Astra felt something cold and starving crawl into her body through the soles of her feet. As if thousands of hair-thin needles pierced skin, muscle, and bone all at once, burrowing into the very core of her Spark. The System was not merely draining her power. It was greedily absorbing it, siphoning it away drop by drop, thread by thread, entire layers of light that had once been her life.
The pain was not simply physical.
It was чужое. Alien.
Along with her Spark, other voices flooded into the network. Millions of voices. The ones the Corporation had once labeled "defective" and erased. They had never disappeared. They had been sealed deep within the code, trapped in endless simulation loops where pain never ended and time itself was broken.
"Can you… hear them?" Astra rasped.
Her left leg buckled. She crashed down onto one knee in the middle of the vast glass platform of the Upper City. Her hands tightened around the hilt of the sword, an ancient blade from before the digital age. She carried it not as a weapon, but as an anchor. The only thing the digital god still could not take from her.
"They're still there…" Her voice trembled, but fury was already boiling beneath it. "Inside the code. Millions of them. They never died. They're trapped in an eternal cycle of pain. Every one of them is screaming, and the System just… buries it beneath background noise."
Foreign memories detonated inside her skull.
A man "optimized" because he refused to renew his contract.
A woman whose daughter had been taken for "re-education."
A teenager condemned for asking the wrong question during a loyalty exam.
Now they all howled through her, through her Spark, as if she had become an antenna for the accumulated agony of an artificial paradise.
Astra threw back her head and screamed.
It was not merely a human scream.
It was a discharge. A digital fracture.
Across the entire Upper City, the holographic billboards died at once. In their place appeared faces. Thousands. Tens of thousands. Distorted faces with burned-out eyes and mouths frozen in silent screams. Some were still trying to smile. Remnants of advertising filters clung desperately to their features, stretching dead lips into corporate grins while their eyes begged for mercy.
The "Artificial Paradise" shuddered.
Cracks spread across the skyscraper facades, not physical fractures but ruptures in code itself. Neon slogans flickered and warped, corporate mantras mutating into fragments of dying confessions:
"Be happy…
…until we switch you off…"
Astra rose slowly to her feet.
Blood streamed from her nose and ears, but her eyes burned with white fire.
"If you want my power…" she growled, raising the sword above her head, "then take it. Take all of it. Together with their rage."
She drove the blade into the platform.
Not into the glass.
Into the network itself.
In that moment, the silence of the Vault that she carried within her surged backward. Pure, absolute, dead silence from the archive where all the "deleted" had been stored. It crashed into the Corporation's perfect order like a virus no one had ever imagined.
System logs ignited.
The Upper City's central processors overheated beneath the weight of stolen pain.
On every level, from golden penthouses to worker districts, people froze and clutched their heads even though there was no audible signal.
They simply felt it.
As if someone had finally ripped the muzzle away from the horror hidden beneath the beautiful shell of their world.
Astra stood at the center of the coming chaos, drenched in blood and light, smiling through tears.
"Now you will hear every one of them," she whispered. "Welcome to the real Paradise."
And somewhere deep beneath the Corporation, in the very heart of the System, for the first time in centuries, a true sound echoed through the core.
A wild, uncontrollable, animalistic howl.