Chapter 182: His Discarded Director

The red error walls closed in on St. Celeste from all sides.

Father Marius dragged his bleeding body through the dark corridors of the administrative wing.

The director clutched his right shoulder with his left hand.

The deep stab wound from Lucian’s dagger throbbed with burning pain. He operated on pure, panicked survival instinct.

He lost his academy guards to the novices down in the East Basement. He lost the political war against Elector Mordecai.

He lost the physical foundation of his kingdom when the black Silencer artifact erased the ancient silver runes.

He just needed to escape the building.

Marius stumbled into his personal office on the third floor.

He ignored the shattered glass windows overlooking the ruined main courtyard.

He heard the deafening, sub-audible frequency of the deletion code chewing on the stone walls outside.

The physical pressure popped his eardrums and made his teeth vibrate inside his gums.

He walked behind his heavy mahogany desk and kicked the expensive rug aside.

He dropped to his knees and pulled a loose floorboard up with his bloody fingers.

He reached into the hidden compartment and grabbed a heavy leather satchel.

The bag clinked with pure gold coins and rare ecclesiastical artifacts.

He spent decades extorting the noble families of Phaedra and skimming Church tithes to build this emergency fund.

He planned to buy his way into the High Council in the capital.

He hauled the heavy bag onto the desk.

BZZT!

A massive, flat gray void ripped open in the ceiling right above the mahogany wood.

The unrendered hole deleted the plaster and erased the heavy chandelier.

Marius gasped and fell backward onto his hands.

The red digital static crawled down the edges of the missing ceiling and chewed on the desk.

The glitching polygons erased the polished mahogany in a fraction of a second. The heavy leather satchel fell into the gray void and vanished without a sound.

The gold coins and the artifacts ceased to exist.

“No!” Marius yelled.

He scrambled to his feet.

He did not have time to mourn the stolen wealth.

The cleanup protocol initiated a total server wipe, and the red static spread across the floorboards toward his boots.

He ran out of the office and sprinted down the main corridor.

The air inside the administrative wing distorted and warped. The stone archways turned into jagged wireframes.

The standard blue Church magic powering the torches sputtered and died into gray, pixelated blocks.

The Architect deleted the physical assets from the zone piece by piece.

Marius reached the grand staircase. He grabbed the wooden banister and rushed down the steps.

He needed to reach the back exit near the infirmary. He knew a hidden maintenance tunnel that led out to the western tree line.

He hit the ground floor and turned the corner.

A colossal wall of red error code blocked the entire hallway.

The massive digital barrier stretched from the floor to the ceiling.

It formed a perfect, impenetrable quarantine box around the academy.

The red static hummed with a terrifying frequency and erased the stone tiles beneath it.

Marius stopped dead in his tracks. He stared at the glitching red wall.

He possessed absolute authority over St. Celeste for years.

He ordered assassinations and forged Soul Contracts with shadow entities.

He commanded respect and fear from Exarchs and Paladins.

He possessed zero power against a server wipe.

He turned around to run the other way.

The gray void chewed through the staircase behind him. The unrendered hole expanded rapidly and swallowed the entire landing.

The red static crawled across the walls and boxed him into the narrow corridor.

Marius backed away from the void. He hit the solid stone wall of the infirmary behind him.

He had nowhere left to run.

The blue interface erupted in the empty air right in front of his face.

The screens did not display standard system notifications or ecclesiastical commands. They flashed with frantic red text.

[CRITICAL ALERT: UNREGISTERED ASSET DETECTED.]

[INITIATING ENVIRONMENTAL PURGE.]

[DELETION IMMINENT.]

Marius stared at the floating words.

The system did not recognize his political rank or his accumulated wealth.

The system registered him as a piece of obsolete code trapped inside a deleted zone.

“I am the director!” Marius screamed at the red text.

He raised his bloody left hand and pointed a shaking finger at the interface.

“I serve the Goddess Zhalyr! I serve the Church!”

The red wall of error code surged forward.

The glitching polygons hit the director’s boots.

Marius gasped.

The physical pain of the deletion hit his nervous system with brutal force. The digital static burned through his leather shoes and erased his feet in a single micro-second.

He tried to scream, but the audio channels inside his throat ceased to exist. The sound vanished from his vocal cords.

He tried to channel his standard Church magic to cast a kinetic shield. He pushed his mana into his arms to fight the static.

FZZT!

The blue magic sparked and turned into dead gray pixels. The deletion code smothered his power instantly.

The red static crawled up his legs and chewed through his pristine white trousers.

Marius lost control of his physical body. The server administrative commands overrode his biological functions.

His spine snapped straight.

His arms shot out to his sides at perfect ninety-degree angles. His head locked forward.

He froze in a rigid, unnatural T-pose.

The director of St. Celeste stood completely immobilized in the corridor.

He looked exactly like a broken character model in a crashed video game.

He just stared forward in absolute horror.

The red digital static consumed his waist.

The glitching polygons erased his torso and chewed through his bleeding shoulder. The unrendered gray void spread across his chest and dissolved his beating heart.

The deletion reached his neck.

Marius watched the red wall swallow his vision.

He watched his entire life of greed, manipulation, and power dissolve into a handful of useless floating pixels.

He achieved absolute control over a temple, and the Architect deleted him like a corrupted file.

The red static erased his face.

Father Marius turned into digital ash. The floating red and white polygons drifted into the empty air and vanished completely.

The director of St. Celeste ceased to exist.

The red wall of error code continued its march down the corridor. It erased the infirmary walls and swallowed the wooden doors.

The quarantine dome closed the trap. The entire zone of St. Celeste collapsed into a massive gray void.

Miles away from the deleted academy, Raziel stood on the white sand of the Dead Zone.

He operated on five percent physical stamina and fifty percent empathy.

He secured the seventh Forbidden Gift and punched a hole through the Architect’s quarantine box.

He breathed hard and wiped the sweat from his eyes.

He looked at the massive, endless expanse of white sand stretching to the horizon.

He saw an empty, unrendered wasteland.

The blue interface erupted in his vision and the screens flashed with pure white text.

[QUARANTINE BREACH DETECTED.]

[ANOMALY RELOCATED TO THE PERIPHERY.]

[WELCOME TO THE DEAD ZONE.]

Raziel dismissed the screens. He turned around and looked at his team.

Lucian, Lara, Caius, and Zorya sat on the white sand.

They breathed hard and clutched their injuries.

They looked around the empty wasteland in pure confusion and terror.

They escaped the Inquisition, but they stepped into a completely unknown sector of the game board.

Mirael lay unconscious in the sand next to Lara’s boots.

The Oracle bled from her tortured wrists, but her chest rose and fell with steady breaths. She survived the execution cross.

“Where are we?” Lucian asked.

The noble pushed himself up from the sand and gripped his empty hands.

They possessed no food.

They possessed no water.

They carried zero physical weapons.

They stood inside a deleted sector of the server completely cut off from the main world of Phaedra.

But they possessed six ancient weapons, an unchained Inscriptor, an Oracle, and the Sovereign Override.

Raziel looked out across the endless white sand.

“We are in the Architect’s trash bin,” Raziel stated. “And we need to find a way out before he empties it.”

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