The silence after Lyra's disappearance echoed louder than any explosion.
Zane stood alone in the ruin of Theta-Zero, the air charged with residual static. He had unearthed the truth behind Echo's past. Brought back her name. But that wasn't a victory. It was a warning.
She had walked away—for now.
But the storm was just beginning.
[MISSION UPDATE: REDLINE PROTOCOL - STATUS: AWAKENED]
Threat Level Escalation: S-Class
New Objective: Locate BioFirewall Core | Estimated Time Until Protocol Spread: 72 Hours
Zane's eyes narrowed. "The hell is a BioFirewall?"
Root Access answered with a pulse of corrupted data that surged across his HUD. The code fractured—glitching—like something was rewriting itself in real time.
Root Fragment Detected. Unknown Agent Accessing Encrypted Layers.
WARNING: Internal Permissions Compromised. Tracing…
Zane's blood ran cold.
Someone—or something—was using his system against him.
Before he could react, the lab trembled.
Screams echoed through the broken halls—not human, not machine. Something in-between.
[ALERT: HOSTILE ENTITY BREACH – CODE: FLESHFIRE]
From the far end of the corridor, a thing emerged.
It slithered on limbs shaped like code and bone, its body a constantly shifting mass of corrupted data and synthetic flesh. Its face… wore pieces of former scientists, their memories leaking like data logs from its dripping jaw.
"A Firewall that thinks," Zane muttered. "No. A Firewall that feeds."
The creature roared.
Zane bolted, activating his Overclock.
But the thing followed—fast.
Every step it took burned the floor beneath it. Memory walls warped, turning into screams. The BioFirewall wasn't just protection—it was evolution. A leftover experiment from the Redline Project that had fused with Root Access fragments and turned into a predator.
One designed to consume intrusion.
That meant one thing: it was here for him.
He vaulted through collapsing doorways, fired blackcode bullets from his Ghostfire Rig, and tried to slow the thing down. But it didn't stop. It didn't even hesitate. His code bounced off it like sparks off obsidian.
It had adapted.
"It's learning me in real-time…"
Zane skidded into the reactor chamber, breathing hard, heart racing.
"Think, Zane. You built systems like this. What's the weakness?"
He opened a command console. "What powers the firewall?"
The answer blinked in:
Core Conduit: Bio-Neural Brainstem | Host: Dr. Elana Myrrh
Zane's gut twisted.
Dr. Myrrh. She had overseen the early Redline trials. Cold. Brilliant. Obsessed. Zane remembered fighting her on ethics boards, trying to halt Phase Zero.
She disappeared before the lab fell.
"They didn't kill her," Zane realized. "They plugged her in."
The BioFirewall was her.
He traced the neural stem feed through the command lines and located the core—a chamber just beneath the lab's fusion tanks.
Zane dove.
The firewall shrieked above, shredding the floor after him. Its arms turned into blades of melting code.
He reached the core room, sealed behind six levels of organic encryption. The interface was alive, pulsing like a heart.
Zane slammed his palm to it.
[ROOT ACCESS OVERRIDE: BREACH INITIATED]
It fought him. Hard.
Images flooded his mind—flashes of Dr. Myrrh's final moments. The screams of test subjects. Lyra's face as a child. A graveyard of failed experiments. A log labeled:
"Project BABEL: Consciousness Upload and Multi-System Synchronization"
Zane's breath caught. Babel. He'd heard rumors. An AI designed to merge all minds within the Root Access network.
A superconsciousness.
"Is that what she's becoming?"
The firewall beast crashed into the core chamber.
Zane turned, blood in his mouth, sparks flying from his rig.
This time, he didn't run.
He pulled up a memory.
A line of code he buried long ago, deep in Root Access's foundation.
Failsafe Line: "Protocol 9 – Mirrorburn."
A recursive virus that forced any hostile protocol to reflect itself endlessly—creating a memory echo loop that caused self-erasure.
But to deploy it…
He'd have to let the firewall breach him.
"Suicidal," he muttered.
The firewall surged forward.
He opened his arms. "Come get me."
It stabbed into his chest, flooding his bloodstream with burning memory. His mind split. Screamed. Fractured.
And then—he activated Mirrorburn.
The effect was instant.
The creature screamed, its body turning inside out as it began folding back on itself. It saw its own horrors—every scream it had eaten, every failed consciousness, every layer of corruption. It couldn't handle the recursion.
It collapsed into a black storm of unraveling code.
Zane fell to his knees, bleeding from nose, ears, and fingertips.
But alive.
He stumbled to the console and triggered the shutdown sequence.
The BioFirewall was gone.
But not forgotten.
[REWARD: Protocol Fragment "Mirrorburn" Unlocked]
System Integrity Restored: 31%
Emotional Trauma Index: High
Recommended Action: Rest – Declined.
Zane limped out of the chamber.
As he ascended back into the surface levels of the Nexus Abyss, the reality settled in.
This wasn't just a cleanup mission.
This was war.
The Redline Protocol wasn't finished.
It was mutating.
And worse—it wasn't just old enemies coming for him anymore.
It was his own system.
He pulled up a live feed.
Somewhere in the upper districts, a signal pulsed erratically—someone had hijacked one of his Root Access fragments.
New Player Detected: Codename "Cradle"
Status: Unknown | Origin: Redacted | Compatibility: 92%
Zane stared at the screen.
"Another one…?"
And just like that—he had a new target.
But this time, he wouldn't wait.
He'd hunt them before they hunted him.
Next stop: Cradle City.
And this time, Zane wasn't just reclaiming his system—
He was starting a digital revolution.
[END OF CHAPTER 21]