CHAPTER III

Hollow Logick didn’t run. Running required friction, and friction was inefficient. He glided.

He moved across the obsidian dunes of The Binary Expanse like a drop of ink falling through water. His silhouette was wrong—too tall, too thin, his limbs articulating at angles that suggested his joints were made of liquid rather than bone. This was the curse of the Marfan genotype: a connective tissue disorder that stretched him into a wireframe ghost, stripping away his durability but granting him the reach of a spider.

He stopped, his breathing shallow. His chest wall, convex and fragile, struggled against the thin air of the digital desert.

< Warning, > Indexor-Prime noted, the text appearing as a gentle blue overlay on Hollow’s retina. < Hostile signature detected. SIMULEX Protocol active. Deepfake rendering in progress. >

Hollow stood still. Around him, the desert shifted. The black sand began to rise, forming shapes. Three figures manifested from the dust.

They weren't monsters. They were him.

Three perfect copies of Hollow Logick stood before him, their neon pink katanas drawn, their masks reflecting the blood-red sky. They were "Viral Clones"—perfectly rendered, high-resolution lies designed to bait him into exposing his position.

If he struck the wrong one, The Mainframe would triangulate his location instantly. If he hesitated, they would cut him down. And with his bone density, a single strike would shatter him.

He had to look. He had to really look.

Hollow closed his eyes behind his mask. He reached deep into the terrifying, cold logic of The Sight Debt.

"Open," he whispered.

He didn't open his physical eyes. He activated True Sight.

The world stripped down. The texture of the sand vanished. The red sky dissolved into raw hexadecimal code. And the three clones before him flickered. Two of them were hollow wireframes—polygons with nothing inside.

But the middle one? The middle one had a heat signature. It had a pulse.

Got you.

But the cost was immediate.
A timer in his peripheral vision—a literal countdown clock burned into his optic nerve—ticked down.

4 Years, 3 Months, 12 Days...
4 Years, 3 Months, 11 Days...

He just paid twenty-four hours of future sight for five seconds of clarity now.

Hollow moved.

He triggered the Gliding Serpent Flow. He didn't push off the ground; he exploited the lag between frames. He appeared in front of the middle clone before the code could render his arrival.

His weapon, The Lantern Katana, was a blur of Vibrant Pink. It didn't slash; it passed through the clone's guard like a glitch, severing the connection between the entity and the server.

The clone didn't bleed; it fragmented into white noise and vanished.

Hollow didn't celebrate. He recoiled instantly, sliding back ten meters into the shadows.
Because he wasn't alone.

As his True Sight faded, a massive, towering shadow peeled itself off the ground behind him. It was the Shadow Demon—the persistent, dark parasite attached to his own silhouette. It grew taller, fed by the energy he had just expended. It shrieked, a digital feedback loop that echoed across the desert, acting as a beacon to every Overseer in the sector.

< Beacon active, > Indexor warned. < You lit a flare in a dark room, Hollow. VORATH is watching. >

Hollow leaned on his katana, his long, spider-like fingers trembling slightly. The countdown clock in his eyes stabilized, but the number was lower than it had been a minute ago. The dark edges of his vision—the peripheral blindness—crept inward just a fraction of a millimeter.

He looked at the empty space where the enemy had been. He was the Deceiver who stayed. He was the liar who bought The Network time, paying for it with the only currency he had left.

"Let them watch," Hollow whispered, dissolving back into the glitch-dust of the storm. "I don't need to see them to kill them."