"Aria! Front courtyard, now!" Silas roared, sprinting back through the manor with Vera hot on his heels.
By the time they reached the heavy oak doors and burst out onto the front steps, the hole in the sky was expanding. The localized firewall of the Recycle Bin was fighting back, trying to patch the hole with golden legacy code, but it was being eaten away by a highly aggressive, modern virus.
"Silas, what is that?" Vera asked, her bravado completely gone, her hands instinctively glowing with black fire.
"A forced intrusion," Silas gritted his teeth, pulling up his Dev-Kit interface. He tried to type in a patch command, but his terminal flashed red. [Insufficient Mana to Execute Core Command.]
Three figures dropped from the white hole in the sky, plummeting toward the glowing grass of the sanctuary. They landed with a heavy, synchronized CRUNCH, leaving craters in the turf.
As the dust cleared, the intruders stood up. They weren't standard Enforcers.
The one in the center was a young woman wearing a sleek, heavily customized black-and-neon-green uniform. She had short, jagged pink hair and a manic, unsettling grin. Floating around her were dozens of glowing green digital scalpels.
"Well, well, well," the girl giggled, her voice artificially amplified. "Kaelen told me we were hunting a bug, but I didn't think it had built a whole nest! I'm Vesper, by the way. Lead DPS of the Beta-Squad. And you're scheduled for a permanent uninstall!"
Flanking Vesper were two massive, heavily armored [Breach Constructs]—hulking brutes made of solid, optimized Version 9.0 combat data.
"They bypassed the dimensional lock," Aria said, stepping out of the manor to stand beside Silas. Her cyan eyes were locked onto Vesper, analyzing the neon-green magic. "Her spells... they are highly volatile. Unfinished code."
"Experimental Version 9.5 combat magic," Silas coughed, his exhaustion catching up to him. "It sacrifices stability for raw, piercing damage."
Vesper pointed a finger directly at Silas. "Kill the Janitor. I want to play with the girls."
The two Breach Constructs charged. They moved with terrifying, optimized speed, the ground shaking beneath their heavy boots.
Silas reached for his interface, but a hand pushed him back.
"Stay behind me, Administrator," Vera growled.
The goth girl stepped forward, slamming her hands together. She didn't panic. She didn't try to summon a city-destroying nuke. Remembering Silas's words from the crater, she focused her intent. Protect the home.
[Abyssal Ruin: Obsidian Wall]
A roaring tide of pitch-black fire erupted from the ground in front of her, rising twenty feet into the air. But instead of exploding outward, the flames solidified, hardening into a dense, super-heated wall of black glass.
The two Breach Constructs slammed into the wall. The optimized code of their armor immediately began to melt and scream upon contact with the Genesis-Tier heat.
"Ooh, legacy fire! Shiny!" Vesper laughed, unfazed by her constructs melting. She flicked her wrists, and the dozen neon-green scalpels shot forward, zipping entirely around Vera's wall.
The scalpels locked onto Silas.
"Mathematical error detected," Aria stated coolly.
Aria raised her left hand, the silver Version 1.0 ring glowing with brilliant golden light.
[Grand Archive: Refraction Matrix]
A complex, multi-layered geometric dome of golden runes materialized around the three of them. When Vesper's neon-green scalpels struck the dome, they didn't pierce it. Because Aria's magic was based on absolute mathematical logic, the dome calculated the exact angle of trajectory and flawlessly bounced the scalpels right back where they came from.
Vesper shrieked as her own spells tore through her armor, forcing her to rapidly deploy a shield to avoid being sliced to ribbons. She stumbled backward, clutching a bleeding cut on her shoulder.
"You glitches!" Vesper snarled, her manic grin replaced by pure rage. "You obsolete trash!"
"We are not obsolete," Aria said gracefully, her golden dome humming with power. "You are simply unrefined."
Vesper glared at them, realizing her quick assassination mission had just hit a literal brick wall. She tapped the side of her headset. "Command! The target has Genesis-level defensive architecture. Requesting tactical retreat and heavy bombardment!"
A beam of white light shot down from the hole in the sky, enveloping Vesper and the melting remains of her constructs.
"This isn't over, Janitor!" Vesper screamed as she was pulled up into the light. "We have your IP address now! We're bringing the whole server down on your head!"
The white hole violently collapsed, sealing the sky back into its calm, twilight state.
The sanctuary fell silent.
Vera dropped her wall of fire, falling to her knees and gasping for air. Aria dismissed her golden dome, her silver ring smoking slightly from the intense calculation output.
Silas looked up at the patched sky, his jaw clenched. They had survived the first wave, but the illusion of safety was shattered. Kaelen's hounds knew where the door was now.
"Aria. Vera," Silas said, his voice grim as he pulled his Developer terminal back up. "Get inside. It's time to stop hiding and start writing some offensive code."