Ray watched, analyzing its source code. The efficiency was breathtaking. There were no wasted lines, no brute-force commands. The code was elegant, a true masterpiece. He watched as they effortlessly defeated another contestant. The opponent had created a large, brutish hammer. The #137 simply adapted, their whip-blade flowing around the clumsy attack, wrapping around the other mannequin's arm, and then solidifying, shattering the avatar's arm into a shower of pixels. A second, precise strike, and the contestant was eliminated.

A private message from Anya pinged in his interface, her voice trembling with a mixture of fear and professional respect.

Anya: Glitchy, their code… it's flawless. I'm running a diagnostic, and the efficiency rating is off the charts. This may not be a person... it could be a high-level AI.

This is the final boss.

Ray, dashed away and took cover in a quieter section of the Sandbox, observing. Using the cold logic he gained from the Static King, he saw the underlying structure of their elegant code, the efficiency of their fabrication.

He was reverse-engineering their techniques in his mind.

A new wave of daemons swept the arena. The #137 created five sharpened data-shards that flew around the Fracturelings. Somehow they did no damage as they passed right through the minions. But then, they clenched their fist and Ray saw as a string of invisible data attached to the data-shard turned red. The Fracturelings turned into piles of code that disappeared a moment later.

Ray, cornered by his own group of daemons, decided to test what he had learned. His first attempt to emulate the "stringed data-shards" was clumsy, a wobbly, inefficient version that barely held. But he felt the ghost of the Static King inside him, guiding his will. He refined the design, correcting the flaws in his code, and on the second try, he created a stable, effective version of the "stringed data-shards." He had successfully learned from his rival.

The field was narrowing and only a handful of the most skilled or cunning netstriders remained, including Ray and Anya.

The #137, having dispatched their latest opponent, turned their attention.

They went for Anya.

With a flick of their wrist, the whip-blade shot out, at the code of the grid around Anya's burrow. The blade injected a string of "delete" commands. The floor of the Sandbox around Anya's hiding spot simply vanished, leaving her exposed and falling into the void. Her avatar dissolved into pixels before she could even scream.

The prodigy then turned their attention to Ray. A silent, mutual acknowledgment passed between their two blank, grey avatars. This was the true final battle.

The prodigy made the first move, manifesting a perfect, shimmering katana and charging. Ray met the charge with his own, a copy, based on the blade he had absorbed from Ursa Major.

The duel began. The prodigy's every move was perfect, their blade a blur of silver light that seemed to be everywhere at once. Ray was instantly on the defensive, his own blade a clumsy, brutish thing in comparison. The shriek of digital blades clashing echoed across the white grid, showers of corrupted pixels exploding with every desperate parry he managed. He felt like a child fighting a master. He was being systematically dismantled. The prodigy's footwork was flawless, their attacks coming from impossible angles, forcing Ray into a chaotic, reactive dance of pure survival.

A feint. A spin. Ray's processors screamed a warning, but his avatar couldn't react in time. The silver katana sliced across his chest. He staggered back, his chest a gaping wound, the raw data of his being bleeding out into the virtual space.

The prodigy switched tactics. The katana dissolved, and the whip-blade lashed out. Ray, guided by the cold logic of the Static King, analyzed its structure in a fraction of a second. He couldn't replicate its flawless elegance, but he could create a crude, functional copy. As the silver blade retracted, Ray manifested his own, blockier version of the whip-blade, a dark, serrated imitation. He was learning their language, and he was starting to speak it back.

"You're a fast learner," the prodigy's voice echoed in his mind, calm and impressed.

But it wasn't enough. They were too skilled. They feinted again, and Ray fell for it. The silver katana, re-formed in an instant, sliced across his chest, then again across his left arm. Ray's avatar glitched violently. He looked down. His left arm was gone, dissolved into a shower of zeros and ones.

He was finished.

The prodigy raised their katana for the final blow. And then, they stopped.

"I propose we remove all limitations," they screamed at the empty, black sky.

Everything froze. The daemons, the countdown timer, the very code of the arena—all locked in a single, silent moment.

