"NO!" Leo screamed, his voice a raw, ragged sound of pure, undiluted rage. He lunged forward, his own katana a blur, and with a single, desperate, grief-fueled strike, he plunged it into the back of the distracted ninja. The ninja froze, its head turning to look at him, a flicker of something—surprise? confusion?—in its cold, cybernetic eyes. Then, it too dissolved, leaving behind only its shimmering, silent katana.

Leo, his teddy bear avatar trembling with a mixture of grief and adrenaline, snatched the fallen ninja's blade from the air. It felt heavy, cold, and wrong in his paw.

"To the barrier!" Reina screamed, her voice a sharp, commanding presence in the chaos.

Leo ran, his fluffy form a blur of motion, the stolen katana held tight in his paw. He reached the shimmering, translucent barrier that separated them from Glitchy, from their former friend, from the architect of their betrayal.

Grief was a fire, and the cyber-ninja's katana was its fuel. Leo hammered relentlessly at the shimmering, translucent barrier that separated him from them. Each strike was a roar of pure, undiluted agony, a desperate, futile attempt to punch through the wall of their betrayal. The blade, a corrupted piece of code, began to feed on his rage. Black and red static, like a creeping, digital disease, spread from his paw, up his arm, and across his chest. His cute, button eyes began to glow with a malevolent, crimson light, and his roars of grief became more animalistic, more monstrous. He was getting stronger, each blow cracking the barrier with a spiderweb of brilliant, white light, but he was losing himself, the kind, goofy soul of their friend being consumed by the weapon's malice.

Anya and Reina watched in horror, torn between the battle raging around them and the slow, terrifying self-destruction of their friend.

Each impact, a futile, self-destructive pulse, echoed in Reina's bones. She watched Leo, a silhouette of rage against the shimmering, unyielding wall, and a familiar, chilling coldness seeped into her. It was the ice of an impossible scenario, the ghost of a digital cage she'd never truly escaped: a prodigy failing, a family lost. Her past replayed in a new, more brutal key. The realization struck her with the force of a physical blow, a terrible, sudden clarity: force was the wrong answer. It had always been the wrong answer.

She turned to Anya, her expression hardening, emotion stripped away until only cold, hard logic remained. "The spire's core. Can you overload it?"

Anya's gaze met hers, and in that shared look, an entire conversation passed between them. No explanation was needed. A digital apocalypse. A scorched-earth tactic that would erase this entire sector—Glitchy, the Sombra Liberation, them. A final, desperate gambit to prevent the birth of an immortal overlord.

A choked, monstrous growl ripped through the air. Leo. He had heard. "If he wants to be a god," he snarled, his voice a twisted ruin of what it once was, "let him be the god of nothing."

Glitchy felt nothing of their despair. A thick data cable, pulsing with a sick blue light, snaked from the back of his head into the main console. He was a conduit, and the universe inside his consciousness was a raging storm. A single slip in concentration, a moment's faltering, and the torrent of raw data would fry his mind to ash. As his consciousness bled into the spire, GRANDMAMA.EXE fought back. Her core programming, the very essence of "kindness" and "experience" she was built upon, rebelled against his tyranny. It was a virus of love in the heart of his ambition. Doubt flickered across his silver eyes. He was losing control.

As the last of the Sombra mechs fell. Kaito's final, defiant cry was swallowed by the overwhelming power of the god-machine. It was over.

Anya made her move. In her hands, she held her most powerful program, a weapon that couldn't simply be deployed, not without paying the price.

At that exact moment, with a sound like shattering stars, the barrier broke. Leo, a terrifying, corrupted parody of the man he'd been, stood panting in the breach.

She glanced at Reina, a silent apology and a fierce farewell in her eyes. Then, she unleashed her virus. Her rabbit avatar dissolved into a cascade of pure, white light.

The security AI froze. Its crystalline form, once a monument to power, began to crack, consumed by a force it could not fight.

Reina's eyes widened. "No…" The word was a breath, a whisper of denial. She had asked for an overload. Not… this. Not this agonizing, personal erasure.

She took in the sight of the data spire. It was dying.

