It was a sound I felt in my teeth before I heard it in my ears—a high-pitched screech as the whole match hit a lag spike and everything slowed at once.
The walls, previously solid and reinforced with sector steel, began to jitter.
Textures flickered, swapping between rusted metal and that flat gray checkerboard like the skin wouldn’t load.
The lighting started dying, and the shadows broke into jagged block-shapes every time the klaxon shrieked.
Then the seams popped.
Hairline fractures spidered across the floor and ceiling, ripping the room open along invisible seams in the model.
Behind them, hidden purge vents opened with a heavy, hydraulic hiss.
Green system haze blasted into the chamber like a pressure vent blowing.
It wasn’t a cheap smoke effect.
It was a nasty green fog with a wireframe lattice, the Mutagen moving like the game stopped enforcing the rules—thick, fast, and relentless.
It was the "Garbage Collector" with the safety limits disabled.
I watched a junked assembly arm get caught in the wave.
The second the green fog touched the metal, the arm didn’t just break—it started getting erased.
The model broke into chunks.
Chunks broke into scraps.
Then it just… despawned.
No loot. No respawn. Just deleted.
No undo. No recovery. Just gone.
The fog rolled across the factory floor, bugging the map’s pathing and wiping it out chunk by chunk.
[SYSTEM WARNING]: SECTOR PURGE IN PROGRESS.
[HP: 641 / 1400]
[-15 HP/sec]
My massive, armored hands started to glitch at the edges.
The red-and-gold textures of my Siege Minion plating were peeling away, revealing a glowing blue wireframe under the skin.
It felt like a freeze—head full of static, inputs delayed and sticky.
I was marked in a full-map wipe.
I looked at the progress bar hovering over the backup clone, Template_7429.
[UPLOAD STATUS: 78%...]
[TIME REMAINING: 42s]
Forty-two seconds.
In a normal game, that’s a long respawn.
Here, it was a straight-up delete timer.
"Phase," I croaked, my voice turned into a crunchy voice-chat glitch.
"I need to Phase out. Now."
I went for the keybind and mashed D like I could force it.
[ERROR: PHASE ON COOLDOWN. 25s REMAINING]
"Right," I hissed, sparks spitting off my shoulder cannon.
"That Tesla-Stalker chase—it had been snapping at my heels through half the sector.
I burned Phase just to escape its leash, and now I'm getting deleted because of it.
Perfect balance, Axiom.
You really baked this cruelty right into the system, didn't you?"
Every tick hit like a lag spike—stutter, damage, stutter, damage.
The purge-fog was ten meters away.
I was menu-locked, plugged into a terminal that was both my lifeline and my delete button.
Behind me, past the fog-of-war line, the map tore open.
The air cracked like a screen about to shatter.
A Warden Sentinel—eight feet of chrome and Core-Tech—shouldered through the breach.
Its core thumped with blue light so bright it blew out the colors around it.
[TARGET ACQUIRED]: SIEGE-CLASS ANOMALY.
[THREAT]: MAX.
The Sentinel didn’t do the usual NPC talk.
It raised its shoulder-mounted pulse cannon.
Three red targeting lasers traced across my chest plate.
I was at 626 HP.
The purge-code was at my feet.
The Sentinel was charging a full burst.
And Phase was still twenty-two seconds away.
"System," I gritted out, forcing the upload faster.
"Redirect all spare HP to the transfer. Burn the safety limit if you have to. Just. Finish. It."
[WARNING]: CONVERTING HP WILL SPEED UP DELETION.
[ACTION CONFIRMED]
The damage feedback doubled.
The progress bar jerked forward.
[UPLOAD STATUS: 81%...]
The Sentinel fired.
The Core-Tech shot didn’t travel.
It spawned on me.
Hitscan.
No travel time—if it sees you, you get hit.
If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.
It slammed into my chest plate dead-center.
The reinforced plating cracked but held—barely. Plating buckled under the hitscan blast, cracks spidering across my chassis as critical damage warnings flooded my HUD. The scrap metal grafted to my torso groaned under the strain, spiderweb fractures racing across the blue wireframe beneath.
The reinforcement held—barely—but the kinetic force threw me back against the assembly console.
[-70 HP]
[STATUS: ARMOR PLATING COMPROMISED]
Sparks burst from the vents in my chest.
The purge-fog chewed through my treads, erasing my feet right off the model.
[-22 HP]
I looked at the progress bar hovering over the lifeless clone.
[UPLOAD STATUS: 87%...]
The math was brain-dead simple.
The upload needed twenty more seconds to finalize.
The Sentinel needed three seconds to cycle its cannon for a finishing burst.
The garbage-collection fog would delete my core in five.
I was out of time, out of juice, and my Phase icon stayed gray—taunting me as it ticked down: 16s.
I looked at the thick blue data cable tethering my skull to the console.
It was pulsing, siphoning my code into Template_7429.
If I stayed plugged in when the fog hit the console, the corruption would run up the cable—ruin the clone and delete me in the same tick.
"Garbage in, garbage out," I hissed, my voice box grinding like busted gears.
I reached back with my massive, reinforced mechanized hand.
The reinforced hydraulic claws locked around the thick data cable.
"Abort."
I ripped it free.
[-150 HP] (DATA SEVERANCE)
No fade-to-black.
The screen cracked.
It felt like my controls got yanked mid-fight—like the game ripped part of me out.
