The transition wasn't like stepping through a door; it was like forcing yourself through a sheet of badly tuned static. Jax gritted his teeth as he pushed through the weakest point of the Authority quarantine field where it intersected the crumbling sewer conduit. For a disorienting second, the world dissolved into screeching white noise and the smell of burning ozone filled his nostrils. His vision pixelated violently, reality stuttering like a corrupted data stream. A wave of nausea surged, and the cheap synth-booze he’d consumed earlier threatened a hostile return journey. His forearm comm unit shrieked a burst of corrupted code, its display dissolving into frantic, meaningless symbols before going dark. The charge indicator on his kinetic pulse pistol flickered between full and empty like a nervous tic.

  Then, as abruptly as it began, it settled. He stumbled forward, catching himself against the slimy, curved wall of the conduit, now definitively inside the Anomalous Zone of Sector 9’s Geo-Thermal ruins. The air here was different. Heavy, thick with the scent of damp decay and something else… something metallic and vaguely organic, like rusted blood and overripe fruit. The oppressive, familiar grey gloom of Neo-Veridia Prime was replaced by a strangely vibrant, sickly illumination emanating from glowing patches of phosphorescent fungi clinging to the walls and ceiling, casting long, dancing shadows that didn’t quite seem to match the shapes they belonged to.

  “Right,” Jax muttered, his voice sounding flat and oddly damped in the strange acoustics. “Five-star accommodation. Wonder if they have room service.” He spat gritty saliva onto the conduit floor, the stim-chew’s artificial buzz already feeling thin against the weird pressure building behind his eyes.

  He pushed onward, pistol held ready despite its flickering indicator. The sewer conduit soon opened into a vast, cavernous space – what must have once been a primary coolant reservoir for the geo-thermal plant. Massive pipes, thick as transit tubes, snaked across the ceiling and walls, coated in grime and the ubiquitous glowing fungus. Catwalks, rusted and precarious, crisscrossed the space high above. And everywhere, the glitches.

  Patches of wall flickered between solid corroded metal and brief, transparent glimpses of swirling, non-Euclidean geometry in eye-watering colors. A steady drip of water from a leaky pipe seemed to fall upwards occasionally before splashing back down. The beam of his shoulder-mounted utility lamp – thankfully still functional, though its light seemed oddly diffused – occasionally bent at impossible angles or split into brief prismatic shards. It wasn't just decay; it was reality itself fraying at the seams, the underlying code succumbing to cosmic malware.

  “Lovely,” Jax quipped to the oppressive silence. “Looks like the maintenance budget took a hit when the extradimensional horrors moved in.”

  He needed to get higher, orient himself using the pre-Bleed schematics Fingers had supplied, now hopefully accessible via his comm’s offline memory if the unit hadn’t completely fried itself. He spotted a maintenance ladder ascending one of the massive support pillars, miraculously still mostly intact, though several rungs were missing or bent at alarming angles.

  Climbing was tedious, the metal cold and slick beneath his gloves. He moved cautiously, testing each rung, acutely aware that a fall here wouldn't just mean broken bones, but potentially tumbling into a patch of reality that decided gravity was optional or that solid matter wasn't strictly necessary. His pistol’s charge indicator finally gave up its frantic flickering and died completely. Fantastic. Now he was relying on a maybe-charged energy weapon in a zone where energy itself seemed drunk.

  Halfway up, he heard it. Not a growl, not a screech, but a low, dissonant chime, like fractured crystal resonating just at the edge of hearing. It seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere at once. He froze, scanning the cavern below and the catwalks above. Nothing moved except the flickering glitches and the slow ooze from leaky pipes.

  He continued climbing, faster now, the unsettling chime prickling the hairs on the back of his neck. He reached a catwalk that seemed relatively stable – meaning its Axiomatic structure, even through his own untrained perception, didn't look like it was actively trying to unravel into screaming chaos this very second. He stepped onto the grated metal surface, pistol held ready, sweeping the area.

  The chime intensified, accompanied now by a visual distortion ahead. A section of the catwalk seemed to shimmer, buckle, and then unfold like badly rendered origami. Metal groaned, not in protest, but in transformation. Rusted plating, broken conduits, strands of corroded wiring peeled away from the structure and coalesced, drawn together by some unseen force. Sparks flew, not from short circuits, but from the very air as fundamental forces were violated.

