Apocalypse Trade Monopoly
Chapter 158: : Ghost Law

Chapter 158: : Ghost Law

Then—nothing.

Just flashing white.

No sound. No edges. No structure.

Lucas hit the ground first. Hard. Every breath was like gravel in his lungs. His body ached in too many places to count—one arm was half-dead from blood loss, and the blade wound hadn’t sealed.

He blinked, trying to focus.

Nothing sharpened.

A haze coated everything. Like the world had been dipped in smoke and code static.

Then—

"Ava—"

"Lucas?"

Her voice echoed—too loud, distorted.

"I can’t see—Lucas, where are you?!"

She stumbled through the blur, her fingers stretched in front like a diver under ice. Her boots slid across the glassy floor—if it even was a floor. Nothing felt solid. Her balance kept shifting, like gravity was in beta.

Lucas coughed. "I’m here. Somewhere... left of whatever the hell direction this is."

Ava’s silhouette flickered into view, her form bending and splitting at the edges like a badly compressed image. Her hand grabbed his shoulder. Real. Steady.

"Are you bleeding?" she asked.

"Always."

The static pulsed again.

Then the system rebooted—

But wrong.

[ENVIRONMENT REBUILDING...]

[ERROR: HOST DEFINED – USER UNKNOWN]

[FORCED CONTINUATION: GAME STATE RESTORED]

Ava’s eyes flicked upward at the broken interface.

"That’s not good."

"No," Lucas muttered. "That’s system trying to pretend everything’s fine."

Then, a voice—flickering, deep, glitched.

[Next Phase: TRIAL OF ORIGIN.]

[Begin.]

A new space assembled beneath their feet. Tiles. Columns. Flickering shadows like courtroom benches long abandoned. A circular tribunal room. Mock-legal. Too detailed to be generic code.

Lucas squinted at the floor. "What now, a judgment test?"

The air grew colder.

The shadows leaned forward.

Not system avatars.

Not data ghosts.

They were... watching.

And Ava’s eyes went wide.

She spun toward the nearest shimmer and screamed, "She’s not a person! Angle—she’s not human! She’s a copy—downloaded! IT’s must be some system!"

Lucas froze.

"What did you just say?"

"She was dead. She’s not alive. She’s emulated consciousness—a system memory!"

Lucas leaned against a collapsed pillar, eyes flickering with understanding.

"That’s why the system can’t delete her. She’s outside."

Ava nodded once, her breath shaky. "She’s not a user. She’s an exception. A violation."

"Great," Lucas muttered. "And we’re stuck in a trial room."

He looked up at the jury box formed from jagged data architecture and waved a hand.

"Hi. We’re guilty. Let’s skip to sentencing."

No response.

Just cold.

The trial board lit up.

TWO PARTICIPANTS.ZERO REPRESENTATION.ONE EXIT GRANTED.CHOOSE THE DEFENSE.

"Defense?" Ava said. "We’re being forced to defend ourselves?"

Lucas grunted. "In a language we don’t speak, under rules written by a dead woman who hates us."

"Perfect."

Ava was already moving, scanning the broken floor tiles.

Lucas joined her, limping.

Then he saw it.

A crack.

Not in the tile.

In the logic grid.

Ava saw it too.

"Lucas—look."

It pulsed, faintly. An error shimmer. Just barely visible—beneath the trial board. A sliver of unused system logic.

A loop.

Lucas knelt by it. "It’s a legacy function. Built to simulate hung cases. If the system detects no valid verdict after one full cycle—"

Ava nodded, catching on instantly. "—it triggers a recess command."

"And if we stall the trial long enough," Lucas finished, "we break the loop."

Ava grinned.

Lucas reached up and waved at the tribunal projection. "We’d like to represent each other, please."

The system paused.

Then granted it.

[UNUSUAL REQUEST ACCEPTED.]

Lucas turned to Ava, eyes gleaming through exhaustion. "Say something impossible. Draw it out."

Ava stepped into the circle and said, with perfect solemnity:

"I plead logic-violation on the grounds that Lucas Zhang is not a citizen of any surviving polity and therefore can’t be tried under existing Rewrite parameters."

Lucas cracked a bloody smile. "And I submit that Ava Zhang’s system is technically an independent AI and thus protected under the neutrality clause of Ghostline Protocol."

The tribunal stuttered.

The floor dimmed.

The logic cracked.

[UNRESOLVED ASSERTIONS.][UNVERIFIABLE CLAIMS.]

[CYCLE INITIATED.]

Lucas leaned close to Ava, whispering:

"Hold your breath."

The system stuttered again—trying to rerun the trial from the top, only to find the logic trail broken.

[ERROR: REDUNDANCY DETECTED][NO VERDICT POSSIBLE][RECESS FORCED][LOOP COMPLETE – EXIT RESTORED]

The courtroom peeled away in slow, reluctant ribbons of light.

A door formed.

Flickering. Half-coded.

Lucas didn’t wait.

He grabbed Ava’s hand.

"Now we run."

