CHAPTER 56: PACKET LOSS

Riding a wyvern was exactly like riding a motorcycle, if the motorcycle was made of angry leather and tried to eat you every time you adjusted your grip.

Rin clung to the saddle of the lead beast, the wind tearing at his face as they hit cruising altitude. The desert below was a blur of beige static, the glitch effects less visible from three thousand feet up but still there, patches of the world failing to render like a game map with a bad internet connection.

"This is unsafe!" Joy screamed from the wyvern behind him, clinging to Tayo’s waist. "There are no seatbelts!"

"It’s a dragon, Joy!" Tayo yelled back, looking exhilaratingly terrified. "Just hold on to the scales!"

Echo rode the third beast with Vane and Kelvin, the blind S-rank sitting cross-legged in the saddle with no harness, looking completely unbothered by the fact that a slip would result in a terminal velocity splat.

"Heading 0-4-0," Leo’s synthesized voice crackled over the comms Rin had looted from the truck. Leo was flying under his own power, the Aegis suit’s gravity drives humming as he kept pace with the wyverns, a black streak against the purple sky. "Entering the Caprivi exclusion zone in ten minutes."

"How’s your battery?" Rin asked, pressing the comms bead into his ear.

"Running at 92%, solar recharging is active, though the sun looks..." Leo paused. "The sun is a square, Rin."

"I know."

"It’s unnerving."

Rin looked ahead. The horizon was changing. The infinite sand was giving way to a wall of green.

The Caprivi Strip.

It wasn’t just a forest, it was a biological explosion. Trees the size of skyscrapers pierced the cloud layer, vines thick as highways wove between them, and a mist hung over everything that glowed with a sickly, neon luminescence.

"Mana density rising," Nyx shouted from behind Rin, checking her wrist computer. "It’s thick soup down there, breathing is going to be hard for the unenhanced."

"We’ll manage," Rin said.

They hit the border of the zone.

It wasn’t a gradual transition. It was a hard line. One second they were over desert, the next they were over jungle.

And the physics changed instantly.

The wyvern screamed, its wings suddenly struggling to find purchase as the air density fluctuated wildly. Rin felt his stomach drop as gravity went from 1G to 0.5G and back again in a heartbeat.

"Turbulence!" Rin yelled. "Keep them steady!"

"It’s not wind!" Echo called out. "It’s data stream! The Bio-Server is broadcasting interference!"

Below them, the jungle wasn’t just growing, it was glitching. Leaves flickered from high-res textures to 8-bit blocks. A flock of birds flew past, but they were looping, flying the same ten-foot circle over and over again.

"Look out!" Leo shouted.

A shape burst from the canopy.

It wasn’t a bird. It was a spore. A massive, floating sphere of green gas and spikes, the size of a bus, drifting upward on a mana current.

And then another one. And another.

A minefield of biological bombs.

"Evasive maneuvers!" Rin yanked the reins hard left.

His wyvern banked, diving between two of the spores. The one on the right sensed the movement, its spikes extending, glowing red.

BOOM.

The spore detonated, a cloud of corrosive gas expanding instantly.

"Shields!" Vane roared from the rear wyvern.

He slammed his hands together, pulling moisture and dust from the air to form a concrete shell around his mount, punching through the gas cloud.

"They’re tracking us!" Joy yelled, firing her plasma rifle at a spore drifting toward them. The blue bolt hit the gas bag, igniting it prematurely.

"Don’t shoot them!" Nyx grabbed Joy’s shoulder. "The chain reaction will wipe us out!"

"Then what do we do?"

"We drop," Rin said. "Below the canopy."

"Into the jungle?" Tayo asked. "That’s where the monsters are!"

"The sky is mined!" Rin pointed at the clouds, which were filling with hundreds of the floating spores. "Dive!"

Rin pushed his wyvern into a stoop. The beast folded its wings and plummeted toward the green ocean below.

The wind roared. The spores blurred past.

They hit the tree line.

It wasn’t a soft landing. They smashed through layers of leaves, branches whipping at them, vines snapping. It was like falling through a salad spinner.

Rin’s wyvern flared its wings at the last second, catching the air and swooping into a glide beneath the massive branches.

"Status!" Rin yelled, checking his HUD.

[Health: 85%]

[Mount Health: 60%]

[Location: The Deep Green]

"We’re good!" Tayo called out from behind, though his mount had a branch stuck in its flank.

Echo’s wyvern landed on a thick bough, claws digging into the bark.

They were in a twilight world. The canopy above was so thick it blocked out the glitchy sun, leaving them in a bioluminescent gloom. The air was heavy, humid, and smelled of ozone and wet fur.

"GPS is dead," Leo said, landing on a branch next to Rin, his suit venting heat. "Magnetic interference is off the charts."