  Before Jax’s cynical, disbelieving eyes, the scrap heap assembled itself into a vaguely quadrupedal form. It was a mockery of life, a glitch given malevolent purpose. One leg was a bent pipe spewing faint, corrosive steam. Another was a bundle of sparking wires crackling with contained energy. Its body was a shifting mass of jagged metal plates, and its head was a fractured sensor array, its multiple lenses glowing with the same sickly phosphorescence as the fungus, swiveling erratically. It didn't roar; it emitted that same fractured, dissonant chime, louder now, painful in its unnatural harmony.

  “Okay,” Jax breathed, backing away slowly. “New rule: don’t lick the fungus. Might be sentient. And grumpy.”

  The Scrap-Chimera, for lack of a better term, lurched towards him, its movement jerky, unnatural, defying its own apparent weight and structure. Its wire-leg crackled, sending arcs of raw energy snapping towards the catwalk floor near Jax’s feet, melting small holes in the grating.

  “Right, grumpy it is,” Jax decided. He raised the pulse pistol, thumbing the activation stud, praying to whatever indifferent cosmic entity coded this mess that it still held some charge.

  The indicator stayed dead, but he felt a faint vibration in the grip. He squeezed the trigger.

  Instead of the familiar sharp crack of a kinetic pulse, the pistol emitted a pathetic sputter, accompanied by a shower of blue sparks from the muzzle and a smell like burnt insulation. The Scrap-Chimera paused, its optical sensors focusing on him, seeming almost… amused? If a pile of sentient junk could feel amusement.

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  “Oh, you have got to be kidding me,” Jax groaned. He holstered the useless pistol. Plan B: run like hell and hope the thing was too busy violating the laws of physics to give chase effectively. Plan C: harsh language and maybe throwing rocks. He mentally ranked Plan C’s chances somewhere below ‘spontaneous combustion’.

  He turned to sprint back towards the ladder, but the Chimera moved with deceptive speed, its pipe-leg dragging it forward while its wire-leg discharged another, wider arc of energy, forcing Jax to leap sideways. He landed heavily, rolling, the impact jarring his teeth. The Chimera skittered closer, the chiming intensifying, vibrating not just in his ears but in his bones.

  Trapped. Cornered by a walking trash heap with an attitude problem and an apparent mastery over localized energy discharge. Perfect. Just another Tuesday in Neo-Veridia Prime.

  Desperation flared. He scrambled backwards, pulling his vibro-knife – thankfully, a purely mechanical device less prone to existential electronic crises. Its low hum was drowned out by the Chimera’s chiming. The creature lunged, its jagged metal body surprisingly agile. Jax dodged, slashing wildly with the knife. The blade scraped against rusted plating, sending sparks flying but failing to find purchase or inflict significant damage. The Chimera’s wire-leg lashed out, grazing his thigh, sending a jolt of agonizing electricity through him. He yelled, stumbling back, the smell of burnt fabric and his own seared flesh filling his nostrils.

  Pain sharpened his focus, adrenaline flooding his system, momentarily pushing back the exhaustion. He couldn’t dodge forever. He couldn’t damage its patchwork hide effectively. But maybe… maybe he didn’t need to. He looked at its legs – the steaming pipe, the crackling wires. Unstable components.

  As the Chimera advanced again, chiming triumphantly, Jax didn’t dodge. He lunged forward, low, under the snapping energy arcs. Ignoring the searing pain in his leg, he drove the point of his vibro-knife with all his strength not at the main body, but jamming it directly into the corroded joint where the sparking wire-leg met the main chassis.

  The effect was immediate and spectacular. The humming knife bit into stressed metal and overloaded circuits. The crackling energy discharge went wild, arcing uncontrollably. The Chimera convulsed, emitting a high-pitched shriek of distorted static that replaced the chiming. Blue fire erupted from the damaged joint. The wire-leg flailed violently, then went limp, showering the catwalk with sparks. The creature staggered, losing its balance, its remaining legs struggling to compensate.

  Jax scrambled backwards, putting distance between himself and the flailing machine-thing. It wasn't dead, but it was crippled, momentarily neutralized. He watched, panting, as it tried to drag itself forward, trailing smoke and sparks, its optical sensors flickering erratically.

