Chương 206: Unauthorized Access

Aurelia was getting desperate. Rank one remained out of reach no matter how many hours she dumped into Minesweeper Omega 5. She could close the gap, sometimes enough that Chadculator's name felt almost reachable, and then he would move again. Another level, then another, always just enough to make whatever progress Aurelia had fought for feel temporary. Meno had Chadculator's contact information somewhere in his phone, but calling him would feel like giving up. Aurelia could not do it.

Solver still sat at rank three, though he had stopped playing long ago. He was thirty-seven levels behind Aurelia now, his score frozen in place with everyone else who had eventually remembered there were other games, other streams, and other things a person could do with a life. Only two people remained in the real race: Aurelia and Chadculator. Everyone else had moved on, leaving every loss feeling more personal.

Hundreds of solved patterns and hours of concentration reduced to whether her finger clicked left or right. Aurelia kept finding the mines. Four days had passed since her father's funeral when Feltforge finally announced its next game. EXCRINON: GRAVE OF MASTERS That was basically all anyone knew. Feltforge had simply announced the title and confirmed that it would launch in one week. Meno was still in a coma. His demand that Xarr stop Veyrath 2. 0 from releasing had never meshed particularly well with reality.

What was Hyperion supposed to do, send KKFs to Feltforge, kick down the doors, and announce a hostile acquisition because Meno had demanded it? Especially now, when Hyperion and Feltforge were working together. Aurelia did not know the specifics. She had overheard enough to know Feltforge's LinkSync was being integrated into something Hyperion was developing, so whatever the alliance had become, it was real. Meno's mother and sister had visited the day before, and those visits were always hard to watch.

His mother tried to stay every time, Hyperion refused every time, and family access remained locked to scheduled visitation windows every few weeks. Crying, arguing, and reminding security that the unconscious man in the bed was her son had changed nothing. Aurelia couldn't do a thing about it. All she had was the stupid promise, and even at that she was failing. She pushed back from the workstation and stood. It was time to visit Meno again and have her daily cry beside his bed.

Meno drifted through space while darkness carried him somewhere he had not chosen. The wormhole took him without warning, reality folding around him in silence before opening again onto the Astatine System. Planets slid past one by one, familiar enough to recognize and wrong enough to make recognition useless. Meno never knew how he knew what they should have been. The answer simply appeared when he looked, then vanished before he could reach for anything behind it.

Mars should have been red, but this one was transparent. It hung in space like a colossal sphere of glass, clear through layer after layer to a faint point of light buried at its center. The glow pulsed inside without illuminating the planet around it, tiny and trapped inside all that emptiness. Meno drifted on. Stopping meant nothing. So did hurrying. The silence stretched with him, and little by little, things began slipping away.

Details disappeared first, then memories, then the connections between them, until even the sense that he had once belonged somewhere else began to fade. Who he was became less important, and what he was became difficult to remember, but Meno kept drifting anyway. Time had no useful meaning there. Eventually another planet came into view, blue only because Meno expected blue before he saw enough to understand that the color was missing. Earth, his mind insisted.

This had to be Earth, except the Earth he knew was gone. Black towers had replaced everything. They buried the old coastlines and mountain ranges beneath a continuous forest of structures, packed across the planet and tall enough to remain enormous even from orbit. Sunlight disappeared against them, and the night side remained a solid black mass without a single visible light.

Every tower swallowed light, making even the sun beyond them look dim, as if the structures were feeding on it faster than the star could reach the surface. Nothing matched the Earth his mind insisted this was. Meno entered orbit without deciding to and circled again and again. The Moon was gone, and nothing disturbed him as he passed over the same dead surface. Only black towers and a weak sun repeating beneath him with every rotation.

If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it. Eventually even that became ordinary, until a thought surfaced that did not belong to him. [Unknown Pattern Detected] Meno woke hard enough to nearly throw himself out of bed. His breath came fast as he took in the empty hospital wing: white walls, medical displays, glass partitions, the bed beneath him. Hyperion.

"Meno, it's okay. You're okay." He turned toward the voice and found a pink-haired woman standing beside the bed in a torn dress, the fabric ripped along one side and hanging loose around one shoulder. Her name surfaced before the rest of his memory did. Rina. He knew her, but the recognition dragged something darker up with it. Betrayal. Fragments started coming back too quickly to sort. Hyperion. The Olutron. Aurelia. Senfestra.

Time had no shape yet, but everything before the darkness was forcing its way back in broken pieces.

"What?" Meno said.

"What is going on? Why are you here?" Then he noticed two nurses and a doctor unconscious on the floor near the wall behind her.

"We don't have much time," Rina said.

