Chapter 10 #2
"I am going to strap the Catalyst to this table. I am going to drain every drop of his glitched marrow, and I am going to harvest his Weave-Interface while he watches. I will integrate his corrupted code into my own. And when I am finished, I will finally be a god without limits."
The aether-feed violently shuddered.
The sheer, overwhelming volume of data passing through Drystan’s manual hack reached critical mass. The heavy brass plating of the gauntlet turned white-hot.
Drystan screamed, tearing his right hand away from the exposed aether-threads.
The hologram vanished instantly. The smuggler’s hollow plunged back into absolute, suffocating darkness.
The sudden silence was deafening, broken only by Drystan’s ragged, agonizing gasps as he clutched his smoking left arm to his chest. The smell of searing flesh filled the damp air. He rolled onto his side, biting his tongue to keep from screaming again, tears streaming from his icy gray eyes.
He had wanted intel. He had wanted to know the stakes.
He had just watched his own vivisection being planned.
"Moros," Nymeria whispered. She didn't move toward him. Her voice was trembling, thick with a horror so profound it bordered on madness.
She had grown up in the shadows, expecting cruelty from the golden elite.
But what they had just witnessed defied cruelty.
Cruelty required emotion. Evander Cross was an unfeeling algorithm wearing a beautiful face.
He didn't want to torture Drystan out of spite; he wanted to mine his organs like a vein of gold.
"I heard it," Drystan rasped, forcing himself to sit up in the dark.
His entire body was shaking. The terror was absolute. He was a corporate accountant. He balanced ledgers. He didn't know how to fight a sociopathic demigod who viewed his spinal fluid as an upgrade material.
Run, the ghost of his past life whispered. Keep running until you freeze in the ash.
But the memory of the executioner’s melted helmet flared in his mind. The memory of the Glitched Runic Strike shattering the hard-light halberd.
"He isn't a holy warrior," Drystan breathed into the dark. "He's just a player trying to break the game."
"He wants to harvest you," Nymeria said, her voice rising in panic. "He's going to send the entire Vanguard into the Wastes. They won't stop until they drag you back to that table."
"Let them come," Drystan said.
The words slipped out before he even fully processed them. They didn't sound like a terrified bluff. They sounded like a death sentence read by a judge.
Drystan Harrow closed his eyes. The fear was still there, a cold, freezing weight in his stomach, but it was being rapidly displaced by a cold, calculating rage.
Evander Cross wanted to optimize the system. Evander viewed Kaelen-D?r as a perfectly balanced equation.
But Drystan was the anomaly. Drystan was the glitch.
He leaned back against the cold basalt wall.
The agonizing pain in his left arm and his broken rib receded slightly, pushed aside by the sheer, undeniable gravity of his new paradigm.
He had spent his entire previous life adhering to the rules, terrified of stepping out of line, terrified of the consequences.
It had gotten him a heart attack in a cubicle.
He wasn't going to play by Evander's rules. He wasn't going to be a resource node.
If Evander Cross wanted to break the game, Drystan Harrow was going to burn the servers to the ground.
"Nymeria," Drystan said, his voice dropping into the low, terrifying resonance of the Doomed Mid-Boss. It wasn't an act anymore. It was an embrace.
"I'm here," she whispered from the dark.
"He thinks we're prey. He thinks we're hiding out here, waiting to be hunted down and dragged back to his sterile little tower."
Drystan reached over and grabbed the heavy, calcified block of mana-resin they had scavenged. He gripped it with his bloody right hand.
"But he made a miscalculation," Drystan continued, his icy gray eyes staring into the pitch-black void of the hollow. "He thinks I'm still bound by the Script. He thinks I'm just a glitch he can absorb."
He heard Nymeria shift in the dark, moving closer to him. The absolute, unshakeable confidence in his voice was a tether in the storm.
"What are we going to do?" she asked, her cynical edge completely replaced by a fierce, loyal readiness.
"We stop running," Drystan stated. "The Ashen Wastes aren't a hiding place. They're a staging ground. If Evander wants to send his golden zealots out here to harvest me, we're going to use the terrain. We are going to bleed his Vanguard dry, one squad at a time."
Drystan looked down at the smoking, ruined brass of his Weave-Gauntlet. The primitive, horrific patch job was a testament to the brutal reality of the Arch-Realm. He had survived by getting his hands dirty. Evander Cross had never been dirty in his entire life.
"He wants my corrupted code?" Drystan whispered, a cruel, razor-sharp smile touching his pale lips. "I'll give it to him. But I'm going to deliver it directly into his chest."
The dark faction had received its mandate. The game of survival was officially over. From the freezing depths of the smuggler’s hollow, the Villain’s Valedictorian prepared to wage absolute, asymmetrical warfare against the gods.