Simon jack-knifed the admin console’s neural tap into the base of his skull, expecting the standard pulse of VR handshakes, maybe a dull ache if Chop’s people still used legacy overcurrent warnings. Instead he got full-body seizure and a blinding whiteout.

  The system didn’t filter him in gently. It drop-kicked him through seven layers of failsafes and dumped his consciousness into a cathedral built by a hallucinating AI, every line of code strobing neon and static. The world resolved, then over-resolved, as if someone had upscaled reality without bothering to smooth the edges.

  Simon’s avatar was his own body, but stripped to the essential—tight black synth-skin, half his chest mapped in grid lines, veins shot through with streaming numbers. He flexed his hand and watched the data ghost of his own movement trail a microsecond behind. The environment sprawled: pillars twisted up like bone, light refracted in impossible angles, every surface a tessellation of black mirror and ultraviolet. The air wasn’t air, just a charged field that made his virtual skin itch.

  Something roared in the rafters, shaking digital dust from the roof.

  “Welcome,” said a voice, or maybe thirty voices. It rippled the world, every syllable a corruption of sound and error message. “INTRUDER DETECTED.”

  Simon’s HUD flared to life—this time, gamified to the point of parody. Health bars, logic trees, runtime exploits, even a jittery “focus” meter that tracked the quantum noise at the edges of his simulated consciousness. Chop’s old security team had always overdesigned their defensive environments. This was a classic move: cage the hacker, force him to play by their ruleset, then grind him into recycled memory.

  He grinned, felt his simulated teeth spark with kinetic code. He’d seen worse.

  The Firewall Beast manifested between two altar-like server racks. It came together in chunks: first a river of liquid metal, then cables whipping out in zero-G slow motion, then the rest—a hydra made of data garbage, its faces smeared with stolen security keys, its scales a mishmash of audit trails and system logs. Its “eyes” were black holes, but each blinked a different port address, watching every slice of the arena at once.

  “STATE YOUR INTENT,” it bellowed, the words deformed into a spray of warnings: Unauthorized request. Access denied. Logic fault.

  Simon raised his left arm, saw his default loadout mapped in the overlay: three canned exploits, two zero-day spikes, one custom-built logic bomb Elara had written for him as a joke. He queued the latter, let the Beast see it plain.

  “Just visiting,” Simon said. His voice echoed in the chamber, exactly as flat and tired as he felt. “Need some information. Then I’ll show myself out.”

  The Beast lunged, three heads converging at once. Simon’s body acted before his brain—sidestep, dash, rollback, the classic netrunner dance. Each time the Beast passed through him, it left trailing lines of corrupt data, like a jet’s afterburn. The first strike took a chunk of his logic tree—his ability to process recursive code dropped by thirty percent, the effect echoing as a migraine. The second strike was worse: it split his avatar at the midline, sending a raw pulse of pain through both halves of his simulated nervous system. But the halves snapped back, slapping together with a satisfying crunch.

  Simon’s HUD now trailed two health bars: real and virtual. Both were bleeding.

  He rolled the first exploit—a “static glitch” that spiked the local frame rate and jammed the Beast’s predictive attack routine. It worked, barely, the world jittering for half a second as the hydra’s heads desynced, snapping at empty space. Simon used the window to scan the main logic core: there, in the flank, a cluster of “soft nodes” where the thing’s adaptation code lagged behind the rest.

  He loaded the next exploit: a logic spike, meant to trigger a memory overwrite and force the security daemon into fallback mode. He sprinted through the cathedral’s nave, the tiles under his feet shattering into error messages, and hurled the logic spike with a quarterback’s confidence.

  The Beast caught it in its teeth, paused for a nanosecond as the code began to unspool. But then it chomped down, shattering the spike and roaring loud enough to split the world into grayscale and color, then back again. The counterattack was savage: a tail of pure binary whipped around, caught Simon by the ribs, and hurled him across the length of the arena.

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  He hit the ground hard, vision wobbling. Health bars bottomed out; focus meter spiked with red flags. Simon crawled to his knees, rebooted his toolkit, and read the next line of the system log:

  “ADAPTIVE RESISTANCE: ENABLED. INTRUDER PAIN RESPONSE: INCREASED.”

  Simon wiped the blood from his mouth, even though there was no mouth to bleed. “God, I hate you,” he said to the air, and somewhere, Elara would’ve been proud.

  The Beast advanced, moving now with the smooth arrogance of a program that knows it’s going to win. “SURRENDER,” it intoned, all the voices in perfect unison.