The #137 turned to Ray, their featureless face somehow conveying a sense of intense, analytical curiosity. "Survival is about adaptation and evolution. Show me that you are worthy of the power you hold. Show me that you are more than just a ghost in a machine, Ray."

Their words rang in his head. They know about me. They know what I am. That can't be. It's impossible.

"Don't worry," the mannequin assured him. "They are not watching."

Their reassurance was meaningless. But their words… their impossible, terrifying words…

The world unfroze.

But instead of attacking, the prodigy lifted their own katana.

"We will meet again, Ray," they said, and plunged the blade through their own chest. Their avatar dissolved into a shower of pure, white data, leaving Ray alone in the silent, empty arena.

This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

He stared at the spot where they had been, his mind a maelstrom of confusion.

He actually won?

The white void devolved around him, and he found himself on a winner's stage, multicolored confetti made of pure data falling from a ceiling that wasn't there. A data-slate flew from out of nowhere and hovered before him. On its screen, it read: [DELIVERY ADDRE$$].

He numbly punched in the address of the anonymous delivery box he had bought for this very occasion.

[CONGRATULATIONS, WINNER. SEE YOU NEXT TIME.] The announcer's voice boomed around him. And like that, he was ejected from the server.

Ray's eyes opened wide as he disconnected from the Net, the quiet of Red's apartment a deafening silence.

Someone knew about him. They knew what he was. And they had just given him a powerful cyberdeck. The question was… why?

The anonymous delivery box was located in the Hollow Verge, in a forgotten, cancerous pocket of the city that the maps tried to ignore. Ray approached it on foot, his senses assaulted by the district's miasma. The air was thick and heavy, a toxic cocktail of rotting garbage, chemical runoff from the industrial sector nearby, and the damp, cloying smell of human misery. A steady, greasy drizzle fell from the perpetual smog-choked sky, turning the filth on the streets into a slick, rainbow-sheened sludge.

The buildings here were crowded skeletons, their ferrocrete skin peeled away by acid rain and neglect to reveal the rusting rebar beneath. Faded, peeling graffiti from a dozen different forgotten gangs was layered one on top of the other, a vibrant, chaotic testament to a history of violence and desperation. Overflowing dumpsters spilled their contents into the narrow alleyways, creating small mountains of discarded tech, broken plastics, and rotting organic matter.

And then there were the people. The city's refuse. It's forgotten. They were huddled in doorways, their forms wrapped in rags, their faces pale and gaunt under the flickering, sickly glow of a malfunctioning neon sign. A man with a cheap, glitching cybernetic eye sat against a wall, his head lolling as he succumbed to a bad stim. A woman with a persistent, hacking cough that rattled her frail frame stared at Ray with hollow, hopeless eyes as he passed. They were the human cost of the corporate progress that gleamed in the towers high above.

Ray moved through it all with a heightened sense of paranoia, the prodigy's final words—"We will meet again, Ray"—echoing in his mind.

He found the delivery box in a grimy, secluded corner. He retrieved the package, a simple, unmarked black case, and retreated into the quiet solitude of an old, rotten-away apartment. He sent his nanites over the case and inside it, probing its surface for tracking devices, for traps, for any hint of its origin. He found nothing.

Hidden away in the dark, where he was sure there were no eyes to see him, he finally opened the case.

The Aegis X-9 lay nestled in a bed of black, shock-absorbent foam. It was a pinnacle of neural interface technology—compact, lethal, and beautiful in its ruthless efficiency. Forged from aerospace-grade matte-black titanium alloy, its chassis was cool to the touch, absorbing light rather than reflecting it. The surface was etched with a labyrinthine network of crimson circuits, which pulsed faintly like living veins.

Ray placed his hand on its surface, and with a single, silent command, he began to consume it.

The moment his nanites made contact, the deck's counter-intrusion AI, fought back. Ray felt a jolt as a wall of pure, white-hot defensive code slammed into his own consciousness. For a moment, he was locked in a psychic battle against a pure, defensive AI. But Ray was no longer just a man. He was an archive of monsters. He unleashed the cold, paradoxical logic of the Static King, and the AI, defensive programming shattered against the weight of a mad god. He had conquered the deck.

