Apocalypse Trade Monopoly
Chapter 154: : Anchor Protocol

Chapter 154: : Anchor Protocol

The transmission open.

Lucas stared at the flickering end-text on the interface—each word rendered in a jagged serif font that hadn’t been used in any Rewrite standard since the original pre-Fall protocol. Custom. Sharp. Old-school arrogant.

[INCOMING TRANSMISSION – UNKNOWN SENDER][TEXT ONLY]

[Nice cleanup, Bai. You forgot the basement.]

The message dissolved again—until it didn’t.

Another line blinked to life before the system could register it:

[I know what Ava was assigned.I know what you were told to do.And I know you won’t..]

Lucas’s jaw tensed. His golden eyes scanned the blank slate that followed, waiting. Two seconds passed. Four. Then—

[Do the job, Bai. Be a good boy. Fetch the node. Stabilize the stack. Or are you planning another detour?.]

He didn’t answer immediately. He waited. The cursor blinked like it was breathing.

Then he typed back.

[LUCAS: I’m not doing the mission.]

[LUCAS: This isn’t a cleanup. This isn’t containment. This is war.]

[LUCAS: I know where you are, Angle. I just haven’t decided you’re worth the bullet yet.]

The line paused. The cursor blinked once.

Then twice.

A reply filtered in, slower this time.

[You think you have the time to be picky? That girl you keep dragging along—she’s not a weapon, Bai. She’s a fuse. You think she doesn’t notice how often you lie?]

She’s going to see the whole thing soon. And when she does? You lose everything.

Lucas typed slower this time. No rush. No exclamation. Just fact.

[LUCAS: Then I’ll win before she looks.]

The connection severed with no animation. Just dead silence.

Behind him, the node stabilized with a low harmonic chime. Ava stepped into view from the far corridor, one of her drones trailing behind her like a silent guard dog. Her armored coat was still dusted with sync-fracture residue from 7C’s breach.

"You get another whisper?" she asked, voice dry.

Lucas didn’t look back at her right away. "She’s loud."

Ava raised an eyebrow. "We gonna talk about it?"

"Later."

Ava didn’t push. Not yet.

Instead, she brush her fingers cross the holographic surface in front of her paying attention to the details.

Then the light shifted.

A tremor passed through —subtle but wrong. The drone let out a short chirp, not alarm, but confusion. Ava’s head snapped up just as Lucas’s body tensed.

His hand twitched toward his wrist interface—too late.

The node screamed.

A burst of jagged red code erupted mid-air like a virus detonating in real-time. It shaped itself into a figure before it touched ground—masked, lean, running hot with corrupted sync energy. Angle’s signature was embedded deep in the pattern—stealth protocol, buried in the authorization stream of Ava’s mission data.

Lucas stepped forward readily and intercepted the strike mid-blink.

The impact shattered the air around him. Ava flinched as Lucas’s system flared gold and black, catching the attacker’s weaponized data-blade against his own palm and shoving it off-axis.

Too fast.

Lucas’s whole frame reeled.

He twisted, dragging the corrupted figure into a spin and slammed it down with a force-coded slam command—but it cost him.

His system cracked visibly.

Golden veins surged down his arms—draining, overexposed. The strain of system-level combat in a raw node space—especially one seeded with forbidden code—cut deeper than it looked.

The corrupted figure snarled, flickered, and dissolved in a burst of static, not dying, but yanked out. Remote controlled.

Angle, watching. Testing. Again.

Lucas staggered back a half step, hand pressed to his knee, eyes burning from the sync backlash.

"That wasn’t a hit squad," Ava said, voice sharp, already flicking open her support terminal. "That was a handshake. She pinged your structure signature."

"She’s trying to mark me," Lucas muttered, spitting digital grit from his teeth. "Track me through residual trace. She knows I’m leaving the grid."

"You can’t fight another one," Ava said. "You’re at critical sync drop."

"I know," Lucas rasped. "We need an exit—now."

He turned, wrist already flaring as he began to unspool—threading an illegal exit gate. His hands moved with practiced ease, but his body swayed. That last clash drained more.

It hit his body too.

His breath was shallow, jaw tight.

Ava saw it.

No hesitation.

She stepped between him and the open space.

"I’ll cover."

Lucas didn’t argue.

Three more pings registered across the horizon of the Mindspace node—shadows approaching. Reinforcements.

Ava spun up her interface with a flick of both wrists. The drone behind her snapped into firing form. From her back, a modular cannon unfolded—her own design, ugly in a beautiful way, a patchwork of salvaged architecture and forbidden scripts.

The first attacker blinked into view, and Ava dropped it with a flash-blind burst. Clean. No theatrics.

The second tried a bypass flank.

Ava spun and shot it mid-jump, the impact scattering it across the node like ash.

"Lucas!" she called, eyes never leaving the shadows. "Exit status?"

"Gate’s folding!" Lucas shouted back. "Thirty seconds!"

Ava didn’t reply.

She stepped into the next attack with cold efficiency—dodging, countering, bleeding sync charge into every move. Her system didn’t flex the way Lucas’s did. It built. It evolved. The longer she fought, the more the system learned.

Twenty seconds.

She got grazed—once. Her shoulder lit up with red syntax burn, but she didn’t flinch.

Ten seconds.

Another wave.

This one came hard—Angle’s style. Fast, elegant, cruel.