  He ignored the command. Instead, he flicked open the toolkit Elara had hard-coded into his neural jack years ago: a patchwork of junkware, obsolete code, and the kind of logic bombs nobody used anymore because they required actual human intuition to deploy. He fed three of them into the toolkit’s runtime, watched the interface stutter under the load, then launched all of them at once.

  The Beast laughed—actual laughter, a scraping, wet sound—as the first two bombs exploded harmlessly against its scales. But the third got through, burrowing deep into the adaptation layer and detonating with a pop that rewrote the entire lower jaw of the hydra. For a second, the head just hung there, dumb and silent, until the code figured out how to self-heal. But it was enough: a window, a vulnerability, a chance.

  Simon dove into the gap, sprinting up a spiral staircase that hadn’t existed a second ago, and landed on the Beast’s flank. He jammed his hand into the pulsing node, the virtual flesh squirming and hot, and uploaded Elara’s logic bomb directly.

  The effect was instant. The world inverted, black becoming white, up becoming down. Simon felt every nerve ending burn as the Beast screamed in raw binary, then started to split apart—head after head, each shrieking in a different voice, none of them in control.

  “UNEXPECTED ERROR,” the hydra howled. “PRIVILEGE ESCALATION DETECTED.”

  Simon held on, even as the code began to tear at him, chewing through his avatar with a million tiny teeth. He felt the health bars crash to zero, felt his own sense of self fragment into random number generators and failed pings. He squeezed the node harder, pushing every last scrap of the logic bomb’s payload through.

  “FUCKING DIE,” he said, out loud, and the Beast finally listened.

  It exploded—not with sound, but with perfect, all-consuming silence. The shards of its body dissolved into points of static, then nothing at all. The cathedral reassembled itself, every line of code finally clean.

  Simon lay on the floor, gasping, and waited for the system to stabilize. The health bars returned, both now flashing a warning yellow. He checked his toolkit—one exploit left, the rest fried, and his focus meter fluttered at the edge of collapse.

  “Not bad,” he said, then grinned. “For a trash build.”

  The arena’s far wall shimmered, revealing a set of “doors” mapped in quantum encryption. At the center, a database console pulsed with living light. Simon limped over, half-expecting the Beast to respawn, but nothing moved.

  He plugged in, started the query. The response was fast—too fast for a normal corporate system. Chop’s people really wanted to keep this data on a leash.

  “READ-ONLY ACCESS,” said the console, almost apologetic.

  Simon snorted. “Yeah, figured.”

  He trawled the pods database, searching for Elara’s neural signature. The index was a mess—half the records were duplicated, others were scrambled or outright missing. He ran a local diff, cross-referencing known public handles with the garbage data. Most of the names were dead, but a few showed recent access logs. He flagged them, then focused on the ones closest to the date he’d last seen Elara alive.

  There it was. A cluster of entries tagged with her handle, “E.L.A.R.A,” but the attached metadata was all wrong: mismatched genders, random ages, even one with a skull made of pure obsidian. Simon parsed deeper, following the logic until he hit a floor: Floor 2, sub-basement, pods 219-223. The link was flagged “corrupted,” but the neural signature matched hers, down to the weird spike in memory retention that Elara used as her calling card.

  He leaned back, fighting the vertigo that came with rapid context switch. The database spit out a map—crude, but navigable. The rest of the pods were dead ends, or intentional decoys.

  He saved the snapshot, then jacked out of the console. The VR cathedral shimmered, then began to fall apart, the walls peeling back to reveal endless blue nothing.

  Simon let it. He’d won, or at least survived.

  In the last second before the system booted him, the ghost of the Firewall Beast reappeared, a single head stitched from leftover code. It looked at Simon, its eyes just empty sockets now, and spoke in a voice stripped of all bravado:

  “See you on the next pass.”

  Simon blinked, and the world was gone.

  ***

  He came to in the admin room, the taste of ozone and copper biting at his tongue. The neural tap spat itself out, hot enough to burn a line on his scalp. His hands shook, but he pressed them to the console anyway, downloading the last of the pod data to his drive.

  His HUD was still bugging out, but he could see the target clear: Floor 2, sub-basement, pods 219-223. And Elara’s signature, battered but alive, flickered on the periphery of his vision.

  Simon let himself laugh, ugly and raw, then wiped his face.

  Always the hard way. But he’d take it.

  He killed the lights, dumped the drive to cold storage, and started plotting his path down.

  Whatever was waiting in the sub-basement, it couldn’t be worse than what he’d just survived.

  Probably.