CHAPTER 57: BUFFER OVERFLOW

The white river didn’t feel like water. It felt like falling into a vat of battery acid that could think.

Rin hit the surface and went under, the liquid light filling his nose and mouth. It didn’t drown him in the biological sense; it tried to overwrite him. His skin burned as the raw mana attempted to force its way into his pores, overloading his circuits with pure, unfiltered data.

[System Alert: Environmental Hazard]

[Mana Toxicity: Critical]

[Assimilation: 4%]

’Not today.’

Rin pulsed the gray energy. He didn’t push it out; he coated himself in it, a second skin of static and void. The white liquid hissed against the gray barrier, repelled by the corruption. The burning stopped, replaced by the familiar, numbing buzz of the glitch.

He opened his eyes.

The river was bright, blindingly so. He couldn’t see the bottom, just endless streams of flowing code-light. Beside him, a heavy shape sank past.

Leo. The Aegis suit was too dense to swim.

Rin grabbed the back of the suit, kicking hard. The gray energy acted like a thruster, disrupting the liquid around his boots and propelling them forward. He dragged Leo toward the massive, pulsing roots of the Bio-Server that plunged into the riverbed.

Leo’s voice crackled over the comms, distorted by the mana interference. "This is heavy. My servos are lagging."

"Keep moving," Rin said, his voice transmitting through bone conduction. "We need to climb the main root."

They reached the base of the massive organic cable. It was the size of a skyscraper, throbbing with a rhythmic white glow. Veins the size of highways pumped mana up toward the heart suspended above.

Rin slammed his hand into the root. The gray energy bit into the flesh-metal hybrid, creating a handhold.

"Climb."

---

Above the river, the jungle had turned into a warzone.

Director Tau stood on a floating island of earth, his golden aura the only thing illuminating the gloom under the canopy. Across from him, the army of Sleepers stood motionless in their white suits.

Then they moved.

It was instantaneous. Three hundred Hunters, all enhanced, all synchronized by the server, launched their attacks at once.

"Shields!" Tau roared.

Vane slammed his hammer onto the ground. A dome of reinforced concrete erupted from the earth, covering the team just as the bombardment hit.

Fire, lightning, and kinetic blasts hammered the stone. The dome cracked, dust raining down on them.

"We can’t kill them," Joy shouted, clutching her plasma rifle but not firing. "They’re hostages!"

"They’re shooting at us with lethal intent," Nyx pointed out, reinforcing the dome’s structural integrity with a gravity field. "Self-defense applies."

"No killing," Vane grunted, holding the wall against the onslaught. "My sister is out there. If you kill her, I kill you."

"Understood," Tau said. "Suppression only. Tayo, Joy, you’re up. We need to break their synchronization."

The dome shattered.

Tau moved first, a golden blur intercepting a volley of ice spikes. He didn’t cut the attackers; he cut their magic, his sword slicing through the spell constructs before they could impact.

Tayo stepped forward, flanked by Kelvin.

"Maximum output," Tayo said. "Non-lethal frequency."

He clapped his emitters together.

A visible ripple of sound distortion washed over the front line of Sleepers. They didn’t die, but they dropped, clutching their ears, their equilibrium shattered.

Kelvin charged into the gap. He wasn’t using his axe edge; he was using the flat, slamming Sleepers aside like bowling pins.

"Sorry!" Kelvin shouted as he backhanded a pyrokinetic into a tree. "My bad!"

Vane ignored the melee, scanning the crowd. He saw her.

A woman in white armor, manipulating the earth to create spikes aimed at Joy.

"Elena!" Vane shouted.

She didn’t react to her name. Her eyes were blank white LEDs. She thrust her hands forward, sending a pillar of stone shooting toward Joy.

Vane intercepted it, creating his own wall. The two earth constructs collided, crumbling into gravel.

"She’s not home, Vane," Nyx said, dropping a gravity well on a group of speedsters trying to flank them. "The server is driving the car."

"Then we crash the car," Vane said. He didn’t attack his sister. He imprisoned her.

He slammed his hands together. The ground beneath Elena turned to quicksand, swallowing her to the waist, then hardened instantly into stone.

She thrashed, unable to move, but her expression didn’t change. She just opened her mouth and began to scream a high-pitched signal.

