The aftermath was a quiet, hollow thing. The immediate, heart-pounding terror of the chase was gone, replaced by a dull, throbbing exhaustion that settled over the group like a shroud.
Leo felt… unplugged. The constant, low-level hum of the System's code that had become the background noise of his existence was gone. The world was just the world again. The damp concrete, the steady hum of the floodlight, the smell of dust—they were just things, no longer overlaid with a shimmering layer of data. The silence in his head was deafening. He had his senses back. And he had never felt more blind.
"Twenty-four hours," he said, his voice a flat, empty monotone.
Chloe knelt beside him, her project manager's mind already processing the new, catastrophic variable. "You're locked out? Completely?"
"Admin privileges have been temporarily revoked pending a system diagnostic," Leo said, falling back on the old, familiar IT jargon. It was a comfort. A shield. "I'm just… a user now."
He tried to stand, and the tunnel tilted violently. Maya was there, a steadying hand on his arm. He was surprised by the contact, by the lack of her usual detached efficiency. Her grip was firm, grounding. A silent, unspoken acknowledgment. She was a warrior, and he had just, in his own strange way, held the line.
"He can't walk," she stated, her voice flat, but without its usual cold edge.
"We can't stay here," Arthur countered, his voice low, staring down the dark, open tunnel. "This… this event… it will have been noticed. The probability of a new threat being dispatched to our last known location is… well, it's not zero."
They were caught in an impossible trap. Their greatest weapon was a casualty. Their location was compromised. And they had a dozen terrified civilians to protect.
"We need a gurney," Chloe said, her voice a sharp, decisive crack. "Something to carry him. And we need to move. Now."
What followed was a marvel of desperate ingenuity. Ben took charge. Under his direction, two survivors, a lanky graphic designer named Mark and a quiet, powerfully built fitness trainer named Eva, ripped a metal panel from the tunnel wall. They used stripped electrical cables to lash it to two long, rusted pipes Maya had found. A crude, uncomfortable, but functional stretcher.
As they worked, Sarah stayed by Leo's side, a quiet, calming presence. "I didn't know my skill could do that," she whispered. "I just… I just wanted to help."
"You did," Leo said, his voice rough. "More than you know." He had a skill that broke the world. She had one that helped put it back together.
They loaded him onto the makeshift gurney. The cold, hard metal was a jarring shock against his back. Every jolt sent a fresh wave of agony through his skull. Great, he thought, a flicker of his old, sardonic self returning. I've been downgraded from Admin to a mission-critical, fragile package. Handle with care.
The new exodus was a slow, grim procession. Maya took point. Arthur walked beside the gurney, his eyes closed, his face a mask of concentration, murmuring a constant stream of probabilities. Chloe and Ben flanked the group.
Leo just lay there, staring up at the oppressive, unseen ceiling, feeling every single jolt. He was useless. A liability. The guy who had to fix this was a broken piece of hardware, waiting for a 24-hour diagnostic to complete. The irony was a bitter, metallic taste in his mouth.
He closed his eyes, the darkness a welcome relief from the bobbing, nauseating lights. He felt a hand on his arm. It was Maya. She had fallen back from the point, her face a grim, unreadable mask.
"You're a liability," she said, a flat statement of fact. Leo just stared at her, the words a cold confirmation of his own self-loathing. "But," she continued, her gaze unwavering, "you're our liability. So don't die. That's an order."
She squeezed his arm, a brief, surprising pressure, and then she was gone, melting back into the darkness at the head of the column.
It was the closest thing to a pep talk he'd ever heard from her. It was also a threat. A responsibility. He was a piece of mission-critical equipment. And he had to get back online.
He closed his eyes again, but this time, he wasn't surrendering to the pain. He was focusing on the faint, high-pitched whine at the edge of his hearing. The ghost of the System. A vast, complex web of pure information, just on the other side of a firewall in his own skull.
Twenty-three hours and forty-two minutes. The countdown had begun.