The desert was turning into glass.
Kaelen gripped the steering wheel of the lead crawler, his knuckles white. The engine screamed, the tachometer redlining as the heavy vehicle bounced over petrified dunes at sixty miles per hour.
In the rearview mirror, the horizon was no longer grey. It was blinding gold.
Archangel Uriel didn't run. He didn't fly. He simply existed, and then existed closer. Every time the massive, twenty-foot avatar took a step, a shockwave of thermal energy rippled outward, instantly crystallizing the silica in the sand.
BOOM.
A spear of light slammed into the dune fifty meters to the left of the convoy.
The explosion wasn't fiery; it was absolute. A sphere of pure white disintegration expanded, vaporizing rock, sand, and air. The shockwave hit the crawlers broadside.
"Shields down to 40%!" Seraphina screamed over the comms, her voice cracking with terror. "Kaelen, he's not aiming! He's just deleting the grid squares!"
"Maintain formation!" Kaelen roared back, wrestling the steering wheel as the crawler tipped onto two wheels before slamming back down. "Don't drive in a straight line! Weave!"
Behind him, the other two crawlers—carrying the terrified refugees and the confused Nomads—swerved erratically. Lyra was driving the second one, drifting through the sand like a rally racer.
"Boss!" Vex shouted from the passenger seat, looking back through the rear window with binoculars. "He's charging another one! It's bigger! The mana density is off the charts!"
Kaelen glanced at the mirror. Uriel had stopped moving. The Avatar raised its burning spear high. A halo of complex geometric runes—Angelic Script—formed behind its head. The sky darkened as all ambient light was sucked into the tip of the spear.
[System Warning.]
[Enemy Skill: Heaven's Judgment (Rank S).]
[Targeting: Area of Effect (10 Mile Radius).]
[Time to Impact: 10 Seconds.]
"Ten miles," Kaelen whispered. "We can't outrun ten miles in ten seconds."
He looked at the map. Sector 2: The Scrapyard of Giants was still five miles away. A wall of magnetic fog marked the border—a dead zone where sensors wouldn't work. If they reached the fog, they could hide.
But they wouldn't make it.
"He's going to wipe the map," Kaelen realized. "He's an Admin tool. He doesn't care about collateral damage."
"We're dead," Vex lowered the binoculars, her face pale. "That's a nuke, Kaelen. A holy nuke."
"Not yet," Kaelen snapped.
He looked at his hands. The black veins of the [Void Architect] class were pulsing.
'The Librarian said the System runs on a script. Scripts rely on coordinates. If I can't move the car fast enough... I have to move the coordinates.'
It was a desperate theory. A gamble based on a class he had unlocked ten minutes ago.
"Seraphina!" Kaelen barked into the radio. "Link the Portable Mana-Well to my crawler! Push every ounce of mana you have into my receiver! Now!"
"But the shields—"
"Forget the shields! Do it!"
The hum of the Mana-Well in the second crawler spiked. A beam of blue energy shot from its dish, connecting to Kaelen's vehicle.
Kaelen felt the surge. It was too much power for a human body. His circuits burned.
[-20 HP]
[-20 HP]
He gritted his teeth, forcing the mana into his [Void Architect] core.
"System," Kaelen snarled, his eyes bleeding violet light. "Access local reality partition."
[Request Acknowledged.]
[Admin Token Detected.]
[Access Granted: Local Geometry.]
The world slowed down. Kaelen saw the desert not as sand, but as a wireframe grid. He saw Uriel as a massive, burning code block. He saw the spear of light descending.
He saw the XYZ Coordinates of his convoy.
"Shift," Kaelen commanded.
He activated his new skill.
[Skill: Glitch Step (Mass Transit Variant).]
[Cost: All Stamina + 90% Mana.]
[Effect: Displace target matter 500 meters forward by skipping frames.]
Kaelen slammed his hand onto the dashboard.
The world shattered.
It wasn't like teleportation. Teleportation felt like movement. This felt like the universe crashed and rebooted.
For a split second, the crawlers didn't exist. They were smear of static color against a grey background. The passengers screamed as their stomachs turned inside out. The metal groaned as physics momentarily forgot to apply gravity.
Then, SNAP.
Reality reasserted itself.
The three crawlers slammed onto the ground, five hundred meters closer to the fog. They hit the sand hard, bouncing violently.
Behind them, where they had just been, the spear of light touched the ground.
SILENCE.
Then, the sun was born on earth.
A dome of white fire expanded, swallowing the dunes. The shockwave hit them a second later. even from 500 meters away, it was strong enough to lift the 20-ton crawlers off the ground and throw them forward like toys.
"Hold on!" Kaelen screamed as the world spun.
His crawler rolled once. The reinforced frame groaned. The windows shattered, spraying safety glass everywhere.
They landed on their wheels, skidding sideways into a massive rock formation.
Dust. Smoke. Ringing in the ears.
Kaelen coughed, tasting blood. His health bar was flashing red. [HP: 15%].
"Vex?" he rasped.
Beside him, Vex was hanging upside down in her seatbelt, groaning. "I... I think I threw up my soul."
Kaelen looked out the shattered windshield.
The explosion had missed them. Just barely. The mushroom cloud of holy fire was rising behind them, a pillar of destruction that reached the stratosphere.