Other Sleepers turned toward her, drawn by the distress call.

"She’s marking us!" Joy yelled, hitting the approaching mob with a wave of despair. It slowed them down, making their movements sluggish, but the server pushed through the emotion, forcing their bodies to keep moving even as their brains wanted to curl up and cry.

"We can’t hold this forever," Tau said, parrying a lightning bolt with his bare hand. "Rin needs to hurry."

---

Rin and Leo were halfway up the root system when the antibodies arrived.

They weren’t biological white blood cells. They were constructs. Sleek, silver drones shaped like metallic lampreys, phasing out of the server’s skin.

"Contact," Leo said.

He punched the root, anchoring himself with one hand, and extended his other arm. The shadow vents opened.

A lamprey lunged, its maw spinning with grinding gears.

Leo fired a spike of solid shadow. It pierced the drone, shattering it into code.

"There’s more," Leo said.

Dozens of them poured out of the server’s pores, swarming down the root toward them.

"I can’t fight and climb," Rin said, pulsing gray energy to melt another handhold. "I need cover."

"Go," Leo said. "I’ll clear the path."

The Aegis suit hummed, the runes turning a deep, violent violet. Leo released his grip on the root.

He didn’t fall. He walked.

Shadows extended from his boots, gripping the vertical surface. He ran down the root, meeting the swarm head-on.

Rin kept climbing.

He could feel the pulse of the heart now, a deep, thrumming vibration that rattled his teeth. He was close to the injection point.

...unauthorized access detected...

The voice wasn’t in his ear; it was in his head. It sounded like Thorne, but stripped of humanity, purely digital.

...subject Matsuda. integration paused. purge protocols active...

The root under Rin’s hand shifted. It wasn’t just vibrating anymore; it was heating up. The white light inside the veins turned red.

"He’s flushing the system," Rin muttered.

Steam hissed from the pores of the organic metal. The heat spiked. Rin’s gray energy protected his hands, but his boots were starting to smoke.

He scrambled upward, ignoring the searing heat radiating through his armor.

Ten meters.

Five meters.

He reached the junction where the root met the base of the heart. A massive valve pulsated there, pumping raw mana into the server.

"Open up," Rin said.

He didn’t knock. He drove his fist into the valve.

Pulse.

The gray energy flared, fighting the red defense protocols. The valve resisted, the bio-metal groaning.

...access denied...

"I have admin privileges," Rin snarled.

He twisted his hand, pouring everything he had into the strike. The gray static ate through the red light, corrupting the lock.

The valve shattered.

Rin pulled himself inside.

He was in the atrium of the heart. It was a cathedral of flesh and circuitry. Walls of pulsating muscle were woven with fiber-optic cables. In the center, suspended in a sphere of pure white mana, was the core.

And floating in front of it was Thorne.

The Architect looked... wrong. His suit was gone, replaced by cables that plugged directly into his spine. His skin was translucent, data streaming visibly beneath the surface.

"You are persistent," Thorne said. His voice echoed from every wall. "But you are too late. The upload is manual now. Direct interface."

"You look terrible," Rin said, standing up. The floor was squishy.

"Evolution is messy," Thorne gestured.

The room shifted. The walls sprouted turrets—organic cannons loaded with condensed mana.

"Delete him," Thorne ordered.

The cannons fired.

Rin didn’t dodge. He stepped forward.

’Static Step.’

He glitched.

The blue bolts passed through the space where he had been a millisecond ago. Rin reappeared ten feet closer.

Thorne frowned. "Anomaly."

He raised a hand. The floor turned to spikes.

Rin glitched again, blinking forward, ignoring the physical changes to the room. He wasn’t playing by the physics of the server anymore. He was running his own logic.

He reached Thorne.

Thorne didn’t panic. He unplugged one of the cables from his spine and lashed out with it like a whip. The metal connector tip sparked with red electricity.

Rin caught the cable.

The electricity surged into him, trying to fry his nervous system.

[Warning: High Voltage]

[Absorption: Active]

Rin’s eyes glowed gray. "Thanks for the battery."

He yanked the cable.

Thorne, anchored to the core, was pulled forward.

Rin met him with a fist wreathed in the heaviest concentration of gray void he could summon.

