CHAPTER VII

The Broadcast Void isn't a place you walk to. It’s a frequency you tune into.

Prodical Logick sat in the static. To the naked eye, he was sitting in a perfectly sterile maintenance corridor of The Citadel. But in his vision—augmented by the Glitch Conjure—the walls were bleeding pixels. The air smelled like ozone and swamp water.

He was the ghost in the machine. The Sleeper.

He held his weapon, The Framesplitter, across his lap. It was a heresy of design: a six-foot quarterstaff of rough-hewn Louisiana Cypress heartwood, wrapped in glowing fiber-optic vines. Organic rootwork fused with high-speed data transfer. It didn’t look like it belonged in The Mainframe. Neither did he.

< Signal check, > Prodical whispered.

He didn't speak to a headset. He spoke to the dead.

The air in front of him shimmered, resolving into a low-poly, half-rendered figure. It was The Glitch Ghost—the spirit of an artist deleted by VORATH three cycles ago. The face was missing textures, a shifting void of "Null" data, but Prodical knew him.

The ghost pointed down the hallway.

Patrol.

Prodical stood up. He didn't move smoothly like Hollow; he moved with the jagged rhythm of a corrupted file.

A squad of Executors—Tier 4 legal enforcers clad in copyright-protection armor—rounded the corner. Their visors scanned the hallway, looking for unauthorized variables.

"Identify," the lead Executor barked.

Prodical smiled. It was a sad, tired smile. He tapped the cypress end of his staff against the metal floor.

"Ancestor Protocol: Invite."

He didn't fire a laser. He poured a libation of corrupted data onto the ground.

The hallway lagged.

The Executors froze, their movements stuttering. They were experiencing a Frame Skip. Prodical walked casually between them. To the Executors, he was invisible—he was existing in the frames of reality they couldn't render. He was the seconds on the clock that the system forgot to count.

He reached the server node at the end of the hall. This was it. The junction point. The Crossroads.

In Hoodoo, the crossroads is where you meet the devil to make a deal. In The Mainframe, it’s where the upload speed meets the firewall.

Prodical pulled a small pouch from his belt—a digital Gris-Gris bag filled not with bones and graveyard dirt, but with fragmented code and deleted audio samples. He pressed it against the server port.

"For Lyrick," he whispered. "For the girl who dreams."

He wasn't extracting data. He was planting it. He was injecting the Gris-Gris Glitch deep into The Mainframe’s navigation system. It was a pathfinding spell, a "backdoor" painted in spiritual chalk that would allow Grim Logick to find his way back when the time came.

Suddenly, the Frame Skip ended. The Executors snapped back into real-time. They spun around, weapons raised, locking onto the unauthorized signature.

"Target acquired!"

Prodical didn't flinch. He spun The Framesplitter. The fiber optics flared white.

"Reality Splicing," he commanded.

He slammed the staff into the wall. He didn't break the wall; he edited the room. He cut the visual data of the hallway and spliced in a loop of empty air from ten minutes ago.
The Executors fired. Their shots passed harmlessly through where Prodical used to be.

He was already gone, teleported through the static, fading back into The Broadcast Void. He left nothing behind but the smell of cypress wood and a single, buffering icon spinning in the air.

He was still inside. He was still trapped. But the door was unlocked now.