Apocalypse Trade Monopoly
Chapter 162: : The Architects’ Vault

Chapter 162: : The Architects’ Vault

Mid-descent, the world warped.

The reactor backlash twisted gravity. For a moment, they were falling sideways. Then upside down. Then not falling at all, but being dragged through a tunnel of pulsing code.

The walls weren’t walls anymore. Just a blur of glyphs and memory.

And suddenly—

Stillness.

They hit the ground in a heap.

Lucas rolled, groaning, one hand still on his coat’s inner lining where another charge sat humming. "Status?"

Ava sat up, hair wild, suit sparking at the joints. "No bones broken. Probably. What the hell did you route us through?"

Lucas looked around.

And paused.

They weren’t in the bunker anymore.

They were standing in a corridor lined with mirrors—but not reflecting the present. Each one showed a memory, frozen in place. Ava as a child, tearing apart her first drone. Lucas at thirteen, sitting across from his father at a chessboard. Anika, smiling in a lab room full of students Ava barely remembered anymore.

"This is—" Ava stepped closer.

"An echo," Lucas muttered. "We overloaded the system so hard it spit us into a mirror path—some kind of Architect memory cache."

"Accident?" Ava asked.

Lucas smirked. "Calculated risk."

Behind them, the corridor shuddered.

The collapse was coming. They didn’t have long.

Ava reached out to one of the mirrors—but instead of touching it, her system reached through it.

The code welcomed her.

A doorway split open between two reflections—this one shaped like a spiral of blue and white light, etched with her original node signature.

Lucas stepped beside her.

"We just destroyed a quarter of their infrastructure," he said casually.

Ava grinned. "Feels like a warm-up."

Then they ran through the door—

—and landed inside a cathedral of memory.

But it wasn’t religious.

It was technological reverence carved in light and code. The space felt infinite, even though its ceiling glowed close and heavy above their heads, flickering like a storm about to collapse.

Columns of crystallized memory stretched upward, latticed with dormant Architect glyphs—Ava’s own, and fifteen others. The air was thick with unspoken commands and incomplete thoughts. Static snow drifted like dust.

Lucas scanned the edges immediately, one hand instinctively hovering near the modified pulse-grenade strapped inside his coat. "Tell me this place isn’t sentient."

Ava didn’t answer right away.

She was too still.

Her eyes traced a line of data flowing across the ground like a river—no, a vein. It led to a raised platform at the center of the vault, where something hung suspended in a translucent prism of energy.

It pulsed.

Once.

Twice.

Then it spoke.

[WELCOME, ZHANG, A.][ROOT ACCESS DETECTED][FINAL DIRECTIVE ARCHIVE—READY FOR UNSEALING]

Lucas muttered, "That sounds like a trap."

"Everything sounds like a trap," Ava said.

"Sure. But this one’s glowing."

Still, she walked toward it.

As her boots hit the edge of the platform, the prism lowered. Slowly. Like it was breathing her in.

Inside, perfectly preserved—was a console.

But not for control.

For confession.

Ava reached out.

The system didn’t prompt her. It didn’t need to. It already knew.

The moment her hand made contact, the vault’s walls shifted—transforming into projections, spinning out threads of raw data from years ago. Video. Logs. Blueprints.

And at the center of it—

The sixteen.

A circle of young students. Her. Anika. Others she barely remembered—faces dimmed by time. All standing in front of a man in an old-world suit.

The professor.

He looked... tired.

And deeply, unflinchingly resolute.

"This is the last record. The world outside is breaking. The governments want control. They’ve found us. We won’t survive long."

"But if you’re watching this... that means one of you did."

He looked straight into the lens.

"Zhang. You always questioned everything. You were never the strongest programmer. But you asked the right questions."

Ava’s mouth tightened.

"So I’m trusting you to do what I couldn’t."

"This vault contains the clean seed of the pre-Rewrite infrastructure. Pre-collapse systems. Everything the military doesn’t know still exists."

"But to activate it... you’ll need a match key. One of the other sixteen."

Lucas leaned forward. "They’re all dead."

The professor’s voice cut in again, as if hearing them:

"Or corrupted."

"That’s the test."

"If they’re gone... you’ll have to choose someone to take their place. Someone outside the circle. Someone you trust."

