Saltwater stings when it enters open wounds, but the black ice created by antimatter simply anesthetizes your death.

  We reached the docks of Leviathania coughing up the sea of Guanabara Bay. The entire city was in organized panic. Steam sirens howled, mixing with Luna's Hangover Voice, which emitted a low, sickening frequency through the loudspeakers, designed to disorient anything with an inner ear and eardrums.

  The problem was that the enemy had neither.

  "Arthur!" Luna ran to us, helping Valéria out of the water. "The music isn't working! They have no heartbeats to throw out of rhythm!"

  I looked back at the bay.

  The Exodus Fleet was no longer just anchored. The Last Breath and the other ships were fusing their hulls through the Black Crystal. Like a glacier growing in fast-forward, a solid, dark bridge was forming over the water, connecting the fleet directly to our island's "Rib Beach."

  And marching over that bridge was the Piper's infantry.

  The "Hollows."

  Thousands of European soldiers infected by the Crystal Plague. They didn't run. They didn't shout war cries. They marched in absolute unison, boots striking the ice with the precision of a deadly metronome.

  Their faces, partially consumed by the dark blue crystal, expressed no hatred, only data processing.

  "They're coming to download our files the hard way," Gristle wrung the water from her hair and pulled the cleaver from her back. "Defense formation!"

  The defenders of Leviathania—an unlikely mix of crab-mutants, ex-High Tide cultists armed with harpoons, and Bronze Sentries from Petrópolis—formed a barricade on the bone dock.

  The first clash was a disaster of physics versus magic.

  Our steam cannons fired. The lead and stone balls hit the Hollows' front line.

  Some fell, crystals shattering. But those who fell were immediately trampled and "absorbed" by the black ice beneath their feet, which recycled the biomass instantly.

  Then, the Piper's elite responded.

  Admiral Sterling's guards raised magnetic containment rifles.

  There was no flash of gunpowder. Just thin beams of absolute darkness.

  Where the antimatter beams touched, matter ceased to exist. A three-meter Bronze Sentry was erased from the chest up, collapsing silently. Part of a whale bone barricade vanished, leaving a smooth, impossible cut.

  "Fall back! Stay out of their line of sight!" I shouted, pulling Gristle behind a colossal Leviathan tooth.

  "We can't fight this, Doctor!" Valéria panted, checking her shotgun and realizing the weapon's futility. "If we shoot, they recycle themselves. If they shoot, we get deleted from the universe!"

  The Parasite inside me vibrated. The Piper's hive mind was saturating the environment with digital signals.

  [FIELD ANALYSIS: ENEMY OPERATES ON A LOCAL AREA NETWORK (LAN) BASED ON BLACK CRYSTAL.]

  [EACH SOLDIER IS A NETWORK NODE. THEY HAVE NO FREE WILL. THEY ARE PINGS.]

  "They are a network," I murmured, eyes fixed on the ice bridge approaching our coast. "The Piper doesn't want to kill us. He wants to plug his cables into the Leviathan and 'format' the island to use as a warm server."

  "If they want to plug into our hardware, let's give them a virus."

  I looked at the ground beneath our feet. We were standing on the Leviathan's petrified gums.

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  "Valéria, does the peripheral nervous system of this thing still have magical conductivity?"

  Valéria's eyes widened, her engineer mind catching up to my medical logic.

  "The flesh petrified, but the mana channels in the giant nerves still work like copper wire. We used them to wire the city's lighting!"

  "Exactly. The whole island is a motherboard of dead meat." I ran to one of the improvised power cables Valéria had installed, ripping it from the bone socket to expose the Leviathan's thick, bluish Abyssal Nerve. "Luna, come here!"

  Luna slid over to me as antimatter beams erased chunks of the dock a few meters away.

  "What do I do? Sing funk to the corpse?"

  "Almost!" I took off my right glove. The Parasite covered my hand with black chitin and inoculation needles. "The Piper works with Order. Zeroes and Ones. Silence and Synchrony. We are Chaos. Flesh, pain, flaws, and noise.

  "I'm going to plug my nervous system into the Leviathan's. I'm going to be the modem. I need you to press your baton against my chest and sing the most chaotic, dissonant, and biologically 'dirty' note you can manage.

