged. Reward allocation will be processed post-mission in accordance with Contribution Protocol 7-B."
It was the most dehumanizing form of dismissal possible. She wasn't even telling him to shut up. She was filing him.
Then she raised her weapon.
It wasn't a gun. It was a sleek, black clamp-shaped device, about the size of a remote. A thin, crimson targeting laser shot from its tip, painting a perfect, unwavering dot on the center of the wounded man's chest.
His eyes widened. "Wait, I—"
"Penalty for Active Operational Interference," the woman recited. "Temporary Disconnection."
She pressed a button on the device.
There was no blast. No projectile.
The man just… seized. His back arched, his mouth opened in a silent scream. The chaotic, glitching HUD around his head flashed a violent, uniform red for one second, then winked out entirely.
The light left his eyes, not in death, but in a sudden, absolute vacancy. He slumped forward, boneless, his head lolling against the splintered wood.
Unconscious. Or worse. Disconnected.
The woman lowered the device, her face unchanged. She'd just turned off a malfunctioning appliance.
Her head swiveled back. The red targeting laser reappeared, cutting through the dusty air.
It danced over the countertop, then dipped lower, finding the gap beneath it. It settled on the torn knee of Leo's cheap trousers.
"Anomaly-Zero," she pronounced. The name in her mouth was a diagnosis.
"Your persistent non-compliance is generating localized Reality Index decay. This is a drain on systemic efficiency."
Leo didn't move. He could feel the cold of the linoleum floor seeping through his clothes. His glitch-sight showed him nothing useful here—just the solid, terrible reality of the Lealists' order.
Their gear was flawless, their formation airtight. They were the antithesis of a glitch.
"Surrender guarantees expedited and painless processing," she continued, taking one step closer. Her boots were silent on the dust.
"Your data will be archived for study. Resistance," she paused, her finger hovering over the device's button. "Resistance mandates Immediate Localized Apocalipse. A wasteful expenditure of reality-stable real estate."
The choice was absurd. Death by filing, or death by deletion.
The red laser dot crawled up from his knee, over his chest, coming to rest between his eyes. The light was a pinprick of heat on his skin.
"You have five seconds to vocalize compliance," she said. "Five."
Leo's mouth was dust-dry. His mind, the analyst, raced down dead-end corridors. No stats. No weapon. No exploitable System error in this clean, efficient violence.
"Four."
The other Lealists had closed in. He could see their silhouettes blocking the other windows. The one with the scanner was now pointing it directly at the shop, the thrumming pulse quickening.
"Three."
The woman's finger rested firmly on the button now. Her ocular lenses whirred softly, focusing.
"Two."
Leo's eyes, desperate, dropped from the laser dot to the floor. To the place where the wounded man had fallen through. The broken floorboard. The darkness of the crawlspace beneath.
His glitch-sight saw nothing there.
But his ordinary, human eyes saw the dust motes, stirred by the man's collapse, still swirling in the beam of the Lealista's helmet light.
They drifted… down. Not just settling. They were being pulled, slightly, toward that dark hole.
As if there was a draft.
A draft. In a sealed ruin.
"One."
"The floor," Leo croaked, the words tearing at his throat.
The woman's finger hesitated. Not out of mercy. Out of procedural confusion.
"Clarify."
"There's… a sub-level access," Leo forced out, his brain stitching lies to the thin thread of hope. "A maintenance crawlspace. From before. It might… might connect to other sectors. Could be unstable. Could affect your… operational efficiency if it collapses."
He was speaking their language. Efficiency. Systemic risk.
The woman's gaze didn't waver from him, but she made a sharp, minute gesture with her free hand.
The Lealista with the scanner outside immediately angled his device downward. The thrumming changed pitch, becoming a deeper, probing hum.
After three seconds, the scanner Lealista spoke, his voice filtered through her helmet comms.
"Sergeant Voss. Sub-surface anomaly confirmed. Non-standard void signature. Possibly a pre-System excavation or a minor reality fault. Depth approximately two meters. It does not register on the municipal schematic."
Sergeant Voss considered this. The red dot didn't move from Leo's forehead.
The calculus was clear in her stillness. The priority was the Anomaly. A potential structural or spatial fault was a secondary contaminant, but a contaminant nonetheless.
Standard procedure would be to secure the primary target, then call in a Quarantine Team for the fault.
But standard procedure didn't account for a target that pointed out the fault.
"You are suggesting the fault is a threat?" Voss asked, her tone making it clear she found the suggestion as likely as a weaponized spreadsheet.
"I'm suggesting," Leo whispered, "that in a Compliance Operation, unidentified variables are… non-compliant."
A flicker in her ocular lens. A tiny, almost imperceptible refocusing. He had, absurdly, quoted a logic she understood.
"Krin," she said, without looking away. "Secure the fault. Non-intrusive scan only. Do not breach."
The Lealista at the window, Krin, nodded. He slung his scanner and drew a smaller, rod-like device.
He approached the hole in the floor where the wounded man's leg was still trapped, giving the unconscious body a wide, dispassionate berth.
This was Leo's moment. Their attention was divided. The red dot was still on him, but Voss's focus was now split between him and her subordinate's actions.
Krin knelt by the hole, activating his rod. A grid of blue light projected down into the darkness.
Leo's every instinct screamed to run, to bolt for the back lab door. But Voss would erase him before he took a full step.
He had to make the variable her problem.
He watched Krin. The man leaned forward, peering into his blue grid-lit scan.
And then Krin stiffened.
"Sergeant," he said, his filtered voice tight. "I'm reading movement. Biologics. Not human. Multiple signatures. They're… they're clinging to the foundation piers. Scavenger variants, maybe. Or…"
He trailed off, his rod emitting a series of rapid, anxious chirps.
Voss's head turned a fraction, just enough to glance at Krin's data feed, which was now projecting a grainy, thermal image into her visor. Her lips thinned.
In that fraction of a second, the laser dot on Leo's forehead wavered.
It was all he needed.
He didn't go for the door. He moved toward Voss, inside the arc of her weapon, a suicidal feint.
As she reflexively adjusted her aim, he dropped, not away, but directly into the hole at Krin's feet.
He fell into the dark, past the trapped, unconscious man, past Krin's startled grab.
He fell for two meters, as the scanner had said, and landed in shallow, icy water that stank of rust and decay.
The blue grid-light from above showed him a cramped, brick-lined tunnel—an old utility conduit.
And it showed him the things clinging to the walls.
They weren't rats. They were masses of frayed cables, swollen ductwork, and corroded pipes that had somehow… knitted together into skeletal, multi-limbed shapes.
At the heart of each mass was a pulsing, gland-like node that glowed with the same sickly rainbow sheen as the oil-mark on the wounded man's wrist.
They had no eyes, but they turned their cable-heads toward the light, and toward Leo, with a creaking, metallic hunger.
Above, Voss's voice, cold fury now cutting through the professional flatness, barked an order.
"He's in the fault! Krin, contain him! I want that anomaly bagged!"
A new light, a harsh white spotlight, pierced the gloom from above.
But before Krin could follow, one of the cable-creatures unspooled a length of razor-sharp conduit and lashed upward with a sound like a cracking whip.
Krin yelped, his light jerking wildly.
Leo was already moving, hunched over, splashing through the freezing water, deeper into the conduit's darkness.
The Lealists were temporarily stalled.
But they were coming.
And he was now in a tunnel with things that looked at him not as a source of points, but as raw material.
The spotlight from above swept past him, illuminating the dripping walls and the skittering, clicking things that now began to drop from the ceiling, pursuing the fresher, warmer anomaly in their midst.