"It was a trap, Meno. Hyperion imprisoned me to get you here. We have to leave before they realize I escaped."

"That… I don't understand. That makes no sense." His thoughts moved too slowly to hold onto each other. By the time one finished forming, the next was already pushing through it. Rina bent over him with a syringe, and Meno registered the needle only after it entered his arm and the clear fluid began disappearing from the chamber.

"What was that?" he asked.

"What are you doing?" The room softened around him.

"It will help stabilize you. You have been sleeping for a long time. Now come, follow me. We must leave at once." His body obeyed her before his mind agreed. Meno swung both legs over the bed, pushed himself upright, and collapsed when his knees failed under his weight. Rina caught him and pulled his arm over her shoulders, then started walking him toward the elevator. Meno told himself to stop. His feet kept moving. He tried again, harder, and another step carried him forward before the command reached his legs.

The body was still his. The decisions were not. Rina used his hand to activate the elevator, and the empty hospital floor disappeared above them. Hyperion should have reacted already. Doctors should have been everywhere, Eyxim should have known he was awake, and security should have locked the place down long before Rina got him this far. When the doors opened into the shark atrium, the same emptiness waited below.

Nobody sat at reception, nobody crossed the floor, and the huge steel entrance had been left partly open. Meno could not make any of it fit. Rina kept pulling him toward the exit while his bare feet crossed the cold marble beneath the hospital gown.

"It's all going to be fine," she whispered near his ear.

"I found you again. I won't let go, even if people try to keep us apart." His mind rejected everything Rina said, but his body kept following her through one step after another. Skyline's fog closed around them outside, carrying the smell of wet concrete. The lower city disappeared into grey within a few dozen meters, with the bases of skyscrapers rising through the haze. Meno fought every step. His legs were not resisting Rina; they were resisting him.

He ordered them to stop, tried to lock his knees, tried to drag his weight backward. Useless. Another tower appeared through the fog before they had gone far. Meno caught the logo above the entrance and felt his thoughts finally sharpen around one thing. SENFESTRA Every part of him wanted to stay outside, yet his feet carried him through the doors. People in lab coats closed around him immediately with scanners, cables, instruments, and a stretcher.

They lowered him onto it while his own body helped them, lying back when guided and holding still while technicians fixed connections across his chest, neck, arms, and legs. That terrified him more than the cables. The stretcher rolled into an elevator and began moving. Rina never left his side. She kept whispering soft promises near his ear, and the words sank into his slowed thoughts before he could properly reject them. The elevator opened onto darkness, with a single capsule waiting in the middle of the floor.

Orange light traced its shell, bright enough to illuminate the space immediately around it while the rest of the room remained black. The lab coats disengaged from the stretcher and two large security men took over, lifting Meno and placing him inside while his body did nothing to resist. Technicians gathered the cables already attached to his skin and began plugging them directly into sockets around the capsule. Meno's fear finally cut through some of the fog. Where was the skinsuit? XTachyon needed protection.

Even an XUltra needed interfaces between the capsule and the body, yet they were connecting this thing directly to him. Were they really going to run it like this? Meno tried to speak, but his mouth barely moved. He tried lifting one hand and got nothing back. He could feel his body lying there perfectly while control remained somewhere outside his reach. Rina leaned into the capsule and kissed him, holding it long enough for Meno to feel every second while wishing he could turn his head away.

When she finally withdrew, an old man wearing glasses stepped into view behind her as the capsule lid began to close.

"Turn on the XMelter." The lid sealed, and orange light began brightening around Meno before flaring all at once. Fire covered him. Meno screamed as heat tore through skin, muscle, and everything beneath, leaving no part of his body outside the pain. He tried to claw at the lid, kick, twist away, do anything at all, but nothing moved. His body burned while he remained trapped inside it, completely powerless to save himself. The heat kept climbing until pain stopped meaning anything.

Meno felt himself coming apart inside it, and when almost everything else was gone, one thought remained. If only I was faster. If only. [Compatibility Verified] Meno woke again and came upright so fast the medical monitors beside him started screaming. Air tore into his lungs as he grabbed the sheets, released them, then raised both hands in front of his face and flexed his fingers. His arms moved. He did it again just to make sure, opening and closing both hands while his head cleared much faster than before.

The Hyperion hospital wing surrounded him exactly as he remembered it, with white walls, medical displays, and the same bed beneath him. It looked real, though Meno was not ready to trust that yet. A chair scraped beside the bed, and a blond-haired woman shot to her feet before throwing herself toward him.

"Meno!" Aurelia wrapped both arms around him. Meno froze for a heartbeat, waiting for his body to betray him or something around them to stop making sense, but nothing did, so he hugged her back. This was a reality he could accept.