Even Lieutenant Garret looked genuinely unsettled. The sadistic smile had completely vanished from the officer’s face. Garret stared at Sebastian as his cybernetic arm twitched slightly.

"Is there anything else, sir?" Sebastian asked. His voice was a flat deadpan monotone that carried no emotion whatsoever. "Or can we get back to work?"

Garret swallowed hard and took a slight step back. The officer suddenly realized that the quiet lazy grunt he had kicked in the hangar wasn’t a coward. He was a psychopath.

"No," Garret grunted as his voice lost some of its previous bravado. He turned away and refused to make eye contact with Sebastian.

"Load the bodies onto the transports. We’re done here."

Sebastian simply nodded. He turned his back on the dead boy and walked away.

He had shed the last remnants of the traditional hero. He wasn’t playing the good guy anymore. The universe was a meat grinder and Sebastian was fully prepared to turn the crank if it meant getting what he needed.

——

The cull was finally over. The echoing gunfire in Sector 4 died down and was

replaced by the heavy industrial grumble of Vanguard transport trucks idling in the alleyways.

Sebastian stood near the back of a massive heavily armored cargo hauler. The vehicle was easily the size of a dump truck and its thick metal siding was painted with the dark grey and blue insignia of the Syndicate.

"Keep moving! Throw them in the back!" a sergeant barked and waved a glowing

baton.

The grunts were busy loading the cargo. They were dragging the bloody limp bodies of the culled refugees and tossing them unceremoniously into the open back of the truck.

Sebastian grabbed the legs of a dead civilian while another soldier grabbed the

arms. They swung the body backward and tossed it into the growing pile of meat.

THUD.

Sebastian wiped his gloves as his silver-tinged eyes narrowed slightly behind his visor.

Something was deeply fundamentally wrong with this picture.

In the Ethereal Plane when a human player or NPC died their physical avatar usually lingered for a few minutes before dissolving into a pile of grey ash and dropped loot. The server conserved memory by deleting the rendered assets.

But these bodies weren’t dissolving.

"Hey," Sebastian casually muttered to the soldier next to him. It was a nervous-looking guy named Rix. "Why are we loading the trash? Shouldn’t the server just scrub these assets in a few minutes?"

Rix looked at Sebastian like he had just asked why water was wet. The soldier nervously glanced over his shoulder to make sure Garret wasn’t listening before leaning in close.

"You hit your head, Trent?" Rix whispered as he hoisted another body. "They don’t dissolve because they have the tags. The collars."

Sebastian looked closer at the corpse they were lifting. Wrapped tightly around

the dead refugee’s neck was a thin glowing metal band. It wasn’t an explosive collar like the one Corbin had worn. It was a stasis lock.

It was a piece of code specifically designed to trick the server into thinking the entity was

still alive to prevent the body from despawning.

"Right. The tags," Sebastian played along as his mind raced. "I forgot. Where are we hauling them again?"

"To the Harvest Den," Rix said and shuddered visibly. "I hate this detail, man. Just throw them in and let’s go."

Sebastian tossed the body into the back of the truck. He didn’t ask any more questions. He just climbed into the passenger seat of the transport cab. He needed to see exactly what the Syndicate was doing with a truckload of preserved human corpses.

The drive was entirely miserable. The heavy truck rumbled down a massive spiraling concrete tunnel that descended deep below the city’s foundations. The neon lights of the slums faded away and were replaced by the harsh flickering red emergency bulbs of an industrial sector.

After thirty minutes of driving, the truck passed through a series of massive magically reinforced blast doors.

They emerged into a sprawling underground cavern.

It was a processing plant. But it wasn’t refining iron or processing raw mana crystals.

"Everybody out! Unload the cargo!" the driver yelled and hit the hydraulic release for the back bay doors.

Sebastian stepped out of the truck.

He walked over to the rusted metal railing of a catwalk overlooking the main factory floor. He looked down and his blood ran entirely cold.

The facility was massive. Below him, hundreds of automated hydraulic cranes swung back and forth over a series of gargantuan glowing vats.

The vats were fifty feet wide and filled to the brim with a violently bubbling neon-blue liquid. It wasn’t water. It was pure highly concentrated arcane acid.

Sebastian watched in absolute horror as a crane lifted a massive steel net filled with dozens of the dead refugees.

But as the net swung over the vat, Sebastian noticed something horrifying. Through his True Sight, he could see the faint flickering health bars hovering over a few of the bodies.

They weren’t all dead. Some of them were just unconscious. Some of them were

just severely wounded and paralyzed by the stasis collars locking them into a vegetative state.

They were alive.

The crane released the net.

The bodies plummeted into the glowing blue acid.

SPLASH!

The reaction was instantaneous and horrifying. The moment the organic matter hit

the acid, the human bodies began to violently dissolve. The flesh melted off the bone in seconds. The stasis collars shorted out and the game’s pain receptors forcefully reactivated.

A cacophony of muffled gurgling screams echoed up from the vats as the half-dead refugees woke up just in time to be boiled alive in the chemical bath.

"What the fvck is this," Sebastian whispered with his voice entirely hollow.

He watched the bodies disintegrate into a thick glowing blue sludge. The sludge

was then aggressively filtered through a series of massive glass pipes to refine the raw biological mana into perfectly smooth glowing blue energy cells.

"Core Fluid," Rix said from behind him and stepped up to the railing. The soldier looked sick to his stomach. "It’s how the Syndicate powers the heavy Mechs. You can’t run a Level 80 Vanguard Walker on regular crystal mana. It doesn’t have the output. You need raw condensed soul energy."

Sebastian stared at the glowing blue batteries sliding down the conveyor belts.

It was a direct parallel to the blood rituals he had seen the Void cultists perform on Earth. The System didn’t care about morality. The Ethereal Plane’s underlying code operated purely on math. If an Administrator wrote a localized law that classified human beings as livestock and fuel, the server would perfectly execute the logic.

The Vanguard Syndicate wasn’t protecting the city. They were farming it.