Lucas didn’t wait.

He seized Ava’s hand like they were leaping off a building—because that’s exactly what it felt like.

The moment they crossed the threshold, the ground vanished beneath them. The door didn’t open—it detonated outward in a bloom of white-blue light that tore through the collapsing tribunal chamber like a reverse explosion.

They were yanked through a vortex of raw system data, cascading in rivers of corrupted syntax, shredded logic loops, and memory shards. Code wasn’t flowing—it was screaming past them.

Ava’s body twisted mid-air, the gravity—or whatever passed for gravity here—yanking her in directions that didn’t make sense. Her hand held tight to Lucas’s.

"I swear if this is another damn illusion—"

"It’s not!" he shouted. "This is freefall!"

The space around them folded, buckled, snapped inside out.

A data-spike the size of a tower lunged toward them from the black like a harpoon. Lucas twisted, pulling Ava into a spin that barely dodged it.

"IS THIS WHAT YOU CALL AN EXIT?" she shrieked, her voice Dopplering in the void.

Lucas’s voice was ragged. "I call this style!"

Suddenly, platforms appeared mid-air—thin slices of grid logic floating like shattered glass.

Lucas spotted a shimmer of green on one.

"Land it!"

Ava gritted her teeth. They both dropped like meteors, boots slamming down onto the first fragment. It cracked under the weight, a ripple of unstable logic shooting across its surface.

More platforms surged upward like elevator doors slamming open.

Lucas ran.

Ava followed.

The moment her foot hit the next one, it tilted sideways, flinging her toward open void. She screamed—but Lucas caught her wrist midair and slung her onto the next ledge.

He landed beside her, winded. "Ten points for improvisation!"

"Minus ten for NOT MENTIONING THE FLOOR EXPLODES!"

Behind them, the collapsing courtroom unleashed one final scream—Angle’s fractured voice distorting through the chaos.

[YOU CAN’T ESCAPE ME.]

[YOU AREN’T OUT.]

[YOU ARE JUST—RECALIBRATING.]

The system surged.

The platforms began to spin.

Not drift—spin.

"Jump!" Lucas shouted.

Ava didn’t hesitate. She launched across the growing gap, flipping over a broken chunk of tribunal desk midair. Her boot caught the edge of the next panel. She slipped—

—but Lucas slammed into her from behind, and they hit the ground rolling.

Not graceful.

Fast. Brutal. Loud.

Ava’s breath left her in a violent grunt as Lucas’s shoulder drove into her ribs mid-roll—just as the tile they’d launched from detonated behind them in a roiling column of red fire and shrapnel-code.

Flaming bits of system debris whipped past their heads, slicing into the air like molten razors. A blast wave chased them, heatless but laced with kinetic pressure—a force that wanted to erase.

Lucas dragged Ava across the slick surface of the next platform, boots scraping, momentum barely under control.

"Keep moving!" he barked, one arm shielding his face.

Ahead, the platforms began collapsing one by one, chain-reacting with synchronized flashes. Boom. Boom. Boom. Like the rhythm of a ticking bomb.

Ava spun onto her knees, panting, bleeding from a gash on her temple. "Next one—! Go, now!"

Lucas didn’t hesitate. He sprinted—and Ava was already beside him, leaping in tandem onto the next fragment of flooring mid-collapse.

It tilted under their combined weight.

Lucas grabbed a jagged rebar of exposed code—used it to vault to the next ledge.

Ava ran up the wall at full tilt, kicked off it sideways, and landed like a blade beside him.

Another tile snapped, cracked, and spiraled into space.

Behind them, fire licked the edges of the platform.

Ahead, the fragments got thinner.

Faster.

Deadlier.

"Shortcut!" Lucas shouted, pointing to a fragment high up and left—rotating rapidly like a buzzsaw.

"You’re out of your damn mind!" Ava yelled back.

Lucas grinned—bloody—and ran.

He jumped.

Mid-air, he twisted his body sideways to catch the spinning platform, momentum flipping him up in a full roll. The force whiplashed him once, but he kicked off at the top of the spin and sailed clean toward the other side.

"NOW!" he roared.

Ava ran.

Jumped.

The platform met her mid-rotation. She caught the edge with one hand, legs dangling over fire, face lit by red flashes.

Lucas skidded back to the edge and dropped into a crouch, hand out. "Come on—!"

She swung, grunted, then launched upward, catching his wrist.

He yanked her with all he had left—both of them crashing into the final panel.

Everything behind them collapsed.

Like dominoes made of glass and death.

Lucas was panting, eyes wild. "You okay?"

Ava just grinned.

Her nose was bleeding. Her jacket was scorched. Her knuckles torn raw.

"Ask me again after I stop vibrating."

They stood slowly—shoulders brushing.

Ahead, for the first time, there was no chaos. No noise. Just mist.

And at its center—

That door.

Still. Waiting.

Lucas stared at it.

"...That?" he asked.

Ava didn’t answer.

She stepped toward it, heartbeat finally catching up with everything her body had just done.