Chapter 175: Her Server Error

The eastern mountain path offered zero comfort.

Sharp, jagged rocks tore through the leather boots of the Unchained soldiers.

The high altitude air burned their lungs and froze the sweat on their faces.

Zion marched at the front of the column and broke the trail through the thick snow.

She possessed SSS-Rank physical stats.

The freezing temperature did not slow her down.

She did not feel the muscle fatigue or the lack of oxygen.

She operated on a completely different level of existence compared to the human rebels following her.

Two hundred elite fighters marched right behind her armored boots.

They carried heavy canvas tents, thick iron cooking pots, and extra steel weapons. They marched for three exhausting days since leaving Varek and the main army behind in the southern valley to bait the Exarch’s forces.

Mila walked directly behind Zion.

The eight-year-old girl wore three layers of thick wool tunics.

She clutched her dirty cloth doll and shivered against the biting wind.

She refused to complain or ask for a break. She kept her head down and focused on stepping into the deep footprints Zion left in the snow.

Zion stopped walking. Her iron boots dug into the dirt beneath the frost.

She looked up at the sky.

A massive, unnatural flash of light lit up the northern horizon and It did not look like holy Church magic.

A colossal square of the blue sky turned completely gray for a fraction of a second. The white clouds vanished and revealed jagged wireframes floating in the atmosphere.

The world lagged.

Zion felt her own heartbeat skip a rhythm.

Her armored boots sank an inch into the snow and then snapped back to the surface instantly.

The physical reality of Phaedra stuttered. The server dropped a massive packet of data.

The blue interface in her vision exploded.

The screen did not just glitch with minor red pixels.

The entire visual display shattered.

A wall of blinding, solid red text covered her retinas.

[CRITICAL ALERT: SERVER INSTABILITY DETECTED.]

[LOCATION: SECTOR 4 — CAPITAL REGION.]

[WARNING: MASSIVE PACKET LOSS IN PROGRESS.]

Zion gritted her teeth and tapped the side of her helmet to clear the noise. The alarm did not stop.

She swiped her armored hand through the empty air and opened her advanced menu.

She bypassed the standard player notifications and accessed the raw, unfiltered combat logs of the server.

She scrolled past the generic error codes and found the active engagement data in Sector 4.

[ENTITY: MORDECAI]

[CLASS: MODERATOR]

[ACTION: EXECUTING ENVIRONMENTAL DELETION.]

Zion stopped breathing. She stared at the red text floating in the freezing air.

Moderator.

She played this exact game across countless timelines.

She lived through dozens of reset cycles. She burned the capital to the ground with her own hands. She slaughtered the King on his throne.

She decapitated every single Exarch in the ecclesiastical hierarchy. She erased entire armies using her black sword.

The Architect never sent a Moderator to stop her.

The Architect just watched her destroy the world, recorded the combat data, and hit the reset button.

The Architect treated her violence as a standard gameplay mechanic.

The system allowed her to slaughter NPCs because NPCs held zero actual value in the code.

A Moderator did not exist to fight players in a standard boss battle, he existed to fix broken code.

A Moderator stepped onto the board to delete anomalies that threatened the actual foundation of the server.

Zion read the next line of the combat log.

[TARGET: RAZIEL CELESTE]

[CLASS: SECOND PLAYER / ANOMALY]

[ACTION: ENGAGING MODERATOR.]

Zion clenched her armored fists. The metal gauntlets creaked under the pressure.

Raziel was fighting an admin.

The boy pushed the game board so hard the Architect panicked and sent a cleanup protocol to erase him from the server entirely.

He fought a war Zion never managed to trigger in all her cycles. He fought the actual system.

Zion closed the interface. She turned around and faced her two hundred elite soldiers.

The Unchained stopped marching.

They leaned on their wooden spears and wiped the freezing sweat from their faces.

They looked completely exhausted. They carried forty pounds of heavy gear on their backs and they needed to rest before the sun went down.

“Drop the tents,” Zion ordered.

“Drop the cooking pots. Drop the extra rations. Keep your weapons and keep your water canteens. Dump everything else in the snow.”

The soldiers stared at her in pure confusion. A lieutenant stepped forward from the vanguard.

“We need the tents to survive the night in these mountains,” the lieutenant stated.

“We will freeze to death without shelter.”

“We are not stopping for the night,” Zion answered.

“We are executing a forced march. We do not stop until we reach the capital.”

“That is three hundred and eighty kilometers!” the lieutenant argued and pointed down the steep trail.

“We will die of exhaustion before we clear the mountain pass! The human body cannot sustain that pace!”

Zion drew her black sword. She slammed the tip of the dark blade into the solid stone of the mountain path.

“I will carry the vanguard,” Zion declared.

“I will share my SSS-Rank stamina regeneration buff with the entire column. You will not die of exhaustion. You will run.”

The lieutenant swallowed hard and nodded. He turned to the troops and yelled the order to drop the heavy gear.

Zion turned her head and looked at Mila.

The little girl shivered in the snow.

She dropped her small canvas bag and hugged her doll tight against her chest. She looked up at Zion with wide brown eyes.

Zion sheathed her sword.

She walked over to the eight-year-old girl and dropped to one knee in the dirt.

She did not argue with the child. She did not tell her to stay behind with the discarded tents. She turned her back to Mila.

“Climb on,” Zion ordered.

Mila wrapped her small arms around Zion’s armored neck and jumped onto her back.

Zion stood up and adjusted the weight. The little girl weighed absolutely nothing against her enhanced physical stats.

Zion looked at the northern horizon. The sky flickered with another distant gray void.

The server tore itself apart piece by piece.

The Architect wanted to delete Raziel Celeste.

The Architect wanted to erase the only person in Phaedra who fought the actual rules of the game.

“Move out!” Zion roared to the troops.

She activated her advanced movement skills.

She pumped her raw mana into the ground and pushed her physical speed to the absolute limit.

She launched herself up the mountain trail.

The two hundred Unchained soldiers left their heavy bags in the snow and ran right behind her, fueled by the shared stamina buff radiating from her armor.

Zion operated on fifty-five percent humanity.

She felt the heavy weight of the little girl clinging to her back.

She unlocked the hidden quest to trust without sight hours ago, and she committed to the objective completely.

She needed to reach St. Celeste.

She needed to reach the boy before the Moderator deleted his code from existence.

She ran toward the glitching sky.

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