The lush, artificial jungle of the Executive Sanctum was a masterpiece of simulated reality, but Amani had zero interest in admiring the scenery.
The CEO of Liberty Prime sat behind his pristine glass desk, his flawless golden Roman mask gleaming in the artificial sunlight. Behind him, the Fragment of Heart pulsed on a pedestal of black Void-crystal, beating like a cosmic organ.
"Welcome, Fate Changer," the CEO said, his perfectly modulated voice carrying effortlessly through the simulated canopy. He tented his fingers. "You are exactly on schedule."
Amani didn't waste breath on villainous banter. He raised his scavenged kinetic rifle, aimed directly at the center of the golden mask, and pulled the trigger.
Three depleted uranium shells erupted from the barrel at supersonic speed.
The CEO did not flinch. He didn't even blink. He simply raised a single finger from his desk.
Ten feet before the bullets reached his face, the hyper-reality glitch activated. The deadly projectiles lost their kinetic momentum, fragmented into thousands of glowing green pixels, and seamlessly transformed into a swarm of harmless, holographic monarch butterflies. They fluttered gently around the CEO's pristine white suit before fading into thin air.
"You misunderstand the nature of this confrontation," the CEO stated, his voice devoid of annoyance. "You brought brute force to a software update. In this room, Amani, I do not fight. I edit."
The CEO snapped his fingers. The sound echoed with a sharp, synthetic chime.
The world dissolved.
The ancient ferns, the cascading waterfall, and the simulated blue sky fractured and vanished. The floor ceased to exist. The Swahili Pack plummeted into a vast, empty abyss of blinding white light. There were no walls, no ceiling, and no horizon. They were falling through an endless, sterile grid.
"Anchor!" Amani roared over the rushing wind.
He tapped into the Space Shard, casting a flat, localized gravity field directly beneath their boots. The invisible platform caught them with a heavy thud. They stood suspended in the infinite white void, hovering a hundred yards away from the CEO, whose glass desk and pedestal remained perfectly stable in the empty air.
"This is the root directory," Jax yelled, dropping to his knees on Amani's invisible platform. The hacker pulled a battered cyber-deck from his coat, his hands shaking. "He bypassed the physical servers. We are inside the Algorithmic Reality Engine!"
The CEO tapped a single keystroke on a holographic keyboard that materialized over his desk.
Gravity instantly inverted—but only for Chacha.
The giant Swahili warrior was ripped from Amani's platform, launched helplessly upward into the white abyss. Before Chacha could swing his Cryo-Hammer, the CEO typed a second command. A cage of solid, searing red hard-light materialized out of the ether, snapping shut around the giant and suspending him midway to nowhere.
"Chacha!" Sia cried out. She raised her Staff of Life, aiming to cast a bloom of emerald vines to break the cage.
"Access Denied," the CEO said.
A red error prompt flashed in the air directly in front of Sia. Her staff sputtered, the life-magic sparking and dying out instantly. The ambient air around her solidified into a translucent block of dense kinetic resin. She was frozen in place, trapped like an insect in amber.
"He's writing us out of the physics engine!" Jax panicked, jacking a thick cable from his deck directly into the port behind his right ear. The hacker's eyes rolled back, glowing with frantic streams of green code as his consciousness entered the digital fray.
Upepo didn't wait to be edited. The haptic gloves anchored his physical mass, protecting him from the glitch. He blurred into a streak of blue lightning, sprinting right off the edge of Amani's gravity platform. He defied the empty void, his hypersonic speed generating enough friction to run on the ambient air molecules.
He closed the gap to the CEO in a fraction of a second, pulling his fist back for a strike aimed at the golden mask.
The CEO didn't look up from his keyboard. He merely swiped his hand to the left.
The space between them physically stretched. Upepo was running at Mach 2, but the distance multiplied infinitely. The harder the speedster ran, the further away the glass desk appeared. It was a spatial treadmill, an endless loop of wasted kinetic energy.
"You are a localized anomaly, speedster," the CEO mused. "But I control the map."
Amani stepped to the edge of the invisible platform. His pack had been neutralized in mere seconds. The glitch was worse than a physical weapon; it was an absolute rewrite of the rules of engagement. If Amani tried to cast a massive gravity well here, the CEO would just invert it and crush them all.
