CHAPTER 54: HIGH LATENCY

The drive back from the Skeleton Coast felt less like a commute and more like driving through a corrupted save file.

Rin gripped the wheel of the stolen truck, his eyes scanning the road which occasionally flickered out of existence, revealing a wireframe void underneath before snapping back to asphalt.

"The draw distance is terrible," Tayo muttered from the backseat, watching a mountain range pop into existence on the horizon.

"Stop critiquing the apocalypse," Joy said, cleaning her plasma rifle with a rag. "It’s depressing."

In the passenger seat, Leo sat perfectly still. He didn’t breathe, didn’t blink, didn’t shift his weight. The Aegis suit hummed, a sound barely audible over the truck’s diesel engine, like a high-end gaming PC running ultra settings.

"You okay in there?" Rin asked.

The suit’s faceplate slid open with a soft hydraulic hiss. Leo’s face looked normal, but his eyes were glowing with a faint blue telemetry overlay.

"I’m running diagnostics," Leo said, his voice synthesized but familiar. "My reaction time is 0.04 seconds. I can see the heat signature of a lizard from a mile away. And I have Wi-Fi."

"You have Wi-Fi?" Nyx asked from the back, sharpening her knife.

"I can pick up Association frequencies," Leo corrected. "They’re panicking. The Council declared Martial Law an hour ago. Director Tau is officially listed as ’MIA presumed traitor’."

"He escaped," Rin said, feeling a wave of relief. "Good."

"The bad news," Leo continued, the faceplate sliding shut, "is that the Glitch is spreading. It’s not just the desert anymore. It’s hitting population centers."

"Which ones?"

"Usakos is dead air. Karibib is reporting ’spatial anomalies’. Okahandja is under quarantine."

"We have to pass through Karibib to get to the interior," Rin said.

"Then we better drive fast," Leo said.

They hit Karibib an hour later.

It was a small town, a transit hub between the coast and the capital. Usually, it was dusty, quiet, and boring.

Now it was a horror show.

Rin slowed the truck as they entered the main street. The buildings were... wrong. The gas station was floating ten feet in the air, rotating slowly. The pavement was rippling like water.

And the people were looping.

A man was walking his dog. He took three steps, froze, glitched back three steps, and walked again. Over and over.

"NPCs," Tayo whispered, horrified.

"They’re stuck in a time loop," Nyx observed, looking out the window. "Local causality failure. Their personal timelines are desynchronized from the world clock."

"Can we fix them?" Joy asked.

"Not without fixing the server," Rin said, gripping the wheel. "We keep moving."

They rolled through the ghostly town. It was silent except for the glitching sounds—stuttering footsteps, repeating fragments of conversations like a broken record.

Then the truck died.

The engine didn’t sputter; it just cut out. The lights on the dashboard vanished. The momentum carried them forward for fifty feet before they ground to a halt in the middle of an intersection.

"EMP?" Joy asked, raising her rifle.

"No," Rin said, looking at his hand where the gray energy was buzzing angrily. "Zone interference. The mana density here is too high for combustion engines."

"We’re walking," Leo said, kicking his door open.

They stepped out onto the rippling asphalt. The air tasted like copper.

"Movement," Leo said, his head snapping to the right. "Heat signatures. Cold ones."

"Cold heat signatures?" Tayo asked. "That’s an oxymoron."

"Mana ghosts," Rin realized. "Wraiths."

From the shadows of the floating gas station, shapes emerged. They looked like people, but sketched in charcoal and static. They didn’t have faces, just white noise where features should be.

[Entity: Mana Wraith]

[Rank: C]

[Origin: Glitch Manifestation]

[Note: Immune to physical damage]

"They’re intangible," Rin warned. "Bullets won’t work."

"Energy works," Leo stepped forward.

The Wraiths screamed—a sound like a dial-up modem amplified to deafening levels—and rushed them. They moved through the air like ink in water, fast and erratic.

"Form up!" Rin yelled.

Joy fired the plasma rifle. The blue bolt passed straight through the lead Wraith, hitting a wall behind it.

"Physical immunity confirmed!" Joy shouted, panic rising.

"Nyx, gravity!"

Nyx slammed her hands together. "Gravity Well!"

The Wraiths slowed, their forms stretching under the pressure, but they didn’t stop. They didn’t have mass to crush.

