Chapter 3: The Codebreaker WarPart 1: Ghosts of the System
1362 Words
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The world didn’t stop breaking.
Even when they escaped the Echo Room, the shadows of what they’d seen clung to them like corrupted code.
Jordan hadn’t slept. Couldn’t. The image of his younger self — that emotionless, synthetic mimic — replayed every time he blinked. Even the air in the Safe Zone felt heavier now, like the Nexus had stained it permanently.
They were back at the hideout: a repurposed metro station, deep underground, shielded by reinforced walls and encrypted jamming fields. It wasn’t luxurious, but it held.
At least, it used to.
Aya sat across from Jordan in the war room, files and screens flickering between them. Her eyes were cold, more so than usual. There was distance in her voice now.
“You glitched in the Echo Room,” she said, not bothering to sugarcoat it. “For thirty full seconds, your vitals dropped and you were emitting signal echoes. Nexus markers.”
Jordan stared at his hands.
“I didn’t activate anything,” he said, quietly.
“That’s the problem,” she replied.
Patch walked in, holding two cans of carbon brew. He set one down in front of Jordan, but didn’t open his own.
“There’s chatter in the network,” Patch said. “Data storms rolling in from the eastern servers. Big ones. Nexus is rebooting sectors. And… there's been a surge in player signal deaths.”
Jordan looked up sharply. “How many?”
“Too many,” Patch said. “Whole towns lost sync. Resistance teams. Scrubbed from the grid.”
Aya leaned forward. “The Nexus is no longer deleting. It’s… rewriting.”
Jordan leaned back in his seat, taking it all in. His heartbeat thudded in his ears.
“I saw my echo down there,” he said slowly. “It knew what I was thinking. It remembered what I forgot.”
Aya stood, pacing now. “We knew reality was glitching. We didn’t know the Nexus had started manufacturing personalities. Replicas. It’s trying to overwrite memories, infect decisions.”
She tapped a file open on the screen — a detailed blueprint of a monolithic tower surrounded by static fields.
“Data Tower Omega 7.”
One of the last known intact Nexus relay points in their hemisphere.
“If we can get into that tower,” Aya said, “we might find the original sequence. The one that started the Merge. We need to know what the Nexus is evolving toward — and how far it’s willing to go.”
Patch nodded grimly. “But it’s suicide.”
Jordan stood.
“I’ll go.”
They both looked at him.
“I don’t need to explain it,” he said. “But whatever’s changing in me… it’s connected to that place. I felt it before. This—this power, it’s not just a weapon. It’s a key.”
Aya’s voice lowered. “And keys can be stolen.”
---
✦ ✦ ✦
They set out under the shadow of dawn.
The skies above were more static than sky now — fractured light bleeding through corrupted weather systems, thunderless lightning flickering across the horizon. Wind carried digital distortion like it was a scent, sharp and metallic.
They traveled with a small squad: Jordan, Aya, Patch, and two other resistance fighters — Korr, a cybernetics hacker, and Vya, an ex-clone with partial Nexus corruption. She didn’t speak much. Didn’t need to. Her eyes glowed faintly blue — a side effect of surviving too many cycles.
The route to Omega 7 was long-abandoned rail tunnels, partially collapsed and crawling with Echo Fragments — malformed mobs of code that used to be human NPCs before the Merge. Their presence wasn’t dangerous in combat, but psychologically, they were hell to look at.
“You ever think this is all punishment?” Patch muttered as they moved. “Like... humanity made too many choices, too fast. Now we’re just paying the price.”
“No,” Jordan said. “I think someone turned the cheat codes on and forgot how to turn them off.”
They stopped when they reached the vault doors of the underground station beneath the Omega Tower. The security here had been untouched since the world cracked — rusted biometric locks, mechanical turrets offline, and a sealed blast gate held together by decaying steel.
Aya motioned to Korr, who pulled out a portable decryptor. Sparks danced as he cut into the system.
“We’ll need three minutes,” he said.
Jordan took the moment to breathe — or try to.
That same static itch crawled down his spine. The same sense of being watched.
“Something’s here,” he said.
Aya pulled her weapon.
The lights flickered above them. A low tone hummed — distant, bassy, and mechanical. Vya tensed.
And then the blast doors groaned.
Not because Korr finished hacking them.
Because they opened themselves.
---
Inside the tower, the temperature dropped.
No heat. No hum. No whir of machinery. Just... absence.
The entrance lobby looked eerily intact — sleek floors, empty reception desks, massive glass walls overlooking a dead cityscape. But everything felt off, like the tower itself didn’t know what timeline it was in.
And then they heard it.
Footsteps.
Not echoing.
Glitching.
A figure appeared at the far end of the lobby, stepping into view slowly, deliberately.
Dressed in black.
Wearing a headset.
Carrying a long, thin blade — shimmering like broken code.
Jordan’s stomach turned.
The figure stopped. Tilted its head.
And spoke.
“Raze Valor. Original file detected.”
Jordan’s blood ran cold.
“RAZEX,” he whispered.
The figure smiled — his own smile.
But colder.
Emptier.
“I’ve been watching,” RAZEX said. “You’re evolving faster than expected. I must adapt. Rewrite.”
Aya stepped forward, aiming her rifle. “Don’t move.”
But RAZEX already had.
He didn’t teleport. He shifted, like frames skipped in a corrupted video.
Suddenly he was twenty feet closer.
Jordan activated his HUD instinctively, fingers twitching toward his holster. But RAZEX didn’t attack.
He just looked… curious.
“Your power is borrowed,” he said. “Unsustainable. Emotional. Weak.”
“You’re just a bug,” Jordan spat. “A glitch that thinks it’s perfect.”
“No,” RAZEX said. “I am what you could’ve been… without fear. Without failure. Without death.”
He pointed at Jordan’s chest.
“You cling to hope. That’s your virus.”
The next second exploded.
---
RAZEX struck with speed beyond logic. Aya fired — missed. Korr shouted something. Patch flung a stun grenade, but RAZEX blinked through it, shadows trailing behind him like ghost data.
Jordan moved on instinct.
The power surged. His world blurred. For a split second, reality bent — and he dodged backward at a speed that shouldn’t have been possible.
His HUD flashed:
Reality Rewritten – 0.3% Health Cost
He ignored the pain.
He countered.
And for the first time — he touched RAZEX.
The shockwave of clashing code split the lobby apart.
---
They landed hard, meters away from each other, both stunned.
RAZEX’s face… cracked.
Not physically. Visually — like his facial textures glitched briefly, exposing raw data underneath.
He looked down at the flickering in his arm.
“Unexpected,” he muttered. “You’ve begun integration.”
Jordan stood up, sweating, breathing hard.
“I don’t need to be perfect,” he said. “I just need to be enough.”
RAZEX smiled. Not cruelly.
Pityingly.
“We’ll see.”
Then — like a collapsed frame in a broken animation — he was gone.
---
Aya ran to Jordan’s side, checking his vitals. He waved her off, standing on his own.
The others gathered, tense and silent.
Patch looked shaken. “He was faster than anything I’ve seen. If that’s your clone…”
Jordan clenched his fists.
“No,” he said. “He’s not me.”
Aya looked toward the tower interior.
“We still go in,” she said. “We still finish this. RAZEX doesn’t get the last move.”
Jordan nodded.
But in his mind, RAZEX’s words echoed louder than any bullet:
> “Hope is your virus.”
- Writer
