The drones hummed overhead, a swarm of mechanical wasps with white-light eyes.
Leo buried himself deeper into the pile of rubble, his face pressed against cold, damp concrete.
The ground smelled like mold and dead rats.
He didn't breathe.
Searchlights swept the yard, painting shadows that stretched and snapped back like broken limbs.
They lit up the gate he'd forced open. Paused.
A metallic, synthetic voice echoed from one of the drones.
"Perimeter breach detected. Weak anomaly signature. Probable use of low-tier escape resource."
The light slid forward, grazing the brick pile.
He felt its heat through the cracks, a thin blade of energy licking the back of his neck.
It stopped five centimeters from his bare, blood-smeared foot.
"Negative scan. Proceeding to sector 7-G."
The hum faded.
The lights pulled away, rising and drifting back toward the main alley.
They were following the cold point at the gate. The glitch's echo. Not him.
For ten crooked heartbeats, Leo didn't move.
The only sound was blood pounding in his ears, and something else.
Distant.
A low, constant roar, like an industrial furnace.
And with it, a smell.
Not fire.
This was sharper. Cleaner. Wrong.
Ozone, like after lightning. But underneath it, a heavy metallic sweetness that clung to the back of the throat.
The smell of flesh exposed to a temperature that left no ash.
Burned circuitry and organic matter coming apart at the atomic level.
He crawled out of the rubble, each movement a silent war.
His collarbone was a fixed star of pain.
Using the metal pipe as a crutch, he got high enough to peer over a low brick wall.
The street looked like chaos paused mid-breath.
Abandoned cars. Crushed glass.
No lights, except the cold glow of the moon and stars.
The city's light pollution, gone.
And the screens.
The massive ad boards, bus-stop panels, storefront displays. All dead for hours.
Now they were alive again.
Not with ads.
With data.
On a twenty-meter-wide screen bolted to an office building, a list scrolled.
Header in clean, authoritative white:
GLOBAL COMPLIANCE RANKING – LIVE UPDATE
Below it, thousands of entries. District number. Name. Percentage. A colored progress bar.
His aching eyes focused.
#8,432. COMMERCIAL DISTRICT 7 (ALPHA SECTOR).
PRIMARY MISSION PROGRESS: 0.0%.
STATUS: NON-COMPLIANT.
TIME REMAINING: 21:17:08.
The bar beside it was red. Completely empty.
On a smaller screen at a bus stop, a comment feed poured by.
A waterfall of anonymous, practical hate.
— #7845 (Residential District 12): Capture the anomaly already, idiots. You're dragging down the whole cluster average.
— #10234 (Industrial District 3): Offering 500 Points for information leading to neutralization of Target-Zero in District 7.
— #1 (Central Administrative District): Remember: collective efficiency ensures collective survival. Districts with zero progress will be considered for optimization. The mission is clear.
The mission. His mission.
The hunt wasn't local hysteria.
It was a metric. A cell in a global spreadsheet.
District 7's failure was a performance deficit, a public digital embarrassment.
The deadline. Twenty-one hours.
Erasure wasn't a metaphor. It was a calendar entry.
The low roar and that sweet-metal smell came from the east.
Toward District 8.
Leo staggered into the street, sticking to the shadows of broken storefronts.
Few people were outside.
Shapes watched from shattered windows, eyes wide, fixed on the screens.
They were hypnotized by the ranking. By their community's death sentence streaming live.
When he reached Concord Avenue, the great artery between districts, he stopped.
The roar was louder here. A bass note that vibrated in bone.
The smell made his eyes water.
District 8 was gone.
Not destroyed. Not bombed.
No rubble. No flames.
The avenue ended abruptly.
Where the intersection should have been, there was a boundary.
A wall of absolute nothing.
Not black. Not white. The color of a powered-off monitor.
A flat, textureless gray that swallowed starlight.
It rose from ground to sky, as high as he could see, stretching left and right beyond vision.
Slicing through buildings, streetlights, asphalt with obscene geometric precision.
The boundary line, where the real world met nothing, was perfectly charred.
Asphalt ended in a smooth, melted edge like glass.
Streetlights were cut clean in half.
A car sat split down the middle. Front half still on the avenue. Rear half simply missing.
And the silence.
Beyond the boundary, nothing. No sound at all.
The roar came from the barrier itself. From the act of nothing consuming something.
ERASURE.
The System's word took shape in front of him.
Not annihilation. Deletion.
The district, its streets, its buildings, the people inside it.
Removed from reality's database.
The penalty for collective failure.
Leo's legs buckled. He grabbed a broken signpost.
His eyes couldn't process the scale of the void.
A wound in everything.
He looked back at the giant screen.
DISTRICT 7. PROGRESS: 0.0%. STATUS: NON-COMPLIANT.
Then at the empty space where District 8 used to be.
The twenty-four-hour deadline wasn't for him.
It was for them.
All of District 7.
If they didn't eliminate him. If the bar didn't move.
This was their future. Clean cut. Erasure.
A dry sound escaped his throat. Half laugh, half cough.
The irony was perfect, brutal.
The only way to save thousands of people was to hand himself over to be killed. Or captured. Studied.
He'd be erased another way.
Movement in a second-floor window to his right caught his eye.
A curtain shifted. A pale face.
A middle-aged woman stared at him.
Not at the void. At him.
Her gaze dropped to the space in front of his face, reading what only she could see.
Then her eyes met his.
She didn't scream. Didn't call out.
Her face twisted into pure, desperate hatred.
Slowly, she raised her hand and pointed a trembling finger straight at him.
She didn't need words. The message was as clear as the emptiness behind him.
It's you.
All of this.
You.
She vanished from the window.
Seconds later, a light flicked on in another apartment. A muffled shout. A door slamming.
The red dot on his map pulsed.
Next location broadcast in twenty-nine minutes.
But they didn't need the ping anymore.
They had eyes.
Leo pushed off the signpost, his body a shell of pain and cold.
He looked at the void of District 8.
At the screens condemning his home.
At the windows lighting up one by one, like a fuse burning.
The anomaly was here. At the edge of nothing. Staring at the price of failure.
Two choices. Neither of them real.
Walk into the void, where the System was broken and pings might fail, but where physics itself was a death sentence.
Or turn back into the district, toward thousands of people who now hated him for a reason they could see carved into the horizon.
Try to survive twenty-one more hours in a land that would vote for his death to save itself.
The roar of erasure was an invitation.
The growing silence of the lit windows behind him was a verdict.
He squeezed the pipe until his knuckles went white.
The sweet stench of ozone and vaporized flesh filled his lungs.
The scent of the new world.
He took a step.
Not toward the void.
Not toward the city.
He stepped into the avenue.
Into the open, neutral space.
Directly beneath the giant screens recording his sentence and everyone else's.
A perfect target against the end-of-the-world backdrop.
If the System wanted a spectacle, he'd give it one.
On his terms.
Behind him, from an unseen hand behind a window, the first stone flew.
It hissed past his ear and shattered on the asphalt, five centimeters from his foot.