He punched the Architect in the face.

Thorne’s head snapped back. Pixelated blood sprayed from his nose.

"That felt real," Rin said.

Thorne stared at him, anger finally breaking through the digital detachment. "You are a virus. You ruin perfection."

"Perfection is boring."

Rin grabbed Thorne by the throat and threw him. Not at the wall. At the core.

Thorne hit the sphere of white mana. He didn’t bounce off; he passed through, merging with the energy.

"You want the core?" Rin asked. "You can have it."

Rin placed both hands on the sphere.

He didn’t try to absorb it. That would kill him. He didn’t try to break it. That would nuke the jungle.

He infected it.

"System," Rin whispered. "Execute Order: Glitch."

He dumped the corrupted data core he’d looted from the bear directly into the server’s main input.

The white light of the sphere turned gray.

Then purple.

Then static.

...critical failure...

...system integrity compromised...

...runtime error...

The heart stopped beating.

For a second, there was absolute silence in the chamber.

Then the heart screamed.

A shockwave of pure data blasted outward. It threw Rin back against the wall.

Outside, the river of white mana turned black.

---

On the surface, the Sleeper Army froze.

Elena stopped struggling in Vane’s trap. The speedsters stopped running. The elementalists let their fires die out.

They all looked up at the sky.

Their eyes turned from white LEDs to static.

Then they started screaming.

It wasn’t a scream of pain. It was the sound of three hundred people waking up from a nightmare all at once, confused, terrified, and overloaded with mana.

"Cover your ears!" Tayo yelled, clamping his hands over his head.

The psychic backlash hit the team like a physical blow. Joy collapsed, weeping uncontrollably as she felt the collective trauma of the army.

"The server is down," Tau said, watching the massive heart above the lake shudder. "But the energy has to go somewhere."

The heart began to bloat. The veins swelled.

"It’s going to burst," Nyx said, eyes wide. "Rin is still in there."

---

Inside the chamber, Rin was trying to stand up. The room was dissolving. The organic metal was turning into sludge.

Thorne emerged from the core. He looked monstrous now, half-data, half-flesh, his form unstable.

"You broke it," Thorne whispered, his voice glitching. "You broke the bridge."

"Good," Rin said.

"If I can’t have the world," Thorne snarled, his body expanding, distorting into something massive, "I will consume the source."

He lunged at Rin.

Rin checked his escape route. The valve he’d entered through was sealed shut by the swelling muscle of the walls.

He was trapped in a dying heart with a glitch monster.

’Inventory.’

He pulled out the only thing he had left. The comms unit.

"Leo!" Rin shouted into the mic. "I need an exit!"

"On it," Leo’s voice came back, calm and synthetic.

A massive black spike pierced the wall of the chamber from the outside. Then another. Then a third.

The wall was ripped open.

Leo, hovering in the Aegis suit, framed by the dying light of the jungle, reached a hand inside.

"Get in, loser," Leo said.

Rin jumped.

Thorne screamed, clawing at Rin’s boots, but Rin kicked him in the face with a boot coated in gray energy.

Rin grabbed Leo’s hand.

Leo pulled him out just as the heart imploded.

They flew away from the epicenter, the gravity drives of the suit whining at maximum output.

Behind them, the Bio-Server collapsed in on itself. The white lake boiled.

A wave of wild magic expanded outward, washing over the jungle.

The trees changed color instantly, turning purple. The water turned to glass.

And the Sleeper Army fell silent, unconscious.

Rin hung from Leo’s arm as they landed on the bank of the river, far enough away to be safe.

He looked back at the ruin.

"Is he dead?" Rin asked.

"No," Leo said, his sensors scanning the wreckage. "He ported out at the last second. But he lost the server."

Rin lay back in the grass, which was now made of soft rubber.

"We crashed it," Rin said.

"Yeah," Leo agreed. "But now we have three hundred confused Hunters and a jungle that defies physics."

Rin looked at his hand. The gray energy was quiet, satisfied.

[Quest Complete: System Crash]

[Reward: Admin Access (Tier 1)]

[Note: You are now a recognized user]

Rin closed his eyes.

"Five minutes," he muttered. "Just give me five minutes."

But the ground was already shaking again.

The grind never stopped.