Apocalypse Trade Monopoly
Chapter 157: : Red Logic

Chapter 157: : Red Logic

There was no boot impact. No footsteps. No breath.

Angle was simply there—folded into the system like she’d belong.

Ava’s gaze locked immediately.

Sharp. Calculated.

"Why aren’t you dead?" she asked flatly. "You were killed, right?"

Angle smiled—not with amusement, but with teeth.

"Guess."

Her voice was low, patient, like a teacher waiting for the wrong answer.

Lucas didn’t even flinch. "Please. She probably had something prepaired like everyother military personal."

Angle glanced at him. "Not far off."

"I don’t care," Lucas added. "Whatever resurrection trick you pulled, it changes nothing."

Angle looked at Ava again.

"I had a body double. You know how easy it is to fabricate a death. I walked out the back door while others were celebrating my extinguish."

She flexed her fingers—slow, deliberate.

"You don’t have to die to disappear, Ava. You just have to let them think you were erased."

Ava didn’t answer. Her expression remained still, but her eyes didn’t leave Angle’s face.

The ghost woman continued, stepping forward just once.

"You’re less attractive than I expected."

"I’m not asking for your opinion," Ava replied coldly.

Lucas cracked his neck like he was getting ready for a workout. "Are we done with the dramatics, or is this another posturing phase before you pretend the test is random?"

Angle ignored him.

Instead, the system chimed.

[NEXT PHASE UNLOCKED: RED LOGIC]

[ROUND THREE: FUNCTIONALITY – PHYSICAL TRIALS]

[PARAMETERS: DAMAGE APPLIED IN SIMULATION WILL NOW REGISTER PHYSIOLOGICAL RESPONSE.]

[INJURY WILL BE REAL.]

The room jolted sideways. Not gravity. Not motion. A shift in rules.

Like the system suddenly remembered it didn’t have to play fair.

A new platform formed—octagonal, wide, and starkly empty except for rising obstacles, red barriers, and strange machines humming at low frequency.

Lucas surveyed the space.

"Physical test. With synced pain?"

Angle nodded once.

"Correct. And not everyone will leave upright."

[OBJECTIVE: REACH CENTRAL NODE – ONLY TWO MAY PASS.]

Ava narrowed her eyes. "Two again?"

"No," Angle said.

She smiled, cruel and soft.

"This time, the third slows everyone else down."

And the floor dropped.

Again.

But this time, they hit running.

Ava rolled into a crouch, knees burning from impact. The ground was shifting beneath her, alive—part machine, part terrain, like the environment was being rebuilt as they moved.

Lucas landed ahead of her, already sprinting.

Keisha, Carter, Tala, and Ravi slammed into formation behind them, stunned by the violence of it—but not broken.

"RUN!" Ava shouted.

Barriers began to rise—red, pulsing, razor-thin like laser fences. Each one hummed at chest height, calibrated to maim, not warn.

The first caught Carter across the arm—he spun out, howling.

It didn’t bleed digital sparks.

It bled.

"They weren’t kidding!" Ravi screamed. "This is live!"

Lucas didn’t look back. "Split left!"

He vaulted over the first obstacle, hit the deck under a rotating limb that jutted from the wall like a meat grinder. It missed by inches.

Ava followed, close on his heels.

"This is psychological warfare," she hissed, ducking low. "If we falter now, we burn."

"Then we don’t falter," Lucas said. "We finish it."

Behind them, Tala screamed as a trap opened beneath her, throwing her sideways into a kinetic wall. She bounced, alive—but barely.

Keisha grabbed her, dragging her forward.

Angle’s voice chimed in—not from overhead this time, but right into their heads.

[THIRD PLACE PLAYER WILL BE DELAYED.]

[THE REST WILL ADVANCE.]

The rules were simple.

Cruel.

Mathematically designed to fracture bonds.

Ava knew the logic.

But she still hated it.

"Lucas—"

"I know," he growled.

He slowed only slightly, eyes scanning.

Then he shoved Ava forward.

Hard.

"Go."

"What are you doing?!"

Lucas turned, planting his heel, and caught a rotating blade-arm with his shoulder.

It ripped through skin. Real skin.

He hissed, spun with it, and forced it into the wall, jamming the mechanism.

"I’ll stay third," he snapped.

"Lucas—"

"I said go!"

Blood was running down his arm.

Ava cursed under her breath, then vaulted the next barrier.

Keisha, Tala, and Ravi followed, stunned, panting, bleeding.

Lucas stood at the center of the chaos—smirking through blood and pain.

Angle’s voice whispered in again.

[How noble. But unnecessary.]

Lucas raised his eyes to the sky, voice dry.

"You still think I don’t know how this ends?"

Then the platform beneath his feet shifted again—

And the trial reset.

Only this time, he wasn’t alone on the delay pad.

Angle appeared directly across from him.

Not a flicker. Not a ghost-thread.

She stepped onto the delay platform like a queen entering her private coliseum—solid, real, and utterly in control of the space around her.

Her boots made no sound. Her coat trailed behind her like a shadow made of purpose.

Lucas didn’t flinch.

Didn’t speak.

