The crimson beam from Sergeant Voss's disconnector struck the center of the rag-and-chemical creature.
The sound was a wet capacitor discharging.
The thing shuddered, its many bundled parts rattling. The cheerful, distorted voice glitched.
"CLEAN—ckzzzt—CYCLE INTERRU—"
But it didn't stop.
It didn't collapse into a disconnected heap like the wounded man had. Its central mass, a soggy lump of textiles and plastic, seemed to absorb the energy.
A few strands of its binding sludge glowed a dull red before fading.
A status line, visible only to Leo's glitch-sight, flickered over it:
[Target has no valid System Interface for disconnection. Effect nullified.]
The creature's single robotic arm rotated with a high-pitched servo whine. Its camera lens, crusted with something crystalline, refocused on Voss.
"ANALYSIS: LOW-PRIORITY INTERFACE ENTITY. CATEGORY: DETRITUS. INITIATING PURGE."
Voss's expression, behind her visor, flickered from cold control to outright confusion.
Her weapon was logic given form; it should work. When it didn't, her programming hit a snag.
The creature didn't charge.
It extruded a limp, hose-like appendage from its lower body. Clutched in a makeshift grip of twisted wire was a cracked, one-liter plastic bottle, sloshing with a viscous brown fluid.
With a jerky, underhand motion, it lobbed the bottle at Voss's feet.
It wasn't a fast throw. Voss could have sidestepped it easily.
But her disbelief rooted her for a critical half-second.
The bottle shattered on the floorboards between them.
The smell that erupted was not just stronger. It was violent.
A wave of eye-watering, nose-hair-singling acid carried the sweet, putrid undertone of decaying fruit and the sharp, metallic tang of dissolving metal.
Leo, several feet away, felt his sinuses burn and his eyes instantly flood with tears.
Voss took the full brunt.
She coughed, a raw, hacking sound, stumbling back. The chemical mist swirled around her boots.
Where droplets landed on her armored greaves, they didn't sizzle, but the matte finish immediately bloomed with spreading, iridescent stains.
Her HUD flashed a frantic, cascading series of warnings:
[TOXICOLOGICAL HAZARD DETECTED. CORROSIVE AGENT. DATA INTEGRITY OF LOCALIZED REALITY COMPROMISED. RETREAT ADVISED.]
"Contaminant is… reactive!" she choked out, her voice breaking through the helmet's filter.
She backpedaled rapidly toward the shattered window, her movements losing their precision.
"Full retreat! Establish perimeter! We need a Quarantine Tac-Team, now!"
She didn't give the creature another glance. It was no longer a tactical problem; it was an environmental one.
Her unit pulled back with her, sealing the shop front with a swift, professional dread.
In moments, the white lights were gone, replaced by the steady, ominous blue glow of a containment perimeter being established outside.
The occasional barked order filtered in: "—seal the block—", "—hazard level theta—".
Leo was left alone in the dim, dust-choked, chemically-haunted shop.
With the thing.
The creature's camera lens retracted, then re-extended, swiveling away from the empty window. With a series of tiny, whirring adjustments, it focused on him.
A thin beam of cold blue light lanced out from the lens, painting a circle on his chest. It swept up and down, scanning.
He could feel it, a pins-and-needles sensation on his skin.
"ANALYSIS: ENTITY NOT IN CATALOG," the childlike voice announced.
The beam lingered on his forehead, where his cursed HUD resided.
"NO STANDARD SYSTEM INTERFACE DETECTED. READING… AMBIENT SIGNATURE. STATUS DESIGNATION:… ZERO."
The word hung in the toxic air.
Not 'Anomaly'.
Zero.
The creature seemed to hesitate. Its body shifted with a sound of rustling rags and creaking plastic.
The large claw arm, which had been poised in a defensive posture, lowered. It trembled slightly, servo motors humming an uncertain pitch.
"PRIMARY DIRECTIVE: REPAIR," it stated, as if reminding itself. "SECONDARY DIRECTIVE: CLEAN."
The voice glitched, the words overlapping.
"YOU… ARE BROKEN? REPAIR PROTOCOLS… DO NOT CATEGORIZE."
It wasn't a question of threat. It was a diagnostic dilemma.
Leo was a broken tool it couldn't find in the manual.
It shuffled closer, not with aggression, but with a slow, almost cautious curiosity. The smell of chemicals and decay rolled off it.
Up close, Leo could see the intricate, desperate workmanship—wires twisted in patterns that resembled circuitry; the rainbow-hued sludge acting as both adhesive and a crude power conduit.
The claw arm extended again. Not to strike.
It opened its pincers, and from a small compartment in its palm, it offered something.
It was a small, handheld radio. An old, analog thing, its plastic casing cracked and yellowed, its telescopic antenna bent at a sharp angle. A single red wire, stripped at the end, sprouted from its back like a severed vein.
"ALL BROKEN HERE," the creature whispered, the distortion in its voice softening to something that sounded almost mournful.
"I ATTEMPT REPAIR. BUT THE CORRECT HUM… IS MISSING."
Leo stared at the offered radio.
This wasn't a monster. It was a remnant. A piece of pre-System programming—corrupted by the Shift, soaked in anomalous chemicals, trying desperately to fulfill its core function in a world where all the definitions of 'broken' had changed.
It didn't see a target. It saw a malfunction it couldn't comprehend.
He reached out, his movements slow, and took the radio. It was cold, inert. The creature's claw retracted, watching him.
"YOU ARE ZERO. YOU LACK THE HUM OF THE WORLD," it said, its camera lens tilting.
"CAN YOU BE REPAIRED?"
Before Leo could form a thought, a new sound cut through the moment.
A deep, resonant thrum vibrated up from the street through the floorboards, a sound that made Leo's teeth ache and the chemical droplets on the floor tremble.
The sound of a massive capacitor charging.
The amplified, androgynous Lealista voice followed, cold and final.
"Attention, unregistered entity and System Anomaly. You are within a designated immediate-sanitization zone. Quarantine protocols are insufficient. Authorization for localized reality-erasure has been confirmed. Please do not move. It will expedite the calibration."
Outside, the blue perimeter lights were drowned out by a harsh, white radiance, growing in intensity.
The thrumming deepened, becoming a painful pressure in Leo's ears.
"Emitter charging. Target lock established."
The creature, 'The Fixer', swiveled its lens toward the blinding light.
Its voice, when it spoke, was a flat, sad staticky hum.
"DIRECTIVE CONFLICT. ENTITY IS BROKEN. EXTERNAL FORCE WILL TERMINATE, NOT REPAIR."
It turned back to Leo, its claw arm twitching.
"CANNOT COMPUTE. REPAIR… IS IMPOSSIBLE."
The white light from the street swelled, washing out the world.
It etched every detail of the broken shop and the forlorn junk-creature in stark, merciless relief.
The thrum reached a fever pitch, a single, sustained note of impending nullification.
The creature did not move to defend itself.
It simply watched Leo, its offered radio still cold in his hands, as the light prepared to unmake them both.