CHAPTER 46: LAG SPIKE

The metal shutter of the storage unit didn’t just buckle, it screamed, the rusted steel tearing like wet paper as a hand the size of a compact car punched through.

"Back!" Rin shouted, grabbing Joy and hauling her away from the door just as the giant ripped the entire wall down.

Dust billowed in a choking cloud, revealing the creature in the moonlight, standing twenty feet tall with limbs that stretched and snapped back like rubber bands, its skin flickering between a goblin texture and raw wireframe static.

"It’s lagging," Nyx said, sliding over a crate, "look at its movement."

The giant took a step, but the animation skipped, one second it was at the door and the next it was ten feet inside, its fist already swinging.

Rin didn’t have time to think, he pulsed his energy, the gray static flaring around his arms, and threw up a barrier not to block the hit but to deflect it.

The giant’s fist slammed into the angled shield, sliding off with a sound like dial-up interference, smashing into the concrete floor and creating a crater that pixelated at the edges.

"Tayo, stay down!" Rin ordered, seeing his friend trying to stand up with his broken arm. "Joy, hit it with panic, try to confuse its AI or whatever runs its brain!"

Joy stepped out from behind the weapon rack, her eyes glowing pink. "Hey ugly!"

She blasted it, not with fear, but with pure sensory overload, a psychic scream meant to scramble neurons.

The giant froze, its white square eyes flashing rapidly, its head twitching.

[Target Status: Buffer Overflow]

[Action: Resetting]

"It’s rebooting," Rin realized, seeing the creature shudder. "Nyx, knock it down!"

Nyx gritted her teeth, pain flashing across her face as she channeled gravity through her injured body, slamming her hands onto the floor.

"Sit," she snarled.

Gravity multiplied around the giant’s ankles, the concrete cracking as the creature’s legs were pinned, its knees buckling under the sudden weight.

It fell forward, crashing into the weapon racks, sending knives and comic books flying.

Rin vaulted over the cot, sprinting toward the creature’s head while it was down.

’Burst.’

He didn’t form a blade, he formed a spike, condensing the gray void energy around his fist until it felt heavy, dense, like holding a black hole.

He jumped, coming down on the giant’s neck.

The giant glitched, its arm snapping up to intercept him, moving faster than should be possible, skipping frames to block Rin’s strike.

Rin hit the arm, the gray energy biting into the glitchy flesh.

It didn’t cut, it deleted.

A chunk of the giant’s forearm simply vanished, erased from existence, leaving a perfectly smooth cross-section that didn’t bleed, just leaked blue code.

The giant roared, a sound of distorted audio feedback.

"It doesn’t bleed!" Rin yelled, landing on the creature’s chest. "It leaks data!"

"Then delete the head!" Nyx shouted, holding the gravity field even as her nose started bleeding again.

The giant thrashed, its remaining hand swiping at Rin, clipping him and sending him tumbling into the wall.

Rin hit hard, his vision swimming, his HP bar dropping another chunk.

[HP: 11%]

[Mana: Critical]

The giant started to rise, fighting Nyx’s gravity, its deleted arm regenerating, not healing but respawning, pixels knitting together to form a new limb.

"It heals too fast," Joy yelled, backing up as the creature loomed over her.

"It’s not healing," Rin wheezed, pushing himself up. "It’s reloading the asset."

He needed to corrupt the file, not just damage it.

He looked at his hand, the gray energy buzzing, hungry.

"Hey!" Rin shouted, drawing the giant’s attention.

The creature turned, its square eyes locking on him.

Rin ran.

He didn’t run away, he ran at the wall, running up the side of the storage unit, his boots gripping the rough concrete, then kicking off, backflipping over the giant.

Mid-air, he accessed his Inventory.

"Inventory, dump!"

He didn’t pull out a weapon, he pulled out trash, the broken server racks, the twisted metal, the debris he’d unknowingly scooped up during the tower fall.

Tons of scrap metal materialized in the air above the giant.

The creature looked up just as an entire server farm rained down on it.

CRASH.

The giant was buried, pinned under twisted steel and heavy electronics, it roared, trying to push the weight off.

Rin landed on top of the pile.

He placed both hands on the debris.

"Merge," Rin whispered.

He poured his fracture energy into the pile, not to break it, but to fuse it, pushing the gray void into the metal, into the giant, into the floor, mixing all the data together.

[System Warning: Invalid Operation]

[Object Fusion: Initiated]

The metal groaned, melting and twisting, fusing with the giant’s glitchy flesh, the creature screamed as steel girders became part of its ribcage, as server racks merged with its skull.

It was a mess of biology and technology, a corrupted file that couldn’t function.

The giant stopped thrashing, its form flickering violently, then it solidified, frozen in a twisted pose of metal and meat.

[Target Eliminated]

[XP Gained: Error]

[Loot: Glitch Core (Unstable)]

Rin slumped on top of the scrap pile, his lungs burning.

"That was disgusting," Joy said, walking over and looking at the fused mess. "Efficient, but disgusting."

"It worked," Rin panted, sliding down the pile to the floor.

Nyx released the gravity, leaning against the wall, looking pale. "We can’t stay here

---

The B1 highway north wasn’t a road anymore, it was a geography test written by a lunatic.

Rin gripped the steering wheel of the stolen truck, knuckles white, swerving around a patch of asphalt that had decided to become liquid magma for absolutely no reason. The truck’s suspension screamed as they hit a section of road floating three feet above the ground, landing with a bone-jarring thud that rattled everyone’s teeth.

"This is unsustainable," Nyx said from the passenger seat, watching a herd of springbok phase through a solid rock wall. "The render distance is dropping."

"Stop using gaming terms for the apocalypse," Joy shouted from the back, trying to bandage Tayo’s arm while the truck bounced like a pinball.

"It’s the most accurate vocabulary we have," Rin argued, downshifting as the road turned into a field of blue static before snapping back to concrete. "The mana density up here is wild."