"Yeah, wouldn’t want to upset middle management," Sebastian replied deadpan.

CLACK.

He slid a magazine into the rifle.

Ten minutes later, Sebastian was strapped into the hard vibrating metal seat of an armored transport truck. The vehicle rumbled aggressively as it descended the spiraling ramps from the military sector down into the absolute bowels of Server 112.

Sector 4. The slums.

The air inside the transport was tense. The soldiers gripped their rifles and their eyes nervously darted toward the reinforced windows.

Lieutenant Garret stood at the front of the transport holding onto a hanging strap. His cybernetic right arm hummed with a low menacing energy. He looked at the squad of grunts with pure disdain.

"Listen up," Garret barked over the roaring engine. "We have a massive pest control problem in the lower zones. Command says there’s a surge of rogue mutants breeding in the residential runoffs. They are aggressive, they are unregistered, and they are completely compromising the efficiency of the sector."

Garret paused as a sadistic cruel smile stretched across his face.

"The rules of engagement are incredibly simple. If it moves and it doesn’t have a Vanguard ID tag, you put a bullet in it. We are cleaning the gutters today, boys. I want a complete cull."

"Mutants, sir?" a young soldier across from Sebastian asked and swallowed hard. "Like Void Crawlers?"

"Worse," Garret sneered. "Parasites."

The heavy transport screeched to a halt. The back doors hissed open.

"Out! Out! Out!" Garret yelled and pointed toward the dark alleyways.

Sebastian hopped out of the back of the truck. His boots splashed into a puddle

of thick oily water. He raised his rifle and scanned the environment.

His Ethereal Plane instincts kicked in. He was looking for massive health bars or glowing red aggro tags. He expected to see horrific beasts tearing the rusted metal walls apart.

Instead, he saw people.

The rogue mutants weren’t monsters at all. They were just humans.

Hundreds of them were huddled in the freezing alleyways of Sector 4. They were

draped in filthy tattered blankets and coughing violently into their hands.

Their faces were pale and their eyes were sunken with severe starvation. They

looked absolutely terrified as the heavily armored Vanguard squad marched into

their makeshift home.

Sebastian’s silver-tinged eyes narrowed behind his tactical visor. He didn’t see

a single weapon among them. No swords, no magic staffs, not even a decent piece

of armor.

"These aren’t mutants," Sebastian whispered to himself.

He pulled up his spoofed UI and targeted a shivering woman clutching a crying child near a rusted trash incinerator.

[Target: Civilian Refugee]

[Status: Oxygen Deprived. Severe Malnutrition.]

[Threat Level: 0]

"They just can’t pay the air tax," Sebastian realized.

The sheer bureaucratic evil of Server 112 hit him like a physical blow. The Syndicate wasn’t fighting a war here. They had commercialized basic survival. If

you couldn’t afford the micro-transactions for clean oxygen and water, the system labeled you a mutant. And then they sent the exterminators.

"Open fire!" Garret roared from behind the line. "Clean the sector!"

BANG! BANG! BANG!

The deafening roar of kinetic rifles echoed through the narrow metal canyons of the slum.

The slaughter began immediately. It was completely one-sided. The Vanguard soldiers didn’t hesitate. They had been brainwashed by the server’s rigid propaganda to see these people as glitches in the grand corporate machine.

Heavy armor-piercing slugs tore through the fragile bodies of the refugees. Blood sprayed across the rusted walls in violent arcs. People screamed and scattered like frightened insects. They desperately tried to crawl over the trash to escape the hail of bullets.

Sebastian stood perfectly still amidst the chaos.

He didn’t raise his rifle. He kept the barrel pointed firmly at the ground.

He had done terrible and violent things since the game merged with reality. He

had dropped a glacier on an army. He had boiled a hundred men alive in a narrow

alleyway. But those were combatants. Those were players who had drawn their weapons and agreed to the rules of the meat grinder.

This was just corporate murder.

"Hey! Trent!" Garret yelled as his voice cut through the gunfire. "What the fvck are you doing?! Shoot them! Or I’ll execute you for insubordination right here!"

Sebastian slowly turned his head toward the Lieutenant. A cold dark fury began to bubble deep within his chest. It was a raw unadulterated hatred for the System that allowed this kind of algorithmic cruelty to exist.

Before he could decide whether or not to blow Garret’s head off and ruin his entire infiltration plan, motion caught his eye.

A refugee leaped out from behind a pile of discarded shipping crates.

It was a young man practically skin and bones with his face twisted in a mask of

absolute screaming desperation. He didn’t have a gun. He had a jagged rusted piece of scrap metal wrapped in dirty cloth. He was charging directly at Sebastian and wildly swinging the makeshift knife.

"Die, you corporate pigs!" the man screamed as his voice cracked with terror.

He was completely out of his mind with panic. He was just swinging at the closest Vanguard uniform he could find.