And in the distance, through the smoke, Uriel stood frozen. The Archangel tilted its head, looking at the crater where the convoy should have been.
[System Analysis.]
[Target: Archangel Uriel.]
[Status: Calculating Error.]
[Target Lost.]
"He's confused," Kaelen wheezed, unbuckling his belt. "The script says we died. The data says we're alive. He's lagging."
He kicked the door open and fell onto the sand.
"Move!" Kaelen shouted to the other crawlers. "We have maybe thirty seconds before he re-calibrates! Get to the fog!"
Lyra dragged herself out of the second crawler. She was bleeding from a cut on her forehead, but she was moving. She slapped the hood of her truck.
"Drive! Go! Go!"
The convoy, battered and smoking, limped forward.
Fifty meters. Twenty meters. Ten.
They rolled into the Magnetic Fog of Sector 2.
The white wall of mist swallowed them. Instantly, the sensors died. The radio cut to static. The oppressive heat of the Archangel's presence vanished, replaced by a damp, metallic chill.
They drove for another mile into the blinding whiteness before Kaelen allowed them to stop.
The crawlers groaned to a halt.
Kaelen slumped against the steering wheel. His hands were trembling uncontrollably—a side effect of the Glitch Step.
"We made it," Seraphina's voice came through the open window, sounding distant.
Kaelen laughed. It was a dry, painful sound.
"We didn't make it," Kaelen whispered, looking at the fog. "We just changed cages."
***
Sector 2: The Scrapyard of Giants.
The fog began to lift slightly as they moved deeper, revealing the landscape.
It wasn't a desert anymore. It was a graveyard.
Towering out of the mist were the rusted skeletons of Mecha-Titans from the Old Era. Massive, humanoid machines, some as tall as skyscrapers, lay half-buried in the earth. Their armor plates were rusted through, revealing complex gears and mana-circuits the size of highways.
Cables hung like vines from their metal ribs. Birds—or things that looked like birds but clicked like cameras—nested in their empty eye sockets.
[Location Discovered: The Scrapyard of Giants.]
[Ambient Mana: Erratic.]
[Danger Level: High.]
"By the Light..." Seraphina stepped out of her crawler, looking up at a severed mechanical hand the size of a house. "What happened here?"
"The War of the Gods," Chief Krog rumbled, stepping down from the third truck. He looked at the machines with reverence. "The metal demons fought the sky people. They both lost."
Kaelen limped to the front. He checked the map his father had projected.
Fragment 1: The Scrapyard.
"The first piece of the 8th Door Key is here," Kaelen said, scanning the ruins. "Hidden somewhere in this junk."
"Hidden?" Vex asked, nursing a bruise on her head. "Boss, this place is the size of a country. Finding a key here is like finding a needle in a stack of... well, giant needles."
"We don't need to search," Kaelen said. He held up his hand. The [Void Architect] veins were reacting to something. A pulse.
Thump-thump.
It was coming from the center of the Scrapyard.
"It's calling to me," Kaelen said.
Suddenly, a sound echoed through the valley of rust.
SCREEEEEEEECH.
It sounded like metal grinding on metal.
The red emergency lights on the nearest Titan skeleton—a massive unit missing its head—flickered to life.
"Movement!" Lyra shouted, raising her rifle. "9 o'clock!"
From the shadows of the wreckage, figures emerged.
They weren't human. They weren't mutants. They were Scrap-Drones. Small, spider-like robots built from random debris, scurrying on bladed legs. Their central eyes glowed a hostile red.
There were hundreds of them.
And behind them, something much larger moved. A shadow that blocked out the dim light.
A massive, rusted crane arm swung out, smashing into the ground in front of the convoy.
Standing on top of the crane was a figure.
It was a small creature, barely three feet tall. It wore goggles the size of dinner plates and a tool belt filled with glowing wrenches. It had large, fuzzy ears and fur.
A Gremlin.
"Halt!" the Gremlin squeaked, its voice amplified by a speaker system built into the crane. "This is Tinker-Town territory! No organics allowed! Unless you are spare parts!"
The Gremlin pulled a lever.
The massive Titan arm lifted a giant magnetized hammer, hovering directly over Kaelen's crawler.
"Identify yourselves!" the Gremlin demanded. "Are you scrap? Or are you fuel?"
Kaelen looked at the Gremlin. Then he looked at the army of killer robots. Then he looked at the Angel still prowling the perimeter of the fog miles away.
He sighed.
"Why is everyone in this world so hostile?" Kaelen muttered.
He stepped forward, holding his hands up.
"Neither," Kaelen shouted back. "I'm tech support!"
The Gremlin blinked. It adjusted its goggles.
"Tech support?" the creature narrowed its eyes. "Do you have 10mm sockets? We are out of 10mm sockets."
Kaelen paused. He looked at Vex.
Vex checked her Loot Bag. She pulled out a [Mechanic's Toolkit] she had stolen from the Iron City. She shook it.
A 10mm socket rattled.
"Yes," Kaelen called back, suppressing a grin. "We have the holy artifact known as the 10mm Socket."
The Gremlin gasped. The army of spider-bots lowered their blades.
"Open the gate!" the Gremlin shrieked joyfully. "The Messiah has arrived!"