"My turn," Leo said.

The runes on the Aegis suit flared blinding white. He didn’t punch. He opened his hands, and the vents on his forearms hissed.

Shadow mana poured out, but it wasn’t the wild smoke from before. It was solid, shaped into jagged, semi-corporeal blades attached to his wrists.

"Soul damage," Leo said.

He blurred.

He moved so fast Rin almost lost track of him. Leo intercepted the lead Wraith, slashing with the shadow blades.

SCREE.

The blade connected. It didn’t cut flesh; it cut the mana holding the Wraith together. The entity shrieked and dissipated into static.

"It works!" Tayo yelled. "Get ’em, Robo-Cop!"

Three more Wraiths swarmed Leo, trying to phase through his armor to freeze his core.

"Cycle thermal," Leo commanded his suit.

The black armor turned red-hot instantly. The Wraiths touching him recoiled, steaming. Leo spun, a whirlwind of shadow blades, carving them apart.

But there were more. Dozens pouring out of the alleys.

"Too many for one tank," Rin said.

He reached for the canister Varg had given him. The refined gray energy.

"Tayo, amplify me," Rin ordered.

"You want the boom?"

"I want the broadcast."

Rin popped the cap on the canister. He didn’t inject it; he poured it onto his hand.

The pain was immediate and blinding. It felt like dipping his hand in liquid nitrogen and lava at the same time. The gray energy coated his skin, crawling up his arm, eating the sleeve of his jacket.

[System Alert: External Energy Source Detected]

[Sync Rate: 100%]

[Warning: Output exceeds safety limits]

"Noise!" Rin screamed.

Tayo aimed his emitters at Rin’s back. "Resonance!"

Tayo hit Rin with a focused sound wave, vibrating Rin’s entire body.

Rin didn’t fight it. He pulsed the gray energy, syncing it with the vibration.

He slammed his hand into the ground.

"System Purge."

A wave of gray distortion exploded outward from Rin. It wasn’t an explosion; it was a refresh rate.

The wave passed through the Wraiths.

They didn’t die. They glitched out. Their forms scrambled, turned into blocks of pixelated noise, and then simply crashed.

Pop. Pop. Pop.

One by one, the Wraiths vanished, deleted from the local area.

The wave kept going, hitting the floating gas station. It crashed to the ground. The looping man stopped walking, looked around, confused, and ran away screaming.

The glitch in the immediate area stabilized.

Rin fell to his knees, gasping. His arm was smoking, the gray scars glowing neon bright.

"That," Nyx said, walking over and kicking a pile of pixel dust, "was effective."

"And expensive," Rin wheezed. "That canister was supposed to be emergency fuel."

"This was an emergency," Joy said, helping him up. "You okay?"

"Define okay."

Leo walked back to them, the shadow blades retracting into his suit. "My sensors picked up a signal spike when you did that."

"A what?"

"A ping," Leo pointed north. "Someone saw that energy signature. And they’re responding."

Rin looked at his phone. The screen was cracked, but a message was blinking.

Sender: Echo

Message: You rang?

"He felt it," Rin grinned weakly. "The blind man saw the light."

A new message popped up under it.

Sender: Echo

Message: Meet at the old Radio Tower in Okahandja. I have friends. We’re forming a raid group.

"Raid group," Tayo said. "I like the sound of that."

"How do we get to Okahandja?" Joy asked. "Truck is dead."

Leo walked over to the floating gas station, which was now firmly on the ground. Parked behind it was a muscle car, vintage, pre-fracture, pristine condition.

Leo punched the window out.

"We upgrade," Leo said.

They piled into the car. It was a tight fit, especially with an armored robot in the front seat, but the engine roared to life with a satisfying, non-magical growl.

"Shotgun," Leo said mechanically.

"You are the shotgun," Rin muttered from the back seat.

As they peeled out of Karibib, leaving the glitching town behind, Rin looked at his arm. The gray energy was settling, integrating. It wasn’t just a tool anymore. It was becoming part of his build.

[Quest Updated: The Glitch]

[Objective: Rendezvous with Echo]

[Status: In Progress]

The world was broken, the Association was hunting them, and the Architect was rewriting reality.

But Rin had a tank, a healer, a rogue, a bard, and a delete button.

He liked his odds.