Sebastian floated in the pitch-black nothingness, his massive, glitching avatar of black static and weeping red runes anchored by a single, brilliant beam of blue light. That light was Valerie.

Her Astral Avatar hovered in front of him, a translucent, glowing projection of the corporate heiress who absolutely refused to let him die alone in the dark. But the beautiful, steady glow of her Earth-mana was starting to violently stutter.

"You’re lagging, Princess," Sebastian murmured, his voice a distorted, metallic hum that vibrated through the empty space.

Valerie’s projection flickered. One second she was perfectly rendered in her torn azure silk robes, and the next, her left leg dissolved into a block of fuzzy, low-resolution blue static before violently snapping back into shape. She gasped, her translucent hands flying to her chest as if she had just been punched.

"I’m fine," Valerie wheezed. The audio feed from Earth was degrading, popping with sharp bursts of white noise. "It’s just a localized bandwidth issue. I can hold the connection."

"Stop lying to me," Sebastian said flatly, his silver-tinged void eyes narrowing. "You sound like you’re trying to talk to me through a blender. I know exactly how much raw processing power it takes to punch a signal through the firewall I just built around Earth. You aren’t just using your mana pool, Valerie. You’re using yourself as the copper wiring."

Valerie didn’t immediately answer. The blue light around her pulsed weakly, struggling against the oppressive, heavy ambient pressure of the Juncture. Millions of miles away, safely tucked behind the impenetrable golden barrier of Sanctuary, her physical body was lying on a cold marble Resurrection Altar.

Sebastian didn’t need his glitched [True Sight] to know what was happening back in that medical ward. He could practically smell the burning ozone. He knew the illegal, jury-rigged Astral Spire they had built was redlining. He knew Galleon was probably screaming at the top of his lungs, desperately dumping coolant onto the runic arrays to keep the machine from melting down into a puddle of radioactive slag.

And he knew what it was doing to Valerie.

"Your physical body is failing," Sebastian stated, stating the brutal math of the situation. He reached out with a heavy, static-laced hand, carefully hovering his fingers just an inch away from her glowing cheek. He didn’t dare touch her. His error-riddled body was too unstable. "If you keep channeling the planet’s leyline through your nervous system, your brain is going to literally cook inside your skull. Drop the tether."

"I am not dropping the call, Seattle," Valerie snapped back, a flash of her old, stubborn corporate authority cutting through the static. "You don’t get to make unilateral executive decisions for this guild anymore. I am the Acting Guild Master of Sanctuary. And my first official decree is that my absolute idiot of a frontline fighter is not dying alone in a space dumpster."

"Valerie, look at me," Sebastian pleaded, dropping the sarcastic, deadpan armor he usually wore. "Look at what I am."

He gestured to his towering, eight-foot-tall form. He was a walking software crash. His body was a churning, unstable mess of bruised-purple code and jagged green wireframes. The red runes carved into his chest wept a constant, oily stream of digital ash. He wasn’t a human being anymore. He was a highly compressed, weaponized computer virus that had just barely survived deleting the creators of the universe.

"The Grand Archons are dead. Earth is locked down," Sebastian said softly. "The Vanguard Syndicate can’t touch our people. We won. You need to log off and enjoy the peace and quiet."

Valerie’s translucent blue eyes glared up at him. She looked utterly exhausted, but the fierce, unyielding devotion in her gaze was heavier than the gravity of a dying star.

"We haven’t won anything yet," she whispered, pointing a shaking finger up at the dark sky of the Juncture. "Look up, Sebastian. The landlords are coming to collect the rent."

Sebastian slowly tilted his masked head upward.

High above them, millions of miles deep into the unmapped void, the fabric of the Ethereal Plane was parting. It wasn’t a messy, jagged tear like the warp portals used by the Saints. It was a flawless, mathematically perfect incision. The chaotic purple smog of the Juncture was simply peeling back in perfectly straight, geometric lines, revealing the blinding, clinical white light of the Core OS.

The true operating system of the multiverse was waking up.

"Yeah, I saw them," Sebastian sighed, his shoulders slumping slightly. "The Architects. The guys who wrote the code for the Grand Archons. I really hate upper management."