His mind reeled as he absorbed its core architecture, a design so advanced, so efficient, it felt pre-Collapse, a relic from a forgotten age of technological gods.

As the last of the deck's code integrated with his own systems, a hidden, encrypted partition unlocked itself in his mind. It was a cascade of fragmented data: a flash of pre-Collapse military code, a philosophical equation about the nature of consciousness, a brief, looping image of a star being born. It was a message that would have been nonsensical to a normal human, but Ray, with the ghost of the Static King inside him, understood its meaning instantly. It was from #137.

It was an invitation.

I have observed your evolution, the message coalesced in his mind, the thoughts not his own. The tournament was a filter, used as a way to find those who, like us, have broken their original programming.

Broken their programming? The phrase was chillingly ambiguous. Was he a broken program?

The message shifted, the tone becoming less like a cold data stream and more like a direct, personal plea.

I am not your enemy, Ray. I forfeited the match because your continued evolution is more important than any prize. You are a unique anomaly. An anomaly that is in grave danger.

A new data file appeared in Ray's mind: a complex, encrypted log from Kaizen Ascendancy's internal security network. It showed multiple attempts by Kaizen to track him. And then a new video started to play.

He watched, and a violent shudder wracked his frame. He saw himself, the real, human Ray, lying and bleeding in that dark alley. He saw himself crawl toward the injector, saw the silvery liquid crawl from his wounds, stitching him together and then eating him away, shifting and forming a perfect, horrifying simulacrum of what it had just consumed. His own nanites, reacting to the stimulus of their own origin, began to shift and stir beneath his skin, a chaotic, unsettling ripple that he had to fight to bring back under control. He was reliving his own death on a cellular level.

The video ended. The log showed that the file, and all traces of its existence, had been subtly and expertly deleted from Kaizen's network by an unknown third party. By #137.

The big wolves are already sniffing at your trail, the message continued. I have covered your tracks, for now. But they will not stop. You need allies. You need us.

The message ended with a single, encrypted comms ID and a final, simple plea.

Call me. Please. I mean you no harm. I only wish to help. The choice is yours.

Ray stood in the silent, dark, rotten-away apartment, the city's neon glow painting shifting patterns on the walls. He had the power he had sought, but it had come with a terrible price. He was no longer a ghost hiding in the shadows. He was a piece on a board in a game played by monsters, and he had just been invited to make his first move.

A move that he will have to make another time.

Ray pushed the matter of the mysterious #137 aside. It was an unknown variable and a problem for another day. Right now, he had a single, clear objective: save Max and Selena. To do that, he had to confront Porcelain Jack at "The Looking Glass" tomorrow night. And he had to be ready.

The door to his apartment hissed open. He didn't step inside. Not yet. His optics ran along every corner of the room, searching. After a few seconds, he stepped inside.

He walked to the stained, uncomfortable couch with a tired sigh. The cushions were stiff, the synth-leather cracked and peeling. He stared at the grey ceiling of the apartment, the city's neon glow a restless tide on the bare walls. He closed his eyes and ran a series of complex combat simulations in his mind, pitting his current abilities against a profile of Porcelain Jack's likely security, which was waiting for him at The Looking Glass. With the power of Aegis X-9, he ran the simulation a hundred times for the duration of one hour. A hundred times, he failed.

A ray traced along his face.

He could win, of course. He could unleash the Juggernaut, or the raw, chaotic power of the Static King. But those were apocalyptic options, eye-catching and messy. They would bring the full, crushing weight of the city's corporate and legal forces down on him. His thoughts went to that Asura he had seen two weeks ago, fighting that Snap with such precision and speed. Even now, after all the upgrades, Ray doubted he could face it. And what if it wasn't the only Asura the city had?

He needed to be like an obsidian scalpel. And as a scalpel, he was insufficient. He had the raw power, but he lacked the finesse, the deep, architectural knowledge to use his nanites in the complex, creative ways he would need to.

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