Location: Data Purge Chamber – Hidden Under Sector 0
Time: 5:42 PM
Kaen moved swiftly through the substructure beneath Sector 0, a place long erased from public maps. The Data Purge Chamber had been built during the system's early evolution to incinerate corrupted memories—both digital and human.
Now it pulsed with quiet power, reawakened by something older than code.
Ezra followed closely, holding a compact EMP generator—one of the few tools they hoped could disrupt the loop's root signal.
"I didn't even know this place existed," Ezra muttered.
Kaen nodded without turning. "That was the point. It was the system's last fallback. If it couldn't control the world, it would destroy everything connected to its memory... including us."
---
Location: Surface Broadcast Hub – Forum Control Tower
Time: 6:00 PM
Nila stood before a bank of monitors showing the faces of the five candidates.
One of them—Mira, the girl from the outlands—had gone silent. No comms. No data.