"They aren’t just going to look at the golden barrier around Earth and go home," Valerie’s voice trembled, the blue light of her avatar dimming as another wave of static washed over her. "If they have root access to the entire simulation, they will eventually figure out how to crack your firewall. They will un-render Sanctuary. They will un-render everyone we spent the last year trying to keep alive."

She took a shaky, virtual breath, forcing her glitching form to stand up straighter.

"I am keeping the tether open," Valerie declared, her tone leaving absolutely no room for debate. "I am your lighthouse. If you go into the Core OS, the sheer perfection of their environment is going to try and scatter your corrupted code. You need an anchor to remind your files who you are. I am not letting you dissolve into background radiation."

Sebastian stared at the woman he loved. She was willingly sacrificing her own physical integrity, letting a machine tear her nervous system apart, just to give him a fighting chance.

He didn’t argue. He knew it was pointless. When Valerie made up her mind, you could sooner convince a brick wall to move out of your way.

"You’re going to owe me a really expensive dinner after this," Sebastian muttered, a dark, terrifyingly genuine smile carving itself onto his face beneath the cracked porcelain mask.

"I’ll buy you the fanciest synthetic steak in the slums," Valerie promised, her own faint smile fighting through the pain. "Just go break their toys, Seattle."

"With pleasure."

Sebastian turned his back on the glowing, golden sphere of Earth. He turned his back on the only safe haven in the entire Ethereal Plane. He looked up at the descending, flawless white geometric shapes drifting out of the Core OS rift.

He bent his knees, his biological steel wireframes coiling tight with the condensed kinetic force of ten million units of Source Code.

He didn’t wait for the Architects to come to him. The Sovereign of Laws launched himself into the absolute, blinding light, fully prepared to butcher the creators of reality.

——

The ascent into the Core OS was like flying directly into the center of a sterile, fluorescent lightbulb.

Sebastian tore through the vacuum of the Juncture, a blurry, violently glitching streak of black and green static rocketing upward. Behind him, the comforting, chaotic purple smog of the dead zone faded away. The environment rapidly shifted from a messy, disorganized graveyard into a terrifying realm of absolute, mathematical perfection.

There was no debris here. There were no floating rusted ships or pulverized bone dust. There was only a sprawling, infinite expanse of pure white space. It smelled like nothing. It sounded like nothing. It was the blank, unwritten canvas of the Ethereal Plane’s foundational hard drive.

And drifting down from the top of that canvas were the system’s ultimate countermeasures.

Sebastian slowed his ascent, allowing his hyper-dense [Concept of Mass] to act as a localized brake. He floated in the blinding white void, his dark, static-filled avatar aggressively clashing with the pristine environment.

He looked at the descending shapes.

They were colossal, perfectly white hyper-cubes that constantly folded in and out of four-dimensional space. They moved with a synchronized, mechanical precision that made Sebastian’s teeth ache. As they drifted closer, the bottom face of the largest cube simply ceased to exist, revealing a hollow, glowing interior.

From that abyss, the Cleaners emerged.

"Oh, come on," Sebastian groaned, his voice a distorted buzz of overlapping audio files. "More angels? Does anyone in this simulation have any original concept art?"

They were Seraphic entities, but they were vastly different from the heavily armored, arrogant Paladins of the Vanguard Syndicate. These things didn’t wear armor. They didn’t hold broadswords or plasma rifles.

They were humanoid in shape, but flawlessly smooth, constructed entirely of blinding, hard-light white code. They had no faces. No eyes, no mouths, no defining features at all. Protruding from their backs were six massive wings. But the wings weren’t made of feathers; they were composed of slowly pulsing, heavily condensed deletion scripts. Every time the wings shifted, tiny flakes of white light drifted off them, instantly un-rendering whatever stray particles of cosmic dust they touched.

They were the literal, physical manifestation of the system’s ’Delete’ key.

Sebastian pulled up his green, corrupted Administrator UI. His silver-tinged eyes narrowed as he scanned the vanguard of the approaching Seraphs.