CHAPTER 55: BANDWIDTH

The muscle car didn’t have AC, the shocks were shot, and it smelled like sixty years of gasoline, but it was fast.

Leo was driving because his reaction times were technically inhuman now, swerving around patches of floating asphalt and pixelated pot-holes with bored precision while the desert blurred past at a hundred miles an hour.

"Can you stop interfacing with the radio?" Joy asked from the backseat, looking a little green. "You keep changing the station every three seconds."

"I’m scanning for encrypted frequencies," Leo said, his ceramic faceplate reflecting the dashboard lights. "Plus, 80s rock has optimal BPM for combat driving."

"We’re not in combat," Tayo said, clutching the door handle with his good hand.

"Not yet," Leo corrected. "But my long-range sensors just picked up three bogeys on an intercept course."

Rin sat up in the passenger seat, wincing as his gray-scarred arm throbbed. "Where?"

"Six o’clock, high," Leo said. " aerial pursuit."

Rin cranked the window down and looked back.

Three dots in the sky, trailing white smoke. They weren’t drones. They were people.

Hunters in flight suits, winged apparatuses glowing with blue mana propulsion.

"The Architect’s Angels," Nyx muttered, leaning over the seat. "Aerial bombardment squad. B-rank individually, A-rank as a unit. They don’t miss."

"Can you ground them?" Rin asked.

"At this speed? If I increase their gravity they’ll just crash into us like meteors," Nyx calculated. "I need to push them up, stall them."

"Do it," Rin ordered. "Joy, open the sunroof."

Joy scrambled to crank the manual sunroof open. The wind roared into the cabin.

"Leo, keep it steady," Rin said, climbing up onto the seat, sticking his upper body out of the roof.

The wind whipped his hair, sand stinging his face. The three fliers were closing fast, diving into attack formation.

The lead flier raised a hand. A lance of condensed fire formed in the air.

"Incoming!" Rin shouted.

Leo didn’t swerve. He hit the brakes.

The car screeched, tires smoking, dropping speed instantly.

The fire lance slammed into the road ten feet in front of them, exploding into a wall of magma. If they’d kept speed, they would have driven right into it.

Leo punched the gas again, driving through the cooling magma curtain, the car bucking as it crushed hardened lava.

"Nyx, now!" Rin yelled.

Nyx was leaning out the passenger window. She shoved her hands upward.

"Zero G!"

She didn’t increase gravity, she deleted it.

The pocket of air the fliers were diving through suddenly lost all gravitational pull. Their momentum, expecting resistance and downward force, threw them into chaos. They spun out, tumbling upward, their flight paths ruined.

"Nice," Rin grinned.

He raised his hand. He couldn’t reach them with a melee burst, and he didn’t have a gun.

But he had the Glitch.

He focused on the air between the fliers. He didn’t aim at them, he aimed at the space they were occupying.

’Static Mastery: Lag.’

He pulsed a wave of gray distortion into the sky.

It hit the lead flier.

The man froze. Literally froze in mid-air, his flames pausing, his cape stuck in a ripple. Then he snapped forward fifty feet, then back twenty.

Rubber-banding.

The sudden shifts in position tore his flight suit apart. One wing snapped off. He spiraled down, crashing into a dune.

[Target Eliminated: System Error]

The other two fliers corrected, pulling up high out of Rin’s range.

"They’re gaining altitude," Rin ducked back inside. "Getting out of range for a bombing run."

"I can’t hit them that high," Tayo said. "Sound dissipates."

"I can," Leo said.

The car’s dashboard lit up with warning lights as Leo interfaced with the vehicle’s electrical system.

"What are you doing?" Joy asked.

"Overclocking," Leo said.

The engine roared, a sound that wasn’t mechanical anymore. Black shadow mana bled from Leo’s hands into the steering wheel, spreading through the chassis. The vintage car turned matte black, the windows tinting, the tires growing shadow spikes for grip.

"Hold on," Leo said.

He didn’t just drive fast. He drove up.

A massive, jagged rock formation loomed ahead, a ramp of natural stone. Leo hit it at full speed.

The car launched.

They soared through the air, engine screaming, shadow energy trailing behind them like a cape.

They were airborne for three seconds, but to Rin, it felt like an hour.

They reached the apex of the jump, putting them level with the two remaining fliers who looked visibly confused to see a 1969 Mustang flying at their altitude.

Leo opened his door.

He stepped out onto the running board of the flying car.

"Get off my lawn," Leo synthesized.

He extended his arm. The Aegis suit vented mana, forming a massive, spectral hand of shadow.

He swatted the fliers.

CRUNCH.

Both Hunters were slapped out of the sky by the giant shadow hand, their barriers shattering instantly. They fell like stones.

Leo stepped back inside and slammed the door just as the car hit the ground.

The suspension should have snapped. The axles should have broken.

But the shadow mana absorbed the impact, the car landing with a heavy thud and immediately tearing off across the desert again.

"That," Tayo breathed, "was the coolest thing I have ever seen."

