Chapter 32: Fatal Collision

  The subterranean cavern of the Nevada Black Site looked like a shattered graphics card.

  The heavy freight elevator screeched to a halt, the steel doors violently pried open by Locke’s bare, sapphire-glowing hands. As the squad stepped into the massive underground chamber, the air pressure dropped so fast it popped their ears.

  At the far end of the cavern, the second celestial Bronze Door had been blown wide open. But the room wasn't just swarming with Null-Walkers—it was actively being unrendered. Half of the concrete walls were replaced by the jagged, gray polygons of the Glitch Wastes.

  And standing directly in front of the bleeding dimensional tear was CEO Marcus Vance.

  He hadn't fled. Driven completely mad by the loss of his empire, Vance had strapped himself into a ten-foot-tall Vanguard Heavy-Loader Mech. But it was no longer a machine of Earth. Thick, pulsing cables of red malware poured from the Bronze Door, jacking directly into the mech's chassis and Vance's spine.

  He was mutating in real-time. Flesh, titanium, and corrupted code fused together into a jagged, neon-red monstrosity.

  [ASSET: MARCUS_VANCE] + [ASSET: VANGUARD_MECH_04]

  [ASSIMILATION: KING_EREBUS_AVATAR]

  [STATUS: HYBRID DOMAIN ESTABLISHED]

  "You cost me my quarterly projections, Kane!" Vance screamed, but his voice was drowned out by the overlapping, grinding static of the Glitch King. (And you cost me my physical anchor. We are merged now. The CEO and the King!)

  "He downloaded the boss directly into his brain," Alex breathed, his green eyes flaring as the Golden Code recognized the sheer, terrifying processing power of the hybrid.

  (My server. My rules,) the Vance-Erebus Avatar hissed.

  The massive mech raised a heavy, static-wreathed cannon. But it didn't fire a physical projectile. It fired a localized patch-update to the room's physics engine.

  [EXECUTING: DOMAIN_RULE_CHANGE]

  [VARIABLE: GRAVITY = INVERTED] [VARIABLE: MOMENTUM = REVERSED]

  "Brace!" Alex shouted.

  This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version.

  Instantly, the floor became the ceiling. Lyra, Thorne, and Alex violently fell upward, crashing into the steel rafters of the bunker. Locke, his overclocked Doorwarden suit humming, managed to flip mid-air, landing in a heavy crouch on the ceiling, cracking the concrete.

  "My stomach!" Thorne gagged, desperately clinging to a steel beam with one hand while his obsidian sword pulsed hungrily in the other.

  "Controls are inverted!" Lyra realized, her crimson coat hanging upside down. She tried to throw a violet gravity-compression sphere at the Avatar, but because her momentum was reversed, the spell violently shot backward, blowing a hole in the elevator doors behind them.

  (Delete them!) the Avatar roared.

  A dozen heavy, corrupted missiles shot from the mech’s shoulder pods, arcing wildly through the inverted-gravity room.

  Alex pushed through the agonizing vertigo. He couldn't fight the physical missiles, so he hacked their targeting arrays. He furiously typed air-keystrokes, his fingers a blur of green light.

  [ASSET: CORRUPTED_ORDNANCE x12]

  [EDIT: TARGET_LOCK = USER_MARCUS_VANCE]

  The missiles instantly pulled violent U-turns in mid-air and slammed directly back into the Vance-Erebus mech. The explosions rocked the cavern, shredding the mech’s outer armor, but the red static instantly began recompiling the damaged steel.

  Locke didn't wait for gravity to fix itself. He sprinted across the ceiling, his sapphire-charged boots leaving glowing footprints in the concrete. He launched himself downward—which was technically up—closing the gap to the Avatar in a heartbeat.

  Locke threw a devastating, overclocked haymaker directly at the mech's cockpit glass.

  But before his fist could connect, the temperature in the room dropped to absolute zero.

  [WARNING: SYSTEM ENFORCER DETECTED]

  [INITIATING: SECTOR_FORMAT]

  The entire cavern shook as if hit by a ten-point earthquake. Above them, hundreds of feet of solid Nevada desert rock simply... vanished.

  A pillar of blinding, holy white light blasted straight down from the sky, instantly vaporizing the ceiling and illuminating the underground bunker in the harsh light of the noonday sun.

  Descending slowly through the pillar of light was Malakai the Purifier.

  His featureless silver mask locked onto the chaos below. He saw the corrupted Earth-tech Avatar. He saw the Architect. He saw the Doorwarden. To the Server's ultimate anti-virus, this entire room was a fatal system error.

  [THREAT_LEVEL: OMNICIDAL]

  [EXECUTING: PURGE_PROTOCOL]

  Malakai raised his massive broadsword of solid white light. He didn't swing it at a single target; he swung it at the localized IP address of the Nevada base.

  A wave of pure, unadulterated formatting-fire blasted outward.

  "Shields!" Alex screamed, dropping the gravity-inversion hack so the squad violently crashed back down to the true floor.

  Lyra slammed both hands onto the concrete, projecting a massive dome of violet magic, while Locke stepped in front of her, crossing his sapphire-glowing arms to absorb the brunt of the impact.

  The formatting-fire hit the Vance-Erebus Avatar first. The mech shrieked as its Earth-titanium and malware-code literally began to unravel, the King's red static desperately fighting Malakai's white light in a blinding clash of administrative privileges.

  The cavern was tearing itself apart. The Earth was glitching. The Server was crashing. And the squad was trapped right in the middle of the apocalypse.

  The Ultimate 3-Way Boss Fight!

  Absolute pandemonium! We have Alex and his fully-upgraded squad, the terrifying Vance-Erebus Hybrid, and Malakai the Purifier all throwing god-tier code at each other.

  The Nevada Black Site is literally being deleted around them.