Chapter 21: Legacy Hardware

  The Glitch Wastes were a digital graveyard. There was no wind, no temperature, and no sound other than the endless, grating hum of television static.

  Silas Vane sprinted across the unrendered, gray polygonal mesh of the ground. His breath came in ragged gasps, his pristine white tactical coat smeared with gray ash. Behind him, the horizon was completely blotted out by a tidal wave of glowing red eyes and jagged, shifting silhouettes.

  Thousands of Null-Walkers were hunting him.

  Silas glanced down at his heavy, cybernetic right arm. The golden energy that usually pulsed through the stolen Aurelian Server Node was gone, replaced by a flickering, sickly yellow light.

  [WARNING: CRITICAL BATTERY. 4% REMAINING]

  [SYSTEM SHUTDOWN IMMINENT]

  "Not today," Silas hissed through clenched teeth, forcing his exhausted legs to keep moving.

  He didn't have the magical RAM of the Crystal Caverns to siphon from. In this dead zone, there was absolutely zero ambient energy. If his gauntlet died, his cybernetic nervous system would lock up, and the malware would tear him apart frame by frame.

  Up ahead, breaking the monotony of the flat gray plain, Silas spotted a massive, jagged shadow.

  As he drew closer, his cybernetic optics struggled to resolve the image through the static. It wasn't a mountain. It wasn't a castle made of corrupted code. It was a massive, crumpled cylinder of scorched titanium and shattered solar panels.

  Silas skidded to a halt, staring up at the wreckage in absolute disbelief. Painted on the side of the scorched metal, barely visible beneath years of digital rot, was the faded, geometric logo of Helios Dynamics.

  Project Icarus, Silas realized, his eyes going wide. Vance's first dimensional probe. They lost contact with it five years ago. It didn't burn up in the transit layer... it crashed into the server's trash bin.

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

  The screeching of the Null-Walkers grew deafening. The vanguard of the horde was less than a hundred yards away.

  Silas didn't hesitate. He scrambled up the side of the crashed satellite, tearing away a panel of scorched titanium to expose the probe’s internal wiring. The Earth-tech was dormant, but Silas knew the Icarus probes were built with redundant, localized micro-fusion batteries.

  He jammed his cybernetic fingers directly into the satellite's main power terminal.

  [UNRECOGNIZED HARDWARE DETECTED]

  [BYPASSING SECURITY PROTOCOLS...]

  "Come on, come on," Silas grunted, his gauntlet sparking as the internal firewall of the five-year-old satellite tried to reject him.

  Fifty yards. The Null-Walkers were leaping over the gray dunes, their jaws unhinging to reveal rows of jagged, red-pixelated teeth.

  [HANDSHAKE COMPLETE. POWER SOURCE ACQUIRED.]

  "Draw it all!" Silas roared.

  The micro-fusion battery of the Icarus probe screamed to life. A massive surge of raw, unadulterated Earth-electricity flooded into Silas’s cybernetic arm. The sickly yellow light of his gauntlet instantly flared into a blinding, hyper-charged white.

  But Silas didn't just recharge his battery. He hot-wired his gauntlet's operating system directly into the satellite's dormant defensive arrays.

  [EXECUTING: OMNI-DIRECTIONAL POINT DEFENSE]

  [TARGETING: ALL HOSTILE ENTITIES]

  The shattered remains of the satellite hummed. From the scorched hull, six high-intensity, military-grade communication lasers violently snapped online. But they weren't broadcasting data anymore. Silas had cranked the output to lethal frequencies.

  A grid of blinding, localized laser fire erupted from the satellite.

  The beams swept across the gray plain with terrifying precision. Wherever the lasers touched the Null-Walkers, the malware simply vaporized. The intense, focused energy of the Earth-tech violently overwrote the corrupted code of the horde.

  Silas stood atop the burning wreckage, his cybernetic arm acting as the central targeting hub. He laughed—a cold, ruthless sound that echoed over the digital shrieking of the dying monsters.

  Within thirty seconds, the vanguard of the Null-Walker army was reduced to a fine mist of fading red pixels. The remaining horde, lacking the programming to deal with actual military hardware, halted their advance, pacing angrily just outside the laser grid's maximum range.

  Silas lowered his glowing, hyper-charged arm. He wasn't just a survivor anymore. He had established a heavily armed, fully powered Helios beachhead right in the middle of King Erebus's domain.

  And from the deep shadows of the gray wastes, the Glitch King was watching.

  The Board is Set!

  Silas just proved why he is Malakai's chief enforcer! He turned a piece of space junk into an impenetrable fortress.

  Now all three of our main storylines are primed for explosive action. We have Alex arriving at the LGA on Earth, Locke stepping into the anti-magic arena in the Heavens, and Silas holding the line in the Wastes.