Multicolored veins of light, a network of corrupted digital arteries, pulsed across the spire's massive black frame. Anya's final, sacrificial virus was a poison in its heart. High above, the core, a perfect, black sphere of pure data, fractured and opened, revealing a hole in reality. A void that drank the very light of the virtual world, its gravitational pull warping the space around it, buckling the foundations of their reality. An eye of doom, waiting to blink this world into oblivion.

"You lost," Reina said. Her voice was quiet, a final judgment in the echoing silence.

A laugh, wet and choked, escaped Glitchy's lips as Major's katana plunged through his chest.

"This is for Goro, motherfucker," Major growled, his voice a monstrous, corrupted thing.

Glitchy smiled, a sad, defeated, almost peaceful expression settling on his perfect, porcelain face. With the last of his strength, he reached for the console and pressed a single, glowing button.

"What do we do now?" Major's growl was low, animalistic, the question of a beast, not a man.

Reina didn't answer. She looked up at the void, at the silent, patient end of their world, and closed her eyes.

Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

A pinprick of light, impossibly bright, bloomed in the center of the nothingness.

Then, everything went white.

"Kitsune?"

The voice was warped, distorted, an echo in a place that shouldn't exist. Reina frowned, her eyes fluttering open. The world was gone. Razed. A flat, sterile plain of rubble and corrupted data that stretched kilometers. But they were alive.

Her gaze fell upon the shimmering, white barrier that encircled them, a fragile dome built from the fractured, crystalline pieces of the security AI.

"Did… did Glitchy do this?" The question was a whisper of disbelief.

A guttural growl answered her. Leo, his mind now utterly consumed by the blade's hunger, lifted his katana.

"No!" Reina screamed, a raw, desperate sound.

With a final, agonized roar that was more pain than rage, Leo plunged the katana through his own chest. The corruption, the power, the man—all dissolved into a shower of glitching, dying data.

Reina stared. Her last friend. Gone. She was the only one left.

As she took a step toward the empty space where he had been, her foot hit something solid. She looked down. A data shard. A brilliant, blue shard that pulsed with a gentle, familiar light.

"Grandmama.exe…" she breathed.

The waste land of the Data Spire dissolved, the code of the simulation gently resolving back into the familiar, dusty comfort of the virtual basement. The scent of ozone and digital cordite faded, replaced once more by the smell of old data and the faint, almost imperceptible hum of their shared server. The game was over.

For a long moment, no one spoke. The avatars of the Zoo Squad stood in a loose, weary circle, the phantom aches of the final battle still lingering in their code. Before them, on the holographic starfield table, the final, cataclysmic moments of their campaign played on a silent, perfect loop: Anya's sacrifice, Goro's fall, Leo's monstrous transformation and self-destruction, and Reina's final, lonely stand. It was a story, replaying their trauma for an audience of silent, plastic figurines.

"Holy shit, Kodiak… that was intense," Leo said, his voice quiet, all his earlier bravado gone, his gaze fixed on the looping video of his own avatar's suicide. The usual spark in his eyes was gone, replaced by a haunted, hollow look.

"Yeah… I really didn't expect Glitchy's betrayal," Anya responded, her voice a soft, sad whisper as she watched her own digital ghost dissolve into pure, white light, over and over again. Her small rabbit form seemed even smaller, more fragile than usual.

Kenji's massive frog avatar was silent, his gaze fixed on the moment his own character, Goro, dissolved into a gentle, fading light. His jaw was tight, his usual stoic calm replaced by a profound, somber stillness. He had died to protect them. Even in a game, the weight of that sacrifice felt real.

Reina's nine tails were still, her silver fox avatar a statue of quiet, contained fury. She watched her own final, lonely stand on the looping video, her expression unreadable.

Kodiak's massive bear avatar materialized in the center of the room, a proud, satisfied smile on his face. "Reina said the last campaign was too happy-go-lucky, so I decided to make this one a little more… interesting. Thanks, Glitchy, for the performance." He started a slow, appreciative clap.

"Yeah, dude," Leo added, a flicker of his old self returning, a weak attempt at his usual bravado. "That final avatar was stylish as hell. Seriously, where did you get the assets for that coat?"

Synth's stick-man avatar just gave a simple, noncommittal shrug.

Kodiak looked at him, his expression warm. "So, what do you say, Glitchy? Same time next week?"