Ava’s voice went quiet. "I’ll kill you later," she whispered to the attacker, almost conversational. Then she slammed it with a back-loaded logic bomb that forced a hard reboot on contact.

"Gate!" Lucas barked. "Now!"

Ava spun, sprinted toward him.

Lucas threw the final command into the air.

The gate tore open—gold and jagged white light exploding out in a burst of rewritten core code, a jagged ellipse yawning wide in midair.

Ava dove through.

Lucas followed, bleeding energy.

The gate snapped shut behind them with the hiss of a severed vein.

But they didn’t fall out of Mindspace.

No real-world re-entry.

Instead—

A room unfolded around them.

White. Seamless. Infinite.

Not in size, but in sterility.

A floor so polished it reflected nothing. Walls that didn’t curve, didn’t corner—just hovered in a suspended geometry that felt too intentional.

Lucas hit the ground first, not hard, but jarringly human. No sync rebound, no auto-catch brace. He landed like someone who wasn’t wearing a system anymore.

Ava landed beside him, knees bent, hand extended out by habit. Her fingers curled—expecting her interface. Nothing formed.

She blinked.

Then again.

Nothing.

No ping.

No data.

Ava straightened slowly. "Lucas?"

He sat up with a grimace and a growl. "Something’s wrong."

"I noticed."

He tapped his wrist.

Nothing responded.

He tried the command mentally.

Still nothing.

He stood and faced her, jaw clenched. "We’re not out. This isn’t an exit."

"No kidding," Ava muttered.

Then the room shifted.

Not visually. Acoustically.

A click echoed across the sterile space like a god tapping on glass. Followed by static. Then a voice.

Smooth. Pleasant. Unplaceable.

[Welcome, Players.]

The word hit like a glitch in the gut.

Players.

Not Mutants. Not System Holders.

Just... Players.

Ava’s brows drew together. "What the hell is this?"

[You have been selected for participation in the Veiled Anchor Protocol. The next sequence is designed to assess tactical behavior, loyalty patterns, and personal deviation thresholds.]

[Your systems are offline. Your abilities are suspended. You are now equal.]

Lucas exhaled slowly. A dangerous sound.

Ava glanced over. "Equal."

He didn’t answer. Just stared at the space where the walls met—except they didn’t. There were no seams. No edge. Just... edge-feeling.

Another shimmer, and more people began to appear.

One at a time.

Seven. Then ten.

Then thirty-two.

Ava scanned them rapidly.

Some stood, confused.

Some already screamed.

All of them had the same thin strip of code wrapped like a collar around their necks—bright white, blinking softly.

Every person here had been dragged into the same no-exit space. All stripped of power. All watching.

A woman near the far wall tried to summon her system.

Nothing happened.

She did it again—louder.

Someone else, a man in armor, rushed the wall at full sprint. He hit it—and bounced.

Not crushed. Not fried.

Just... bounced.

The voice returned.

[Attempted sync will be denied. All system dependencies are void within this chamber.]

Lucas turned toward the source of the sound—there wasn’t one.

His eyes scanned the perimeter—if it could be called that. The room gave no depth cues, no origin for the voice. Just sterile nothingness holding them like an equation with no solution.

He exhaled once through his nose, sharp. Then turned to the others.

"All right," he said, voice loud, cutting. "Roll call. Names. Now."

That got attention.

Some glanced at him with suspicion. Others with relief. One woman near the edge visibly flinched, then stepped forward.

"Keisha Mott," she said. "Recon unit."

"Ravi," said a lanky man with torn sleeves and a makeshift cloth wrap over one eye. "Civilian coder. Worked on a shadow Team West."

A short girl with a split lip and a defensive stance grunted, "Tala. Shifter—was. I guess now I’m just pissed off and powerless."

Lucas gave a nod. "Lucas," he said.

Ava’s head snapped to him, but he didn’t look at her.

"Lucas Bai?" someone repeated, startled.

Lucas shook his head once, voice calm. "Zhang. I’m Lucas Zhang."

Ava narrowed her eyes slightly—but didn’t contradict him. She stepped forward, folding her arms.

"Ava," she said, her tone steady.

Ravi’s good eye widened. "That’s it?"

"It’s not important," she said flatly. "What matters is what happened. Someone explain how this happened."

Tala scoffed. "You think any of us know?"

Keisha stepped in. "We were in a pushback op. Military dropped a update through low-band sync—forced sync. We refused."

"You resisted the overwrite?" Ava asked.

"Yeah," Keisha said. "Our systems started shutting down. We made a hard jump into Mindspace—manual route. Figured it’d be a killzone or a clean-out. We were wrong."

Ravi nodded grimly. "We landed here instead. This place didn’t show up on any map. Not even dark-layer overlays."

Lucas crossed his arms. "You were trying to escape Rewrite. Thought you could out-code it."

"Didn’t work," Tala muttered. "Now we’re just lab rats in a room with no rules."

"No," Lucas said. "There are rules. They’re just not telling us yet."

Ava frowned. "And whoever’s running this—"

"—wants us stripped," Lucas finished. "Stripped down to instinct. To behavior."

Ravi looked around. "But why us?"

Keisha’s face hardened. "Because we didn’t obey."

Ava’s eyes flicked to Lucas. "And someone’s watching who they think might break."

Lucas didn’t respond.