  Then, something strange happened. As the immediate surge of adrenaline faded, replaced by throbbing pain and returning exhaustion, Jax felt a peculiar warmth spread through his chest, accompanied by a faint, almost imperceptible ping sound deep within his own mind. For a fleeting instant, a string of glowing green, nonsensical characters – vaguely reminiscent of corrupted Aethelian script mixed with raw code – flashed across the very edge of his vision before vanishing.

  He blinked, shaking his head. What the absolute glitch was that? Stress-induced hallucination? Neural overload from the energy jolt? A side effect of the stim-chew interacting with the Anomaly's ambient weirdness? He dismissed it. Couldn't be real. Systems didn't just appear in your vision after stabbing a sentient scrap pile. That only happened in bad VR sims, the kind losers plugged into to forget how much reality sucked.

  Still, the feeling lingered – a subtle lessening of his fatigue, a slight sharpening of his senses beyond the usual stim-buzz, almost like a micro-dose of pure energy had just flooded his system. Weird. Deeply weird.

  He gave the crippled Chimera a wide berth, not bothering to finish it off. Wasting energy on scrap wasn't efficient. He limped towards the other end of the catwalk, finally managing to coax his forearm comm back to a semblance of life – offline mode only, but the pre-Bleed schematics of the Geo-Thermal plant overlaid with the estimated location of Object Rho were accessible.

  According to the schematic, the main reactor building was deeper within the complex, past the primary coolant reservoir and through a series of heavily shielded maintenance corridors. Comparing the decades-old map to the glitching, warped reality visible around him was going to be… interesting. Like navigating using a tourist map during an earthquake, while blindfolded, and possibly drunk.

  “Alright, Rho-deo,” Jax muttered, studying the flickering map while keeping a wary eye on the distorted architecture around him. “Let’s see what kind of pre-Collapse bullshit is worth getting electrocuted by sentient plumbing.”

  He pushed onward, deeper into the Anomaly, deeper into the heart of the Geo-Thermal ruins. The air grew heavier, the reality glitches more frequent and pronounced. He saw corridors that twisted back on themselves, stairwells that ascended into solid walls, patches of floor that rippled like water. Strange, bioluminescent flora pulsed with internal light, casting shadows that jittered and warped. The sounds were a disorienting mix of industrial groans, dripping liquids, faint electronic whines, and that ever-present, underlying hum that felt like the base code of reality itself vibrating out of tune.

  He scavenged cautiously where possible. An intact power cell pulled from a non-hostile maintenance drone momentarily caught in a minor spatial loop. A sealed packet of surprisingly preserved emergency rations tucked inside a locker whose door flickered in and out of existence. Strange, crystalline shards dropped by the defeated Chimera that hummed with faint, residual energy – useless now, maybe, but potentially valuable later. Every little bit helped. Survival was about margins, especially when reality itself had thrown out the rulebook.

  The isolation pressed in, thick and suffocating. It wasn't just being alone; it was being alone in a place where the fundamental laws he understood were actively breaking down, replaced by… something else. Something alien, perhaps intelligent in a way he couldn't grasp, or perhaps just pure, mindless chaos bleeding through from somewhere awful. His cynicism and dark humor were defense mechanisms, shields against the encroaching existential dread, the quiet terror that whispered maybe Neo-Veridia Prime wasn’t decaying – maybe it was being overwritten.

  He reached a massive blast door, heavily reinforced, bearing the faded insignia of the Aethelian Geo-Thermal Authority. According to the schematic, this led into the primary reactor containment structure. The energy signature designated Object Rho pulsed faintly from somewhere deep within. The door itself was buckled, partially fused shut, but a narrow gap remained near the floor, forced open perhaps by the initial Bleed event or structural collapse.

  Jax eyed the gap warily. Big enough to squeeze through, but no telling what lay immediately beyond. The air filtering out smelled metallic, ozone-heavy, carrying that same faint, sickly sweet organic undertone he’d noticed earlier. The dissonant chiming he’d heard from the Chimera echoed faintly from within, multipled, as if more such entities waited inside.

  He took another stim-chew, grimacing at the taste. “Okay, Jax,” he muttered to himself, drawing the recovered vibro-knife, its low hum a comforting, real sound in this place. “Time to crash the party. Let’s hope the hosts aren’t too hungry.” He crouched down, preparing to slide into the unknown darkness of the reactor building, the strange warmth and the memory of the green code-glitch flickering at the edge of his awareness like static on a broken screen.