The neon pulses of Neo-Babylon were a collective fever dream, bleeding sickly magentas and electric cyans into the perpetual smog. Above, the sky was the color of a bruised lung. A rhythmic, acidic drizzle washed over the city, carrying the metallic tang of "Oblivion Dust"—a high-dimensional sedative drizzled over the masses to numb the sting of their own slow extinction.
Felix sat in the corner of a hollowed-out 24-hour convenience store. The flickering fluorescent light overhead hummed like a dying insect. He stared at a solitary, shriveled rice ball, his reflection in the greasy window showing a man whose soul had been audited and found wanting.
His phone vibrated with the persistence of a scavenger.
[System Alert: Margin Call. Your life savings have been liquidated to zero.] [Corporate Notice: Your appeal for 'Unfair Termination' has been archived. Reason: Redundant Human Asset.] [Debt Protocol: We are at your door, Felix. Organs have a higher market value than your pride. Pay up.]
"A shoddy stage," Felix murmured, his voice a dry rasp.
He had once been the golden boy of Apex Corp, a Senior Actuary who could turn human suffering into a beautiful, rising line on a graph. He had built the very models that were now eating him alive. In this world, the Architects—the lazy bureaucrats of a higher dimension—didn't care for logic. They cared for Entropy. They needed the friction of human misery to power their fading reality. To them, Felix was no longer a player. He was a Rank F Battery, drained, discarded, and ready for the incinerator.
He stepped out into the rain. The street was unnaturally still, the usual urban cacophony replaced by a heavy, digital silence. Then, a shudder moved through the air. As an elite analyst, Felix felt it before he saw it—a localized collapse of environmental logic.
ROAR.
From the shadows of the intersection, a heavy-duty dump truck tore through the mist. It moved with an impossible, staggering speed that defied the laws of friction. The driver sat slumped, hands off the wheel, lighting a cigarette with trembling fingers. The vehicle didn't just steer toward Felix; the asphalt seemed to warp, funneling the steel behemoth toward him like a divine executioner's blade.
This wasn't an accident. It was a [Physical Deletion] command sent from the Pantheon above. The Architects were cleaning their slate.
"So," Felix whispered, a predatory glint igniting in his hollow eyes. "The House wants to settle the score?"
In that heartbeat of impending impact, the Singularity Reactor in his core—dormant for thirty years of mediocrity—screamed to life. He didn't see a truck. He saw a cluster of jagged, crimson Malicious Code.
CRUNCH.
Felix didn't move. He stood as a pillar of defiance as the truck struck.
The world didn't explode in a spray of blood. Instead, the air groaned. A massive, translucent vortex manifested behind Felix—a dark, swirling sphere of absolute nothingness, ringed by celestial mechanical gears and pulsating blue runes.
The truck began to unravel. The steel grill, the roaring engine, the very momentum of the machine—everything spiraled into Felix's outstretched palm as if being fed into a cosmic shredder. The crimson code screamed in a frequency only Felix could hear before being swallowed whole by the void.
[Refinement Successful: Kinetic Slaughter Absorbed.] [Acquired Trait: Physical Rule Immunity (Lvl 1).] [Data Stream Integrated: The Hunt Begins.]
The street fell silent once more. The truck was gone, erased from existence down to the last atom of rust. Felix stood alone in the acid rain, his pupils now twin silver whirlpools. He looked up at the golden, floating towers of the Pantheon hidden behind the clouds.
"Your script is full of bugs," he said, his voice cold enough to freeze the rain. "And I'm about to crash your entire system."