Chapter 138: Another Awakening

Red dragged his cursor over the blinking text box, and opened his mouth to speak a name.

Suddenly, a blaring klaxon violently shattered the silence of the Void instance.

The primary interface flashed a blinding crimson. The six-legged fox immediately flattened its oversized ears and bared its tiny fangs at the monitors.

Red dismissed the naming prompt entirely and maximized the continental map. The western grid blinked with critical failure warnings across multiple sectors. The towering wall of static on the edge of the deadlands was moving. Whole chunks of the physical map simply ceased to exist in real-time as the Void-Eater surged forward miles at a time.

“The glitch is waking up,” Red muttered, gripping the armrests of his obsidian throne. “The next wave has started, but I have no means to stop it just yet. I have to find the fifth fragment and there has been no luck. I can’t send my pet either. And if I let this wave continue, it would keep many vassal gods and their forces, and I will be heavily penalized by the system for failing to protect them. After all, what I offered to them was absolute protection from everything.”

He traced the crimson warning lines crisscrossing the digital terrain. The massive gathering of Pre-Calamity code acted like a homing beacon across the server. The three fragments already stored beneath the Bastion projected an overwhelming signal, and the fourth piece currently moving across the central plains only amplified the frequency.

The game engine was completely losing its stability under the massive strain of the concentrated glitch.

Red zoomed his camera in on the central plains.

Four avian-hybrids frantically flapped their wings to carry the resin-sealed lockbox high above the wasteland. The game engine recognized the moving corrupted code and initiated an automated immune response to purge the infection.

Massive fissures of blue light tore through the clouds directly above the couriers, spawning a localized glass-storm without warning. Millions of razor-sharp shards spiraled downward, threatening to shred the avian squad and plunge the fragment into the dirt.

The lead courier let out a terrified screech. The bird frantically banked left, desperately trying to outmaneuver the falling hazard while keeping a tight grip on the heavy lockbox.

“You don’t get to delete my loot,” Red snarled.

He slammed his hand onto the console and activated his [Modular Geography] trait. Targeting the solid bedrock directly beneath their flight path, Red violently wrenched his arm upward.

Huge chunks of the continental crust ripped free from the ground and launched thousands of feet into the sky. He rapidly arranged the floating stone slabs into a protective tunnel around the couriers. The descending glass-storm slammed into the rock a second later.

The crystalline shards pulverized against the thick bedrock and spared the terrified birds from certain death.

The couriers tucked their wings and dove straight into the improvised stone tunnel. They flew desperately toward the safety of the Bastion, using the floating boulders as a shield against the endless barrage of glass.

Down on his lap, the silver fox ignored the flying debris on the secondary screens. It kept its swirling emerald eyes locked on the flashing crimson warnings of the primary interface. The creature opened its mouth and let out a vicious hiss at the violet static eating the northern map.

“Don’t worry, I have promised them, and I never break my promise.”

The avian couriers crossed the central plains and dropped the heavy resin lockbox directly into the designated deadlands quarantine zone. Red immediately engaged his Overseer terminal and dragged the digital icon of the fourth fragment into the same grid as the previous three.

He slammed his hand onto the sync command.

A burst of blinding black plasma erupted across the monitors. Searing red error codes cascaded down the primary screen as the game engine violently rejected the concentrated Pre-Calamity data.

Down on the physical map, the four jagged slabs of dark stone hovered in the center of the abandoned swamp, actively draining the color and light from the surrounding environment.

Red immediately checked the northern grid. The terrifying, continent-eating wall of violet static violently stuttered. The apocalyptic glitch ground to a crawl, its progress stifled by the massive resonance of the gathered locks.

It slowed, but it did not stop.

“Where is the last one?” Red muttered, pushing himself off the throne.

He began frantically pacing across the Void floor. He grabbed his imaginary hair. He glared at the northern map grid. The Void-Eater originally manifested from the extreme north and continued devouring everything on its path..

Red had assumed the fifth fragment was buried in the permafrost, just waiting for Gorak to dig it up.

’What if the glitch already ate it?’ The thought sent a spike of pure adrenaline through his veins. ’If the anomaly devoured the final lock centuries ago, the server is already dead.’

The six-legged fox trotted after him. The infant Void-Weaver let out a confused, high-pitched chirp. It hopped into Red’s path and rubbed its fluffy ash-silver body against his armored shin to comfort him.

Red stepped over the code-eating entity without looking down. “I don’t have time to play.”

He stopped pacing and stared blankly at the map. He closed his eyes and vividly recalled the exact extraction points of the previous pieces.

The Hydra guarded the first fragment deep beneath the lake that was originally subterranean earth. The Leviathan protected the second piece fossilized inside a towering mountain peak. The third rested in a canyon carved by endless wind, and the fourth was tangled in the roots of a petrified tree.

’Earth. Stone. Wind. Wood.’

Red snapped his eyes open. He lunged across the void and grabbed the edge of the console. He had spent hours scanning the northern ice and rock.

Unfortunately, he looked at the wrong biome entirely.

“Water,” Red gasped. “It is in the ocean.”

He violently swiped his hand across the terminal. The camera shot away from Gorak’s frozen excavation site and panned straight to the northern coastline near the City of Spiral.

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