White-hot static blasted through my speakers, peaked, then cut out.
My vision splintered into jagged, untextured shapes.
I dropped to my knees, my siege-chassis slamming into the floor plates with a clang like a dropped bell.
[HP: 399 / 1400]
"ANOMALY ISOLATED," the Sentinel boomed.
The chrome giant didn't walk—it dash-slammed forward and closed the gap in a blur of blue light and steel.
It raised its shock-truncheon, lining up an overhead slam.
I scrambled backward, my heavy treads sparking on the metal grating.
I was a tank now—just a broken one.
I scanned for an exit.
The main doors were sealed.
The walls were dissolving into the green fog.
High on the far wall, a ventilation grate sat in the shadows.
On the Grid, it would've been set dressing.
Here, it was an exploit.
But I was nine hundred pounds of bolted-on scrap.
A Siege Minion doesn't fit in a Ranged Minion's escape route.
"Stat check," I roared, my voice warping as the room audio started to cut out.
I didn't aim my Tox-Cannon at the Sentinel.
I aimed it straight down, directly at the floor grate beneath my treads.
"Let's see if knockback beats collision in this game."
I pulled the trigger.
BOOM.
The explosive round detonated point-blank.
The recoil almost flipped me inside out.
[-45 HP] (Self-Damage)
The floorplate didn't just break—it bugged out and turned non-solid.
The welds snapped like brittle plastic.
Gravity, high explosives, and my weight all agreed: down.
I fell through the floor, metal screaming as my chassis tore through copper piping and the fiber-optic guts of the factory's sub-layer.
I was a wrecking ball of glitches, falling through the map.
[ALERT] COLLISION DETECTED.
[-35 HP]
I smashed through another layer of grating and rolled—heavy, clumsy, and loud—out of the chute.
Heat backhanded me in the face.
Real, metal-warping heat.
I wasn't in a room anymore.
I was suspended in the air, falling toward a high-speed conveyor belt system that hauled open vats of molten, volatile blue slag.
"Platforming," I rumbled, my stabilizers whining as I tried to turn mid-fall.
"I always hated the platforming levels."
Gravity Lag is a nightmare when you're piloting a rig built from repurposed scrap.
For a split second, a lag spike hit.
The impact hit me like a truck.
I hung suspended in mid-air above the conveyor belt, a nine-hundred-pound metal ghost floating in the gray void.
Then the server stuttered, reality snapped back, and I got rubber-banded into place hard enough to rattle my chassis.
CLANG.
I slammed down onto the metal rim of a moving vat.
The impact dented the reinforced steel.
My heavy hydraulic feet shrieked against the surface as I fought the momentum.
I stabilized in a low crouch, motors whining as I fought to keep my weight on a three-inch lip.
Below my boots, the blue sludge—molten Core-Tech waste—bubbled and hissed.
Heat poured off it—constant, mean—like a PC about to overheat and hard shutdown.
[SYSTEM WARNING]: EXTERNAL OVERHEAT.
[-10 HP]
"Hot. Way too hot," I muttered.
Above, a metallic hiss cut through the industrial roar.
Coolant nozzles, mounted to the ceiling, picked up the heat spike from the vats.
Psshhht.
A curtain of white cryo-mist swept the line.
I scrambled to the back of the vat's rim, putting the bubbling sludge between me and the spray.
When the coolant hit the molten sludge, the reaction was violent.
A massive cloud of superheated steam punched through the tunnel and white-screened my view.
[-15 HP]
The Warden Sentinel stepped out of the dust.
It stood on the parallel gantry, twenty feet away.
Its armor was scorched, but its HP bar was barely scratched.
"You can't make that jump," I said, trying to cheese its pathing.
"No gap-closer in your kit."
The Sentinel's core shifted from blue to an unstable, angry violet.
It didn't jump.
It blinked—frame-skip fast, no windup.
One frame it was on the gantry.
The next, it was a smear of blur landing right on my line.
SLAM.
The impact buckled the assembly line.
I was launched into the air, my heavy body weightless for a second before slamming back down, skidding toward the edge of the vat.
[-100 HP]
The Sentinel stood calm in the wreckage.
It raised its shock-truncheon; the weapon flared with an azure light so bright it washed out the room's colors.
[ALERT: HIGH-ENERGY SIGNATURE DETECTED.]
"Wait," I wheezed, my HUD screaming in red.
"Let's talk balance and patch notes."
The Sentinel swung.
I couldn't dodge.
My hitbox was too wide, and Phase was still on cooldown: 8s.
[-80 HP]
My vision clipped out—my screen doubled and smeared into a corrupted blur.
[HP: 39 / 1400]
The pain wasn't physical.
It was a hard interrupt—like getting alt-tabbed mid-fight and tabbing back in to a gray screen.
My system seized.
The Sentinel pulled back for the execute.
Below the belt, I saw a secondary chute—a dark drop where nothing was loading, just industrial waste.
The "Bit-Bucket."
I had a choice: get deleted by the cop-bot, or take my chances in the dark.
I rolled.
I threw my broken, glitching body off the belt's edge as the truncheon cut through the space where my head had been.
I dropped into the unrendered dark.
I crashed onto the lower chute, sliding uncontrollably into the blackness.
Massive blast doors slammed shut above me, sealing the light of the factory.
I was still alive.
Barely.
Generated by GlitchWriter.
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