He rolled his shoulder once—blood still dripping down his arm—and tilted his head.

"Oh," he said dryly. "So now you’re pretending to bleed like the rest of us?"

Angle smiled. "I don’t have to pretend."

She raised her hand.

A long, jagged spear of code unfolded in her grip—red static wrapped in reality. A hybrid weapon. Part system. Part physical.

Lucas clicked his tongue. "You’re really using a custom body for this, aren’t you?"

Angle twirled the spear with surgical ease. "I was tired of watching. This is the fun part."

Lucas didn’t respond.

He just stepped forward, casual.

Unarmed.

Bleeding.

Alone.

Angle narrowed her eyes. "You’re down a weapon. You’ve got a torn sync layer. You can’t even call your system in here."

Lucas stopped five paces away.

And smiled.

"I don’t need a system."

Angle lunged.

Fast. Beautiful. Brutal.

The spear came down in a perfect arc—but Lucas was already moving, ducking inside the swing. He caught her wrist mid-strike, twisted, and slammed her shoulder into the edge of the delay ring.

The impact cracked the ground.

Angle snarled—then pivoted hard, elbow slashing toward his throat.

Lucas leaned back, just enough for the blow to skim past. He answered with a fist to her ribs. She coughed—but it wasn’t pain. It was delight.

"You still hit like a tactician," she whispered, stepping back.

"You still talk like a corpse," he shot back.

Angle didn’t give him time to breathe.

She drove forward, shoulder-checking him into a pulse-wall. Lucas hit hard, ribs flaring with white-hot pain. Before he could recover, she slammed the spear against his side—slicing into his lower back.

He dropped to one knee.

Angle raised the spear for the finishing blow.

"Any last philosophy, Bai?"

Lucas looked up, grinning through blood in his teeth.

"Yeah," he said.

And then he pulled.

From the very ground beneath them.

From the code itself.

His hand lit—just faintly—with a pulse of golden light.

Not system. Not synced gear.

Residual energy. Raw Blueprint signature.

Ava’s signature.

"You shouldn’t have let her touch the floor," he murmured.

Angle’s expression flickered.

Too late.

The platform beneath her feet fractured, flashing with stored kinetic energy and trace command loops—harmless on their own, but vicious when threaded through the right architecture.

Lucas detonated it with a twitch of his bloodied hand.

The floor exploded upward, launching Angle backward into the wall like a ragdoll. Her spear skittered out of reach, clattering uselessly.

She slammed down hard.

Lucas stood, breath ragged.

"Learned something in your absence," he muttered, staggering forward. "People like you always think systems are everything. But there’s always something better."

He reached her just as she pulled herself upright.

"What’s that?" she hissed.

Lucas leaned in close, golden eyes burning.

"Contingency."

And then he headbutted her.

Her body jerked, yes. The impact cracked bone, yes. Her head snapped back with a sickening thud, but—

Angle didn’t collapse.

She smiled.

Blood running from her nose. Eyes dilated. Smile too wide.

"Predictable," she whispered.

Lucas blinked—just once.

A mistake.

Angle surged forward with her left hand and jammed a short blade directly between his ribs.

Not code. Not data.

Steel.

The kind that didn’t need a system to kill.

Lucas staggered, breath clipped, vision blooming with red static. Not from the chamber.

From inside his skull.

Angle leaned into his ear.

"You think I didn’t build failsafes into this node? You think you’re the only one who planned for a contingency?"

She twisted the blade slowly.

Lucas clenched his jaw, knees threatening to buckle—but he didn’t fall. Not yet.

"You built a weaponized arena," he rasped. "I weaponized the rules."

"I wrote the rules."

Lucas smirked through the pain. "You wrote a thesis. I wrote an exit."

The platform beneath them shuddered—not from combat, but from a hidden trigger.

A deep-core data seam ignited in the delay zone floor.

Lucas had buried a chain.

A cascading logic fail, linked through every reflection node they’d passed.

Angle’s smile faltered. Just a twitch.

"What did you do."

Lucas coughed blood—and still managed to grin.

"I gave the system two truths. It can’t handle that."

A pulse tore through the chamber.

Angle screamed—not in pain, but in rage—as the platform buckled under them. She stumbled back, her grip faltering, and Lucas yanked the blade from his own ribs, hand slick with blood.

He dropped to one knee, barely upright, vision flickering. But his voice stayed steady.

"I always have a plan."

Angle’s eyes widened just as a ripple split the chamber—forking down the middle like cracked glass.

[SYSTEM ERROR – SPLIT PATH ACTIVATED]

[DUAL NODES FORCED: REDLINE / GHOSTLINE]

[PRIMARY HOST – INVALID CONFLICT]

[NODE OVERLAP DETECTED: AVA ZHANG]

Angle shouted something—Lucas didn’t hear it.

The world began to peel.

Not collapse.

Split.

A binary fork ripped through the arena, separating Lucas and Angle by a wall of blinding white logic—cold, recursive, angry.

Lucas collapsed backward, barely conscious.

And the last thing he saw was Angle screaming, trapped inside the fracture, her body pixelating into fractal code as the system failed to reconcile her presence.

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