"Jax," Amani said, keeping his voice steady to suppress the rising panic. "I need a path."
Jax was bleeding from his nose, his fingers flying across his physical keyboard while his mind battled in the ether. "The Engine is too big. I can't hack the mainframe. But I can build a firewall. A ten-second bubble of standard reality."
"Do it," Amani ordered.
"Brace yourself!" Jax screamed, slamming his palm onto his cyber-deck's primary terminal.
A dome of static erupted around Jax and Amani, expanding outward in a rapid, glitching sphere of grey light. When the dome washed over the stretching space, Upepo's treadmill shattered.
The speedster stumbled forward, suddenly finding himself mere feet from the CEO's desk.
"Error. Unauthorized partition detected," the CEO noted, pausing his typing for the very first time.
Upepo didn't hesitate. He drove his lightning-wreathed fist straight down, shattering the CEO's glass desk into thousands of razor-sharp shards.
The CEO slid backward on his chair, pristine and unharmed. He reached toward the glowing pedestal holding the Fragment of Heart.
"Amani, the firewall is collapsing!" Jax warned, coughing up a spatter of dark blood. The grey dome flickered, buckling under the crushing weight of the CEO's counter-code.
Amani didn't run. He let the Void Hunger take the reins.
His eyes turned pitch black. He compressed the gravity field around his own body, internalizing the mass of the Void. He turned his flesh into a hyper-dense singularity. The invisible grid beneath his boots groaned and warped under his sudden weight.
He bent his knees and launched himself across the gap like a fired cannonball.
He crossed the distance instantly.
The CEO raised a hand, attempting to summon a hard-light shield, but Jax's dying firewall delayed the code by a critical half-second.
It was all Amani needed.
He tackled the CEO. The sheer, crushing mass of Amani's gravity-augmented body slammed into the immaculate white suit. They flew off the floating dais, tumbling violently into the endless white void.
"You cannot delete the Void," Amani rasped, pinning the CEO by the throat as they fell. He raised his right fist, encased in a sphere of light-consuming darkness, and brought it down on the golden Roman mask.
CRACK.
The flawless gold splintered. A jagged fissure ran down the center of the mask.
Amani pulled his fist back for a second strike, aiming to shatter the mask and end the American empire right here in the digital abyss.
But the CEO did not bleed. He did not gasp for air. He did not struggle against Amani's grip.
The golden mask broke apart, falling away into the white void.
Amani froze, his fist suspended in the air.
There was no face beneath the mask. There was no skull. There was no flesh.
Inside the collar of the immaculate white suit was a swirling, empty vortex of brilliant, shifting digital code. The CEO of Liberty Prime was not a man. He was a sentient hologram. He was a digitized consciousness birthed directly from the interaction between the Liberty Prime mainframe and the Fragment of Heart.
"I am the system," the faceless vortex spoke. Its voice was no longer modulated or pleasant. It echoed with a chilling, metallic resonance that vibrated in Amani's teeth.
The white suit dissolved into pure energy, slipping right through Amani's physical grasp.
The CEO reformed ten yards away, hovering in the air. A new, pristine golden mask materialized over the shifting code, hiding the vortex once again.
"Your physical violence is obsolete," the CEO stated.
The white void shifted. The sterile grid vanished.
Amani found himself standing on a narrow, rusted steel beam, a thousand feet in the air. Below him was a sprawling, burning rendition of Neo-San Francisco. The sky was bleeding red, choked with ash and holographic fire.
Jax's firewall broke with a sound like shattering glass.
Upepo was teleported to a separate steel beam fifty yards away, struggling to keep his balance in the howling wind. Chacha's red cage hung suspended from a passing corporate drone, circling the burning towers. Sia remained frozen in amber, perched precariously on the edge of a crumbling skyscraper roof far below.
The CEO stood at the apex of the highest radio tower, the Fragment of Heart pulsing brightly in his ethereal hands.
"You want the core, Fate Changer?" the CEO asked, raising the Fragment to the burning sky. "Come and claim it. But know that in this arena, gravity is my domain."
The rusted beam beneath Amani's feet snapped.
He fell into the burning city.