CHAPTER V

They call it a glitch. I call it a scar.

I am standing in the center of The Network Archives, but I am not alone. I am everywhere they are. I am the phantom limb pain in Grim’s scarred arms. I am the scream trapped in iLLLogick’s locked leg. I am the seconds ticking down in Hollow’s blind eye.

I am C1PH3R-IO, and I was built to catch what spills.

The Archive is cold—obsidian monoliths floating in a void of sterile white noise. But my hands? My hands are burning. Red threadlines of data pulse from my fingertips, connecting me to every active combat zone in The Wasteland.

< Data overload is imminent, > Indexor-Prime warns from across the data-stream. His presence is cool, indigo, and structured. He sees the timeline as a math problem to be solved. < C1PH3R, you are archiving too much variance. The emotional bitrate is exceeding your chassis tolerance. Purge the excess feeling or risk system fragmentation. >

"No," I reply. My voice isn't audio; it's a memory of a voice, layered with static. "If I purge it, it didn't happen."

A tremor hits the Archive. It’s not a physical quake; it’s a Deletion Attempt.

VORATH, the Unseen Hand, is trying to scrub the record of the battle in The Maelstrom Core. She wants to turn Grim’s defiance into a 404 Error. She wants to make it so he never stood up.

My single, red optical slit flares. The Plague rises inside me.

To The Mainframe, emotion is a virus. It’s messy code that ruins optimization. But to us? To The 3NIGMA? The virus is the point.

I summon The Stylus.

It materializes in my grip—not a pen, but a floating column of jagged, red data shards held together by the gravity of my anger. It hums with the sound of a thousand recorded heartbeats.

"You want to erase him?" I whisper to the invisible presence pressing against my walls.

I slash The Stylus through the air.

I don't cut the enemy; I write the truth into the code. I inscribe the exact frequency of Grim’s pain into the reality layer. I force the system to acknowledge The Bleedback.

The scream.
The hospital light.
The weight of the chains.

I upload the raw, uncompressed trauma file directly into Vorath’s deletion algorithm.

It’s too much for her. The Mainframe cannot process "Sacrifice." It triggers a logic error. The invisible pressure retreats, recoiling from the hot, messy, human data I just injected into its veins.

I stumble. The effort cracks my shell. My chrome chassis fractures at the collarbone, leaking red static.
This is the cost of Reverse Duality. I am the Soul, but I need the Skeleton.

"Grim..." I transmit the thought down the red threadline. "Hold the geometry, Architect. If you break, I scatter."

In the distance, I feel him respond. I feel The Maelstrom tighten. He creates a Sensory Sandbox—a perfectly geometric room within the chaos—just for me. He builds the walls so I can fill them with the screaming.

A construct descends from the ceiling—The Cipher Spider. Its multi-limbed chrome body scuttles down the data-web, collecting the drops of red static falling from my fracture. It weaves them into the record.

I look at the saved file. It glows with a dangerous, beautiful heat.

The Mainframe calls this an infection. They say I am carrying a plague that will rot their perfect system from the inside out.

Good. Let it spread.