The world outside the warehouse screamed, but not with sound. It was the shriek of reality being unmade.
Felix looked through the cracked window. The midnight sky over the Rust Belt had been replaced by a pulsing, emerald-green grid. Buildings touched by the grid didn't collapse; they simply ceased to be, dissolving into a flurry of meaningless pixels.
"The grid is closing," Felix snapped, turning to the shimmering Aria and the hulking Leo. "Move. Now!"
"Follow the green pulse, you idiots!" Zero's voice crackled through the warehouse intercom, now sounding frantic. "The Scavengers are here. If they touch you, your source code gets wiped. No respawns, no backups. Just... gone."
As if summoned by his words, three figures stepped through the warehouse wall—literally walking through the solid steel as if it were fog. They were the [Scavengers]. Standing seven feet tall, they had no faces, only glowing, hollow rectangular heads. Their bodies were composed of shifting, semi-transparent cubes that pulsed with a cold, white light.
One Scavenger raised a hand toward a stack of shipping containers. The metal didn't melt; it turned into a swarm of grey cubes and vanished into the Scavenger's palm.
"Leo! Front!" Felix roared.
The Revenant surged forward, his hydraulic legs shattering the floor. "SHIFTS... NEVER... END!" He slammed his violet-lightning fists together, creating an electromagnetic dome. When the Scavenger's pixelation beam hit the shield, the purple sparks hissed and popped, fighting back against the erasure.
"Aria, cover him! Distort their sensors!"
Aria didn't hesitate. She unleashed a low-frequency hum, a song of pure dissonance. The air around the Scavengers began to blur, their geometric forms flickering as her [Scream of Truth] attacked the logical consistency of their digital shells.
Felix didn't run away. He ran at them.
[Warning: Proximal Deletion Aura detected. Critical danger.]
"Danger is just an unoptimized variable," Felix growled. He lunged, his hand glowing with the dark, swirling hunger of the Singularity Reactor. He didn't punch the Scavenger; he grabbed its hollow head.
The Scavenger tried to pixelate Felix's arm, but the Reactor was faster. The "Deletion Command" was met by a "Consumption Logic." The semi-transparent cubes composing the Scavenger began to flow into Felix's palm like sand through an hourglass.
[Refinement Successful: Absorbing High-Dimensional Deletion Script...] [Acquired Trait: Logical Integrity (Lvl 1) — Resistance to Erasure.] [Acquired Energy: 8,000 Units.]
The Scavenger collapsed into a heap of dead code. Felix felt a surge of icy power manifest in his mind. For a split second, he could see the "path of least resistance"—a glowing thread through the closing green grid.
"This way!" Felix grabbed Aria's shimmering hand and signaled Leo.
They sprinted through the dissolving district. Behind them, the warehouse vanished into the void. They reached a massive, rusted hatch leading to the underground data vaults just as the green grid snapped shut above them.
The hatch slammed shut. Silence returned, heavy and suffocating.
They descended into a cavernous room filled with the hum of ancient, forbidden servers. In the center, suspended by hundreds of glowing fiber-optic cables, was a scorched, emaciated body. It looked like a man who had been struck by lightning a thousand times.
The corpse's head tilted up. Its eyes were gone, replaced by glowing green lenses.
"Welcome to the basement of the world," Zero's voice spoke, not from the speakers, but from the mouth of the suspended man. "I'd offer you a drink, but I'm currently being used as a human heat-sink."
Felix walked toward him, his silver eyes narrowing. "Zero. You said we were being deleted. Why did I see a 'Core Extraction' command in that Scavenger's logic?"
Zero's mechanical eyes whirred. "Because Apex doesn't want you dead anymore, Felix. They've seen what your Reactor can do. They've triggered the 'Prometheus Protocol.' They don't want to erase you... they want to turn you into the engine for the next version of the Matrix."
Felix's grip tightened. The hunt had just become a harvest.