Sebastian didn’t flinch. He didn’t draw his combat knife. He just looked at the incoming attacker with a tired and deeply exhausted expression.

If he dodged, the man would just run past him and get gunned down by Garret. If he shot him, he was participating in the slaughter.

He needed to protect his cover. The red Admin Suspicion meter hovering in the

top corner of his vision was sitting perfectly at 0%. If he used his Sovereign authority to stop time or delete the bullets, the planetary firewall would instantly detect his Anomaly tag and vaporize him from orbit.

He had to play by the rules of a Level 42 grunt. But he had already edited those rules in the barracks.

Sebastian didn’t move. He let the refugee close the distance.

The young man lunged and brought the rusted scrap metal down in a wild uncoordinated stab aimed right at Sebastian’s neck.

Sebastian tapped into his mana pool and activated Trent’s defensive skill.

[Skill Activated: Micro-Deflection]

He didn’t cast a massive glowing barrier. He just summoned a completely invisible microscopic pane of hard-light kinetic energy directly over his collarbone.

It was a skill he had quietly edited using his Code Compiler. It didn’t just block an attack. It mathematically redirected the kinetic impact at a perfect pre-calculated 45-degree angle. It was pure terrifying geometry.

The rusted scrap knife struck the invisible barrier.

CLINK!

The sound was sharp and tiny. It was completely drowned out by the roaring

gunfire around them.

The physics engine of the server flawlessly processed the edited code. The kinetic force of the refugee’s desperate swing didn’t just bounce off. It was violently and aggressively returned.

The scrap metal blade snapped backward with twice the speed it had come down.

SQUELCH.

The rusted metal drove directly into the refugee’s own right eye.

The man’s momentum carried him forward but his body went instantly limp. The blade had bypassed the optical cavity and punctured the frontal lobe. The absolute perfection of the angle ensured it was an instant painless death.

The refugee collapsed into the toxic mud at Sebastian’s feet as a thick pool of blood rapidly mixed with the oily water.

[Target Eliminated. EXP Gained.]

Sebastian stared down at the dead man. His face behind the Vanguard visor was completely utterly devoid of emotion. He didn’t feel a rush of victory. He just felt a cold hollow disgust.

He glanced up at the corner of his UI.

[ADMIN SUSPICION: 0%]

The system didn’t flag it. To the server’s tracking algorithms, Trent the Gunner had simply used a standard defensive shield and a clumsy low-level mutant had accidentally killed himself on the rebound. It was a perfectly normal physics interaction.

Sebastian looked over at Lieutenant Garret.

Garret had watched the entire exchange. The officer lowered his smoking rifle with a look of genuine sadistic approval crossing his face.

"Nice block, Trent," Garret laughed and kicked a nearby corpse. "Didn’t even have to waste a bullet on the trash. Keep moving!Push them into the dead end!"

Sebastian didn’t say a word. He gripped his rifle tightly. His knuckles turned white beneath his tactical gloves.

He stepped over the body of the young man he had just mathematically manipulated into suicide. He marched forward and blended in perfectly with the rest of the Vanguard executioners.

He was going to play their game. He was going to follow their disgusting

corporate rules. He was going to keep his head down and his suspicion meter at zero.

But as Sebastian walked deeper into the screaming dying slums of Sector 4, a promise forged itself in his mind.

The moment he got his hands on that Regional Core, he was going to tear Server 112 down to its foundational code. And he was going to start with Garret.

——

The cull in Sector 4 lasted for three agonizing blood-soaked hours.

The narrow metallic alleyways of the slums had turned into a literal slaughterhouse. The deafening rhythmic bark of Vanguard kinetic rifles echoed endlessly off the rusted iron walls.

Sebastian moved through the chaos like a ghost pretending to be a machine.

He kept his rifle raised and fired short controlled bursts into the walls or the empty rusted dumpsters. He made sure the server logged his weapon discharging to keep his activity metrics looking perfectly normal for a grunt in the middle of a firefight. He didn’t hit a single civilian. He let the rest of the squad do

the butchering while he maintained the cold calculated illusion of a loyal soldier.

He hated every single second of it.

His Admin Suspicion meter sat comfortably at zero percent but his actual suppressed human anger was threatening to boil over.

Up ahead near a collapsed water reclamation pipe, the Vanguard line had cornered a large group of survivors. There were maybe fifty refugees trapped against a dead end. They were cowering behind a pathetic barricade of old mattresses and broken hover-car parts.

"Hold the line!" Garret’s magically amplified voice barked over the screaming.

The Lieutenant marched back and forth behind his men as his cybernetic arm hummed loudly.

"Don’t let them scatter! Box them in and finish the job!"

Sebastian stopped near the back of the formation. His boots rested in a puddle of slick dark sludge. He watched the absolute misery unfolding in front of him.

The soldiers were reloading their weapons.

CHK-CHK.