"We need a path," Rin said, looking around. The jungle was dense, a wall of vegetation.

"I hear water," Echo said, tilting his head. "A river. Moving fast."

"The Okavango," Rin nodded. "It runs through the strip. If we follow the river, it should lead to the central mana source."

"The water isn’t water," Vane said, looking down from his perch. "Look."

Rin looked down.

Through gaps in the roots, fifty feet below, a river was flowing. But it wasn’t blue or brown.

It was white. Liquid light, flowing like mercury.

"Raw mana," Nyx whispered. "The server is leaking directly into the water table."

"Don’t touch it," Rin warned. "Pure mana is toxic if you’re not adapted."

"We follow the flow," Rin ordered. "Stay in the trees, the ground is probably swarming with things we don’t want to meet."

They moved out, guiding the wyverns through the massive branches, hopping from tree to tree. It was slow going, the massive reptiles clumsy in the tight space.

"Movement," Leo said, his head snapping left. "Thermal signature. Large."

"Where?"

"Everywhere," Leo said. "Camouflage active."

The tree trunk next to Rin opened an eye.

A massive, yellow reptilian eye.

The bark shifted. The tree wasn’t a tree. It was a leg.

"Ambush!" Rin shouted.

The ’tree’ moved, a colossal chameleon-like creature detaching itself from the surroundings. Its tongue lashed out, a sticky pink whip aimed at Joy.

"Oh hell no," Joy shrieked.

She didn’t shoot. She hit it with Revulsion.

The creature gagged, its tongue retracting mid-strike as its brain was flooded with the feeling of intense nausea.

"Kill it!"

Kelvin leaped from his mount, axe raised. "Timber!"

He slammed the axe into the creature’s side. The impact didn’t sound like meat, it sounded like data corruption. The creature flickered, its camouflage failing, revealing a body made of shifting voxels.

"It’s a glitch mob," Rin realized. "Pulse!"

He jumped, his hand wreathed in gray static. He didn’t hit the creature, he hit the air around it, disrupting the rendering.

The chameleon froze, its animation loop stuck.

Kelvin finished the job, cleaving its head in two. The monster didn’t bleed, it shattered into green cubes.

"We need to move faster," Rin said, landing back on his mount. "The longer we stay here, the more the environment tries to delete us."

They pushed on, following the white river.

Hours passed. The jungle grew weirder. They passed flowers that sang in binary code, monkeys that teleported between branches, and a waterfall where the water flowed up.

"There," Echo pointed.

Ahead, the jungle cleared.

In the center of a massive lake of white mana stood the Bio-Server.

It wasn’t a building. It was a heart.

A colossal, beating heart the size of a stadium, made of flesh and metal and roots, suspended over the lake by massive cables of organic matter. It pulsed with a rhythm that shook the leaves off the trees.

And guarding it was an army.

Not monsters.

Hunters.

Hundreds of them, standing in ranks on the floating islands around the heart. They wore white suits. They didn’t move. They were waiting.

"The Recruited," Vane whispered, gripping his hammer. "That’s my sister."

He pointed to a figure in the front row, a woman with earth armor.

"They’re sleepers," Rin said. "Waiting for the activation signal."

"Thorne is inside," Leo said, zooming in with his optics. "I can see the heat signature in the central chamber. He’s hooked into the core."

"He’s finishing the upload manually," Nyx said. "Since the wireless failed."

"We can’t fight an army of Hunters," Tayo said. "Even with S-ranks, we’re outnumbered fifty to one."

"We don’t have to fight them," Rin said, looking at the white river flowing under the heart. "We just have to crash the server."

"How?"

Rin held up his hand. The gray energy was buzzing, violent and loud.

"I’m going to introduce a virus," Rin said. "Me."

"You want to jump into the raw mana lake?" Joy asked. "You’ll dissolve."

"I have the Grey," Rin said. "It eats mana. I won’t dissolve. I’ll absorb."

"You’ll explode," Nyx corrected.

"Maybe," Rin admitted. "But if I can get to the roots of that heart, I can pulse the static directly into the system. Force a hard reset."

"It’s a suicide run," Tau said, stepping up beside him. The former Director looked tired, but his eyes were clear. "I’ll clear the path."

"No," Rin said. "You hold the army back. I need a distraction."

He looked at his team.

"Leo, you’re with me. Your suit can handle the mana density. Everyone else, make noise. Lots of noise."

"I can do noise," Tayo grinned, checking his emitters.

"I can do chaos," Joy added.

"I can do violence," Kelvin cracked his neck.

Rin took a deep breath.

"Quest start," Rin whispered.

He jumped off the branch, diving toward the white river below.

[Quest: System Crash]

[Objective: Inject the Virus]

[Difficulty: Impossible]

Rin hit the white water. It didn’t feel like water. It felt like electricity.

The final raid was on.