"Sure," Synth responded, his synthesized voice a calm, even hum. "Why not. See you next time."

And with that, he logged off.

Back in the real world, Synth was on the couch. He had already moved Max into his bed, and Selena was sleeping peacefully in her own corner of the room. He lay still, feigning sleep, the quiet of the apartment a stark, deafening contrast to the epic, digital war that had just concluded in his mind.

His internal HUD displayed the date and time in a soft, unobtrusive glow.

Sunday, 27 June 2083. 3 a.m.

Just a few more hours.

The sun fought to cast its light through the clean upper atmosphere, only to be choked and smeared into a hazy watercolor by the permanent grey bruise of the city's industrial smoke. Down in the apartment, the light that filtered through the window was thin and tired, illuminating dust motes dancing in the silence.

Synth and Selena sat on the couch, a fragile truce holding the space between them. A bento box rested on each of their laps, the steam from the synthetic protein and rice coiling into the still air.

"How was the movie last night?" Synth asked. His voice was a carefully calibrated hum, neutral and smooth. While one facet of his consciousness had been engaged in Kodiak's virtualgame, a vigilant subroutine had remained here, a silent guardian watching Selena and Max. He'd observed her watch the film, brush her teeth, and retreat into the quiet fortress of her room.

She yawned, a slow, jaw-cracking stretch. "Kinda boring, to be honest. I mean, the main character… he kept doing such ridiculous things to impress that woman. Do guys really act like that?" She looked at him, genuinely puzzled, her fork hovering over a piece of soy-fish.

"Some do," he responded. The answer was simple, but the data behind it was not.

"Have you ever acted like that?"

"No. Never." The word was clean, absolute. He hadn't. But the men whose experiences were now cataloged in his memory, whispered a different story. He felt the phantom blush of a young Red trying to impress a girl at a noodle stand, the clumsy bravado of another man long dead.

Selena hummed, a low, thoughtful sound. "Nyra, she seemed to like you."

"Did she?" Synth asked, his tone unchanging. He registered the implication instantly. His body may be a variable-density nanite swarm, but he was far from dense.

"Duh." She rolled her eyes. "Honestly, I don't know what she sees in you. You're a seven, at best."

Synth let a single eyebrow arch. "What's that crawling on the wall?" he asked, his voice dropping slightly as he pointed toward the wall to her left.

Her reaction was pure instinct. A choked scream, a violent flinch, and in the next moment, she had launched herself from the couch and into his arms, clinging to him with a desperate strength.

"Kill it! Kill it!" she shrieked, her head buried against his chest, her eyes squeezed shut.

A low chuckle rumbled in his chest, a sound he was still learning to use. "Where… where is the spider?" she stammered, cautiously peering around.

She screamed again, a sound of pure betrayal this time, as he held his datapad in front of her face. On the screen, a massive black tarantula scurried realistically towards the viewer.

With a furious cry, she slapped the datapad from his hand. It clattered to the floor as she scrambled to her feet, her breath coming in ragged heaves. "That… was not funny," she gasped, one hand pressed flat against her chest, feeling the frantic, hammering beat of her heart. "If you ever pull something like that again, I'm going to get Arty's poop gun and use it on you."

The absurdity of the threat was so jarring it momentarily stalled his processors. "Wait. Did he actually make that?"

Selena shuddered, a genuine, full-body tremor, as if recalling a memory she'd tried to bury. "Yes," she whispered.

"And how, exactly, does it work?" Synth pushed, his curiosity piqued by the sheer chaotic energy of the concept.

Selena's hand flew to her mouth, her face paling. "I'm gonna throw up on you," she mumbled, a small burp escaping.

Synth was already composing a message. He opened a channel to Arty, his own query cutting through the cascade of memes had sent him the night before. The chemicals in that street pizza must have some effect on his brain, he thought, a detached, clinical observation.

Ray: Did you show Selena your poop gun?

Arty_MechaManiac_01: Yeah, some video of me shooting some target practice.

Before he could ask for specifics, a video file landed in his inbox. He opened it.

If you find any errors ( broken links, non-standard content, etc.. ), Please let us know < report chapter > so we can fix it as soon as possible.