Chapter 28: Fatal Exception

  The glowing blue blade of the Paladin halberd carved through the freezing London rain, leaving a trail of superheated steam in its wake.

  Hanging upside-down in Alex’s localized gravity well, Silas Vane could only watch as the Doorwarden’s strike connected. Silas tried to raise a shield of red static, but without the processing power of the Null-Walkers—which Thorne was currently vacuuming into his broken iron sword—his firewall was too slow.

  The halberd bit into the corrupted, jagged black metal of Silas’s shoulder joint.

  KRACK-THOOM.

  The collision of holy Aurelian magic and Earth-tech malware sounded like a thunderclap inside a tin can. The blade didn't just cut the titanium; it violently compiled a deletion script right through the cybernetic wiring.

  [CRITICAL HARDWARE FAILURE]

  [NETWORK CONNECTION: SEVERED]

  Silas screamed—a horrific, dual-toned shriek of a human man and grinding digital static.

  The heavy cybernetic arm was completely severed from his torso. It dropped like a stone, hitting the muddy concrete of the Heron Quay excavation pit with a heavy, metallic thud.

  The moment the arm detached, the red malware veins covering Silas’s face instantly died, turning a sickly, ash-gray.

  But losing the arm was the least of his problems.

  That cybernetic gauntlet was the physical anchor keeping King Erebus’s dimensional rift open in the Earth’s atmosphere. Without it, the jagged tear in the London sky instantly lost its stability.

  "Kane!" Silas roared, clutching his bleeding shoulder as the gravity well around him began to violently fluctuate.

  The rift above them didn't just close; it imploded. A localized vacuum of displaced spatial pressure violently sucked inward. Because Silas was still suspended in the air, he was caught directly in the updraft.

  This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  "You can't lock me out!" Silas screamed, his body being dragged upward toward the collapsing tear. "I have root access! I am the—!"

  SNAP.

  The portal violently sealed itself shut, instantly cutting off Silas’s words. The red and gold light vanished from the sky, leaving only the dark, rolling storm clouds of London. The torrential rain returned to normal, hitting the mud with a steady, rhythmic hiss.

  Down in the pit, the remaining handful of Null-Walkers instantly froze as their connection to the Glitch King was severed. With a series of soft pops, they dissolved into harmless red pixels, washing away in the rain.

  Total silence fell over the substation, save for the storm.

  Alex dropped his hand, canceling the [GRAVITY_Z = INVERTED] command. He took a deep, shaky breath, the glowing green code slowly fading from his eyes. His head pounded with the sheer exertion of manipulating the real world's physics engine.

  Agent Locke stood in the center of the mud, the massive Paladin halberd resting over his heavy, unpowered shoulder. He didn't look tired. He looked like a man who had finally gotten to do his actual job.

  Lyra hopped down from the hood of the hijacked SUV, splashing elegantly into the mud. She looked up at the empty sky, then at the towering glass skyscrapers surrounding them.

  "Well," Lyra smirked, crossing her arms. "Your world is certainly loud. And wet."

  Thorne, meanwhile, was staring at his iron sword in absolute horror. The blade was now a terrifying, pulsing crimson, humming with the contained energy of a hundred malware beasts. "I... I think my sword has indigestion," the boy stammered, holding it out at arm's length.

  "Alex!" Sarah’s voice crackled through the earpiece, frantic and breathless. "Alex, talk to me! The local grid just registered a massive pressure drop! Is the target neutralized?!"

  "We're clear, Sarah," Alex breathed, a massive smile finally breaking through his exhaustion. "The connection is severed. The malware is gone."

  Alex walked over to the center of the pit. Lying in a puddle of muddy rainwater was Silas Vane's severed cybernetic arm. The red corruption was slowly fading from the metal, revealing the sleek, high-tech Helios Dynamics plating underneath. The stolen Aurelian Server Node embedded in the wrist was still faintly pulsing with residual Golden Code.

  Alex knelt down, his eyes catching the green data overlay hovering above the severed limb.

  [ASSET: HELIOS_CYBERNETIC_CORE] [STATUS: OFFLINE]

  [ACTION: LOOT / HACK / DESTROY]

  "We didn't just win, Sarah," Alex said, reaching down and picking up the heavy, high-tech arm. "We just got the source code."

  The Aftermath!

  What an incredible conclusion to this arc! Silas is trapped in the Glitch Wastes missing an arm, the portal is closed, and Alex just scored the ultimate piece of loot to reverse-engineer Helios's tech.

  But now, our Aurelian fantasy squad is officially stranded in modern-day London, and the police sirens are definitely getting closer.