Astra sat slightly apart from the small "camp" they had managed to set up in a relatively dry niche of the Labyrinth. She leaned her back against a pulsating wall covered in bio-digital slime. The wall rose and fell slowly, as if breathing, and each inhale sent a faint vibration through Astra's spine.
Her left shoulder burned.
Not the ordinary pain of a burn or wound—this was a deep, internal kind of burning, as if something was slowly rewriting her flesh from within. She tore off the remnants of her charred jacket and threw them to the ground. The cold air of the Labyrinth touched her skin, but brought no relief.
Astra froze, staring at her shoulder.
The wound wasn't just healing.
It was rewriting itself.
Where the "Cerberus" grapples had pierced her body, leaving scorched craters and traces of a million volts, the skin was now tightening into thin, glowing violet threads. The threads intertwined, pulsed, and slowly formed a complex geometric pattern—perfect angles, spirals, and symbols that did not exist in any Corporate language. Beneath her skin, like circuitry from another world, a new structure was growing. Sometimes tiny sparks ran through it, and when they did, Astra felt something other than blood flowing through those lines—a cold, ancient energy of the Abyss.
"What… is this…" she whispered, raising a trembling hand and trying to touch the glowing lines on her shoulder.
The skin beneath her fingers was both hot and cold at once. The touch sent a faint electric shock through her arm and echoed in her chest.
Lira approached. In the dim phosphorescent light of the Labyrinth, her face looked like a mask—sharp shadows under her eyes, tightly pressed lips, and a gaze mixed with professional curiosity and poorly hidden fear.
"Your new anatomy, Astra," she said quietly. "Your body is no longer fully biological. Thanatos is using your Spark—that tiny fragment of life the System once tried to erase—as ink. He is redrawing your blueprint. Every scar, every wound will now become part of your power… or part of your cage."
Astra lowered her gaze to her shoulder. One of the violet patterns slowly completed itself, forming a perfect spiral symbol that resembled both a galaxy and a broken DNA chain.
"I can feel it… growing inside me," she whispered. "It doesn't hurt. It's just… чужое. Like I'm becoming a map someone is drawing new roads on."
Lira pulled a small portable scanner from her pouch—the same device that had once saved Astra from a Thanatos surge. She aimed it at the girl's shoulder. The screen flickered, attempting to process the data… then suddenly emitted a high, pitiful screech. The device began to smoke, its casing cracked, and the crystal inside flared once before dying out.
Lira cursed and tossed the scanner aside. It fell into a puddle of slime and almost immediately began to dissolve.
"You see?" Lira nodded toward the smoking remains. "Your reality density is already higher than anything in this sector. You're a foreign body in this program. An anti-virus the System cannot classify or neutralize by normal means. So it will try to 'delete' you the only way it knows how—by burning everything around you."
Kai, sitting a little further away and bandaging his ribs with strips of cloth, looked up. His face was pale.
"And how long do we have until it starts… burning everything?"
Lira shrugged, though the gesture was tense.
"Days. Maybe weeks, if we move fast and hide in dead zones like this. But the more Astra uses Thanatos' power, the faster the System will find us. Every time she tears reality, she leaves a trace—a bright violet beacon in the Omnipole."
Astra slowly ran her fingers over the new pattern on her shoulder. The threads beneath her skin responded with a soft, almost pleasant warmth.
"So every scar is a chain," she said quietly. "Or a key."
Thanatos did not speak in words, but Astra felt his satisfaction—heavy, ancient, almost gentle. He was pleased with the first scar.
Lira watched her carefully.
"The important thing is not to let him overwrite you completely, Astra. Because when the last piece of your humanity disappears… you will no longer be the one who can stop the System. You'll become what comes after it. And then no one—not me, not Kai, not this rusted world—will be able to hold you back."
Astra lifted her gaze. A faint violet glow still burned in her eyes, but now something new lingered inside it—understanding.
"Then we need to find a way for me to use it… without losing myself."
Lira nodded and looked into the depths of the pulsing corridor of the Labyrinth.
"That's why we're here. Somewhere in these wires and slime are the old archives of Project 'Clean Code'. If we find them, we might understand how to stabilize the symbiosis. Or… how to sever it, if it becomes too late."
In the silence of the Labyrinth, a distant, drawn-out moan echoed—one of the Glitches trying once again to remember how human speech sounded.
The first scar on Astra's shoulder glowed faintly in response.
And far above, beyond the charred ruins of Sector 01, the System was already restructuring its protocols.
The hunt continued.