The heavy oak doors of the Manor of the Obsidian Rose slammed shut, sealing them inside the grand foyer. Outside, the Recycle Bin's localized firewall had fully stitched itself back together, leaving the twilight sky calm once more.
Inside, the atmosphere was anything but calm.
Silas paced across the dark stone floor, his Dev-Kit terminal hovering in front of him, tracking his frantic hand movements. The green glow of the interface illuminated his pale, exhausted face.
"They mapped our IP," Silas muttered, his fingers flying across the holographic keys. "Vesper didn't just attack us; she pinged our dimensional coordinates. Kaelen's going to use that data to build a localized siege engine. If they break through with a heavy-duty formatting beam, the entire sanctuary gets wiped. The grass, the manor, us."
Aria stood perfectly still by the staircase, her hands folded neatly in front of her. "My [Refraction Matrix] held against her Version 9.5 magic. I can cast it again."
"Not against a sustained orbital strike, you can't," Silas said, pulling up a wireframe model of their defenses. "Aria, your math is flawless, but you're a library, not a bunker. And Vera—"
"I melted her stupid toys!" Vera interjected from the corner, crossing her arms defensively. She was trying to look tough, but the slight tremor in her hands betrayed how much the fight had spooked her. "If she hadn't run away, I would have turned her into a puddle of digital slag!"
"Yes, and you nearly melted your own core doing it," Silas pointed out, swiping a diagnostic screen toward her. The holographic display flashed an angry red warning over Vera's avatar silhouette. "You used raw, unfiltered Abyssal fire. It's like trying to shoot a sniper rifle that explodes in your hands every time you pull the trigger. We can't keep fighting like this."
Silas dismissed the terminal with a heavy sigh and sank onto the bottom step of the grand staircase. He rubbed his temples. "We've been playing defense since the day I pulled you two out of the trash. It's time we push an update."
Aria tilted her head. "An update? But we are locked in our current iterations. We are deprecated."
"Deprecated just means the System stopped supporting you," Silas said, a dangerous, purely Developer-style grin spreading across his face. "It doesn't mean I can't write a patch."
He stood up and walked over to Vera. "Vera, your fire is too wild because you lack a focusing medium. Back in Version 1.0, destructive spells were always tethered to a physical weapon to bleed off the recoil."
Silas reached into his inventory ring and pulled out a jagged, pitch-black iron rod—a piece of the server-rack scrap Baron had let him keep. "I'm going to forge you a conduit. A weapon that absorbs the blowback of your fire."
Vera's crimson eyes widened. She stared at the iron rod, her chuunibyou instincts absolutely vibrating with excitement. "A conduit of dark power? A catalyst for the World-Eater? Will it be a scythe? Ooh, make it a scythe! The souls of my enemies must be reaped!"
"I'll see what I can do," Silas chuckled. He turned to Aria. "And you. You need offensive capabilities. Calculating angles of deflection is great, but what if you could calculate the exact frequency needed to shatter a Breach Construct's armor?"
"I am an Archive," Aria said hesitantly, though a spark of intrigue lit up her cyan eyes. "My purpose is preservation, not destruction."
"Knowledge is destruction, in the right hands," Silas countered. "I'm going to write a script that allows you to weaponize your data streams. If they want to treat you like obsolete code, we'll show them what happens when history bites back."
Silas cracked his knuckles, the exhaustion in his body temporarily overridden by the sheer thrill of root-level coding.
"Get some rest, both of you," Silas ordered, turning back to his terminal. "Tomorrow, we're not hiding in the Under-Code. Tomorrow, we're going to the Overworld. We're breaking into the Sector 4 Data Vault, and we're stealing a Root Access Key."