  "We're going to inject a magical Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack straight into the ground they're walking on. A Meat Firewall."

  "Arthur, if I put the full force of my scream inside your body, your organs will turn to paté!" she hesitated.

  "The Parasite regenerates. The island doesn't. Go!"

  I plunged my bare hand directly into the Leviathan's Giant Nerve.

  The connection was instantaneous and nauseating. I felt the island-sized "ghost." A vastness of dead connections waiting for a signal.

  [INTERFACE ESTABLISHED.]

  [AWAITING UPLOAD OF CHAOTIC DATA PACKETS.]

  Luna pressed the crystal tip of her baton directly against my chest bone, through the torn shirt. She took a deep breath, closed her eyes, and unleashed all the frustration, fear, and human grime she held inside.

  It wasn't a musical note. It was a screech of pure biological static.

  The sound entered my body.

  I felt my lungs collapse and my ribs vibrate until they almost cracked. The Parasite howled in agony, but did its job: it converted the sonic energy into a Magical Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) and pushed it down, through my arm, straight into the island's nerves.

  The ground of Leviathania city flashed with a vein of red and purple light that spread like underground lightning.

  The pulse raced along the edges of the island and collided directly with the point where the Black Crystal bridge touched our shore.

  The reaction was a spectacle of clashing systems.

  Luna's organic "noise," amplified by the Leviathan corpse, invaded the Piper's perfectly clean network.

  It was like throwing mud into the gears of a Swiss watch.

  The ice bridge cracked.

  The Hollows marching on the island stopped abruptly. The perfect synchrony ended. The crystal on their faces flashed violently between blue and red.

  Some grabbed their heads and began to scream—the first sound they made—their organic brains frying with the network feedback.

  Others simply shut down, falling stiffly to the ground.

  The antimatter rifles, dependent on the neural connection with the soldiers, jammed.

  "The firewall is up!" Valéria cheered, watching the enemy advance collapse on our beach.

  "Gristle! Cleanup!" I managed to choke out, falling to my knees and spitting blood, severing the connection with the nerve.

  The orc didn't need to be told twice. With the enemy stunned and antimatter disabled, brute force was once again queen of the battlefield. Gristle and the defenders of Leviathania charged over the cracked bridge, smashing the paralyzed Hollows before their system could "reboot."

  Far away, on the deck of The Last Breath, the figure of Admiral Sterling retreated.

  The Black Crystal of the bridge stopped advancing and began to melt at the edges, the connection severed by our biological noise.

  They had been repelled. The first wave failed.

  Luna slumped beside me, panting, her throat hoarse.

  "It... worked. We hacked them."

  "We bought some time," I corrected, standing up with Valéria's help. My entire body ached as if I had been run over by our own truck. "We crashed their router. But the central server," I pointed to the lead ship, "is still intact."

  The Parasite, recovering from the sonic shock, sent a grim report.

  [ALERT: ENEMY POSSESSES MACHINE LEARNING PROTOCOLS.]

  [THE "NOISE" TACTIC WILL NOT WORK TWICE. THEIR SYSTEM WILL DEVELOP AN IMMUNITY PATCH IN APPROXIMATELY 48 HOURS.]

  "The Piper will adapt." I wiped the blood from my chin. "In two days, the black ice will return with insulation against sonic and neural magic. And next time, they won't march. They'll just vaporize the entire island from afar."

  "So what do we do?" Gristle returned, covered in blue crystal dust. "Cut the main power cable on their ship?"

  "To reach the ship and the Piper, we need to cross a sea of antimatter. We can't do that alone with brute force."

  I looked at the ruins of the city and the improvised technology around us.

  "If the Piper is the apex of post-apocalyptic Artificial Intelligence... we need an Intelligence that speaks the same language he does, but fights on our side."

  "Arthur, there is no AI left on Earth." Valéria shook her head. "The pulse from the Rifts fried everything on Day Zero."

  "Not everything," I remembered my father's recorded conversations. "Hélio Veras had a colleague. A rival scientist in S?o Paulo who tried to back up the human internet before the collapse. Rumor has it he managed to save something.

  "We're going to have to take a field trip. We need to find the 'Ghost in the Code'."