"Efficiency rating: 94%," Leo noted, though Rin could hear the smugness in his voice filter.

"Okahandja in ten," Rin said, checking the map. "Let’s hope Echo is actually there."

---

The Radio Tower in Okahandja was a relic from before the fracture, a rusted steel skeleton rising three hundred feet into the glitchy sky. It sat on a hill overlooking the abandoned town, which was currently flickering in and out of existence like a bad hologram.

Leo parked the shadow-infused car at the base of the tower. The upgrades faded, the car returning to its rusty, dented self.

"Up top," Nyx pointed.

Rin looked up. On the maintenance platform halfway up the tower, a signal flare was burning. Green.

"Safe," Rin said. "Let’s climb."

They scaled the maintenance ladder, the wind howling through the metal struts. The view from the platform was apocalyptic—to the south, the desert was a sea of shifting pixels; to the north, the world looked gray and washed out.

Echo was waiting for them on the grating, sitting cross-legged, his cane across his knees.

But he wasn’t alone.

Standing next to him, leaning against the railing with his arms crossed, was a man in heavy earth-elemental armor.

Vane.

And sitting on a crate, sharpening a massive battle-axe, was Kelvin.

Wait, Kelvin died.

Rin froze at the top of the ladder. "Kelvin?"

The big man looked up. It was Kelvin, but... wrong. He had a scar running from his ear to his jaw, and his eyes were different colors—one brown, one blue.

"Yo," Kelvin grunted. "Long time."

"Kelvin died in the Jin raid," Rin said, hand drifting to his gray energy. "I watched Kazriketh snap his neck."

"I got better," Kelvin said dryly. "Mostly."

"He was recovered," Echo stood up, his blindfold fluttering in the wind. "The Association has... methods for critical assets. Regeneration tanks. Soul binding. Expensive, painful, but effective."

"Like me," Leo said, stepping onto the platform, his ceramic faceplate staring at Kelvin.

Kelvin looked at the robot suit. "Leo?"

"Indra," Leo corrected. "For now."

"We’re a team of ghosts," Vane spat, looking at Rin with distinct dislike. "And you’re the reason we’re all dead or wanted."

"I’m the reason you’re awake," Rin countered. "If I hadn’t pulled the plug on the tower, you’d be a battery in Thorne’s machine right now."

"Enough," Echo tapped his cane. The sound cut through the wind, silencing them. "We didn’t come here to argue about who owes who a life debt. We came here to raid."

"Raid what?" Joy asked, climbing over the railing. "The Fortress is gone."

"The Fortress was a transmitter," Echo said. "The Server... the actual physical location where Thorne keeps his ’Admin Access’ code? It’s not in the desert."

"Where is it?" Rin asked.

Echo pointed North. Not just north, but toward the border, toward the deep jungle of the Caprivi Strip.

"The Green Zone," Echo said. "An S-rank exclusion zone. Nature took it back five years ago. No technology works there. No drones. No trackers."

"Why put a server there?" Tayo asked.

"Because it’s a biological server," Kelvin said, hoisting his axe. "A massive, living dungeon core that Thorne corrupted. He’s growing the new world code inside a literal heart of the planet."

"If he finishes the upload," Echo said, "the Glitch becomes permanent. The world gets overwritten."

"So we have to go into a jungle where tech fails," Rin looked at Leo. "You’re a robot. That seems like a bad matchup."

"My suit runs on mana, not electricity," Leo said. "I’m analog-compatible."

"And you?" Rin looked at Vane.

"I hate you," Vane said honestly. "But I hate Thorne more. He took my sister."

Rin blinked. He didn’t know Vane had a sister.

"Recruited list," Vane said, his voice tight. "Saw her name on the drive you leaked."

"We have a full party," Echo said. "Two tanks, three DPS, support, and a specialist." He gestured to Rin. "You’re the specialist."

"Because of the Grey?"

"Because you’re the virus," Echo smiled, a sharp, dangerous expression. "Thorne built a system. You’re going to infect it."

[Quest Updated: The Source Code]

[Objective: Locate the Bio-Server]

[Location: Caprivi Exclusion Zone]

[New Party Members Added]

Rin looked at the group. A blind monk, a resurrected berserker, an earth user with a grudge, a robot ghost, a gravity witch, a psychic, and a sound engineer.

It was the most dysfunctional raid team in history.

"How do we get there?" Rin asked. "Car won’t make it to Caprivi."

"We don’t drive," Echo said. "We ride."

He whistled. A sound that pierced the air, high and shrill.

From the clouds, shadows descended.

Not drones.

Wyverns.

Three massive, leathery beasts landed on the tower structure, shaking the steel, their claws digging into the metal. They were harnessed, saddles on their backs.

"Association mounts," Kelvin grinned. "We stole them from the breeding grounds on the way out."

"We’re flying dragons," Joy said, her eyes wide. "Okay. That makes up for the desert."

"Saddle up," Rin ordered, feeling the gray energy surge in his veins. "We have a server to crash."

The grind was moving to the jungle. And this time, they brought air support.