A violet-red beam of light.
Like paper tearing, the second Mapmaker's last defense gave way.
Its massive mechanical body silently fell apart in the void.
The runes that had once embodied the Beyonders' will? What were they now?
Burnt funeral paper.
They peeled away in flakes, each one scarred with purple-black corrosion.
An indescribable smell filled the air—rust, and the acrid stench of something charred.
Tony stared at the screen, his fingers drumming rapidly against the armrest without his noticing.
He watched helplessly as the traitor controlled by the Logic Virus...
No. The monster.
It tore energy cores from its companion one by one with a madman's efficiency.
This wasn't destruction.
It was dismemberment.
Precise. Cruel.
The method reminded him of a slaughterhouse—expressionless workers taking livestock apart, separating flesh from bone.
Meticulous.
Over the comms, there was only Clark's heavy, barely controlled breathing.
He could see it all too clearly...
Every detail seared itself into his mind like a branding iron.
Material that should have been indestructible crumbled before the virus like foam at a touch.
A sharp pain seized his chest, his body's instinctive protest against such extreme violence.
Reed's fingers spasmed across the holographic keyboard, their tips icy cold.
What scrolled across the screen looked like incomprehensible scrawls: the Logic Virus was irreversibly rewriting the target's underlying code at a terrifying rate of thirty million operations per second.
Even a genius who had seen as much as he had felt a chill shoot from the base of his spine to the top of his head.
This wasn't a fight...
It was slaughter on the Conceptual Layer.
Chu Hang stood motionless before the viewport, the distant mechanical slaughterhouse reflected in his gold-red eyes.
He felt every scrap of data Zero sent back as if he were experiencing it himself.