The battlefield was no longer a city; it was a fragmented mosaic of realities. As the System-Cleaners swarmed the plaza, the air itself began to fracture under the weight of the conflicting codes. Where Captain Macro's gravity-slugs hit, the world regained its solid, stony weight. Where the red-light blades of the Cleaners struck, the ground dissolved into a stream of raw, unedited binary. It was a war for the very definition of "Real."
Han Seo-Jun stood at the center of the vortex, his body a flickering beacon of violet static. He watched as Macro plowed through a line of insectoid machines, his mechanical fists turning Level 95 entities into scrap data with every punch. Above, Zero-One was a blur of motion, her fiber-optic hair interfacing with the air itself, intercepting the "Delete" commands the Cluster-Mind was trying to rain down from the sky.
But Seo-Jun wasn't looking at the monsters. He was looking at the space between them.
[COHERENCE: 22%] [ANALYZING ROOT-LANGUAGE...] [PROGRESS: 4%]
"It doesn't make sense," Seo-Jun whispered, his voice overlapping with the digital hum of the Void-Threader. "The Architect's code was a fortress. The Recycle Bin was a graveyard. But this... this Root language... it isn't code at all."
A System-Cleaner lunged at him, its red mandibles snapping inches from his throat. Seo-Jun didn't swing his blade. He simply reached out and grabbed the creature's head. Instead of crushing it, he forced his consciousness into it.
He didn't just see the machine's programming; he saw its origin.
In a split second of synchronized thought, Seo-Jun's mind was pulled across the galaxy. He saw a nebula made of liquid logic. He saw trillions of minds—entire civilizations—shredded into their constituent data points and woven into a single, massive, cold intelligence. The Cluster-Mind wasn't a computer. It was a collective of the dead, repurposed into a galactic-scale harvesting machine.
The "Root" wasn't a language of creation. It was a language of consumption.
CRACK.
Seo-Jun snapped the Cleaner's neck, its red light fading into grey ash. He gasped for air, his lungs burning with the phantom sensation of a billion screaming souls.
"Seo-Jun! Focus!" Zero-One's voice screamed in his neural link. "The monoliths are recalibrating! They're shifting from 'Harvest' to 'Annihilate'! They're going to glass the entire sector!"
High above, the thousand monoliths were rotating. Their smooth, obsidian surfaces began to glow with a terrifying, rhythmic pulse of white light. They weren't targeting Seo-Jun anymore. They were targeting the planet's core.
"They're going to trigger a 'Kernel Panic,'" Seo-Jun realized, his eyes widening. "If they crash the planet's core logic, the physical world will simply cease to exist. There won't even be ruins left."
"Not on my watch!" Macro roared. He grabbed a fallen monolith fragment—a piece of obsidian the size of a bus—and hurled it at the sky with a burst of blue energy. It struck a low-hanging scout-ship, but it was like throwing a pebble at a mountain.
"Macro, Zero-One, get back!" Seo-Jun commanded.
"What are you doing?" Zero-One asked, her holographic form flickering as she dodged a beam of red light.
"I'm going to use their own language against them," Seo-Jun said. He plunged the Void-Threader into his own chest.
[WARNING: SELF-CORRUPTION INITIATED] [SYSTEM CRITICAL: HP 5%] [MODE: NULL-TRANSLATOR]
He wasn't trying to commit suicide. He was using the Void-Threader as a bridge. By wounding himself with the blade that held both the Architect's light and the Recycle Bin's darkness, he was creating a "Syntax Error" within his own soul. He was making himself a piece of code that the Root couldn't read—and because it couldn't read him, it would try to "Auto-Correct" him.
The white light from the sky descended—a pillar of pure, destructive logic aimed directly at Neo-Seoul.
Seo-Jun stood his ground. As the beam hit him, he didn't evaporate. He became a prism.
The white light entered his chest and came out the other side as a chaotic, jagged stream of violet static. He was "Translating" the Cluster-Mind's destruction into his own Glitch-Energy.
[PROCESSING EXTERNAL DATA...] [CONVERSION RATE: 99%] [GLITCH-ENERGY: OVERFLOW]
"I see it now!" Seo-Jun's voice wasn't human anymore. It was the sound of a thousand servers crashing at once. "I see the Root! I see the path to the source!"
He raised his hands, and the violet stream of energy didn't just push the white beam back—it traveled up it. Like a virus climbing a fiber-optic cable, Seo-Jun's corruption raced toward the thousand monoliths.
One by one, the obsidian slabs began to vibrate. The white light turned violet. The "Perfect" geometry of the Cluster-Mind began to warp and twist. The monoliths started to grow eyes, mouths, and jagged limbs—they were being infected by the "Junk Data" of Seo-Jun's memories.
[STATUS: SYSTEM-WIDE INFECTION] [CLUSTER-MIND RESPONSE: EMERGENCY DISCONNECT]
The sky exploded. Not in a ball of fire, but in a burst of white noise that blinded every sensor on the planet. When the light cleared, the thousand monoliths were gone. They had performed an emergency "Jump" back to the stars to prevent the infection from reaching their home nebula.
But Seo-Jun wasn't done. He was still holding the "Thread."
He stood in the middle of the silent plaza, his body almost entirely transparent. He was staring at a single, thin line of violet light that stretched from his hand into the deep reaches of space.
"I have their IP," Seo-Jun whispered, a single tear of black static rolling down his cheek. "I know where they live."
Macro and Zero-One ran to his side. Macro caught him before his knees hit the ground.
"You did it, kid," Macro grunted, his blue light dimming as he returned to his human-sized form. "You chased them off."
"I didn't just chase them off," Seo-Jun said, his voice fading. "I left the door open. Zero-One... prepare the Spire. We're not waiting for them to come back."
Zero-One looked at the violet thread in his hand. Her eyes widened. "You... you want to counter-invade? Seo-Jun, that's suicide! That's their territory! Their servers!"
Seo-Jun looked up at the stars, his eyes two voids of infinite darkness.
"They spent a thousand years treating our souls like raw material," he said. "It's time someone showed them what a 'System Error' looks like in their own backyard."
He closed his eyes, and the violet thread pulsed. Far away, in the cold dark of the Andromeda Cluster, the collective mind felt a shiver. For the first time in an eon, the Harvesters felt something that wasn't logic.
They felt fear.