The prism flashed once—then dropped fully open.

A single interface rose from the console.

Two options:

[RECONSTRUCT A KEY][DESIGNATE SUCCESSOR]

Lucas looked at her, his usual sarcasm gone.

"What happens if we do this?"

Ava’s voice was flat.

"I think... we reset everything. Not their version of a reset. Ours."

The Vault thrummed louder.

And somewhere, far above them, a trace signal from the bunker’s ruined remains finally reached Rei.

She would know they had survived.

She would know they had found this place.

And she would come.

She stood at the edge of the ruined command deck, smoke curling around her like a silk shawl, her coat untouched by ash or chaos. Beneath her boots, molten concrete still hissed from the explosion Ava and Lucas had left in their wake.

Behind her, junior officers moved like ghosts—afraid to speak. Afraid to breathe wrong.

Rei didn’t need orders barked. She only needed one look at the signal.

The glyph.

Ava’s.

Clear. Blazing. Rooted in a code system that should not have survived.

And pulsing from deep underground—deeper than any map listed.

She spoke, finally.

"Deploy the Titan Array."

One of the officers paled. "That’s—Ma’am, that’s an omega directive. It could destabilize the entire—"

Rei turned her head slightly. Not much. Just enough.

The officer went silent.

She turned back toward the ash-filled crater.

"Let’s finish what the Collapse started."

Below, inside the Vault—

The room convulsed. Just once. Enough to make Lucas grab the console rail.

Ava stiffened.

From the ceiling, tiny fractures spread like spiderwebs—something was pressing in.

Lucas growled, "She’s coming."

"No," Ava said softly. "She’s here."

The Vault groaned again, but it wasn’t from pressure.

It was opening.

The walls of mirrored Architect code twisted upward, unlocking long-sealed fragments—and from within them, a stairwell formed. Circular. Ancient. Like it had always been hidden beneath the false reality of the bunker’s systems.

At the top of the stairwell—

Footsteps.

Unhurried.

Precise.

Lucas activated a defense spike from his wrist module—but it fizzled. "Dammit. Null zone breach."

"Of course she’d bring one."

They backed toward the interface, Ava shielding the core while Lucas positioned himself in front.

The stairwell lit up in bursts as General Rei descended.

Her boots hit the platform like a judge mounting a gallows.

And she was armed.

Not with soldiers.

Not with sync-blades or drones.

But with a rewritten system signature—crafted from Architect code she’d stolen, bent, and fused into her own body. Her veins glowed faintly red. Her pupils flickered between human and machine.

A living contradiction.

A weapon made from their failures.

"I warned you, Zhang," she said calmly. "You think you’re rewriting the future, but all you’ve done is dig up the past."

"Better than licking its boots," Ava snapped back.

"You’ve endangered what’s left of civilization. You’ve threatened order."

"You killed order the day you turned the Architects into ammunition."

Rei stepped forward.

Lucas drew his last pulse-blade. "You know, for someone who talks about order, you show up to fights real damn messy."

Rei’s head turned. "Bai. I’ve been waiting for you."

"Yeah," he said. "People say that a lot."

Then everything erupted.

Rei lunged forward, fast—too fast. Her body fractured into flickers, like she was half-ghost, her system manipulating local physics. Lucas parried the first strike—barely—and Ava ducked under a shockwave of displaced air that carved a trench into the platform.

She dropped a sync mine and it detonated, staggering Rei—

But not stopping her.

Rei twisted, flipping through the smoke, and caught Ava across the ribs with a blow that sent her skidding across the floor.

Lucas caught Rei mid-turn, driving his blade into her shoulder—but she didn’t bleed.

She absorbed the impact and countered, slamming him with a pulse of compressed architect code.

He hit the ground hard, coughing.

The interface behind Ava sparked.

Too close.

She rolled upright and shouted, "She’s burning the system integrity—we lose this Vault, we lose everything!"

Lucas spit blood, eyes narrowed. "Then we end her."

Ava activated the sub-core of her blueprint system—ignoring protocol, overclocking her cognitive load.

Light exploded around her.

Not energy.

Design.

She reached for Lucas’s pulse-blade and reconstructed it in mid-air, embedding volatile sync disruptors along the spine.

She tossed it to him. "Round two."

Lucas caught it, twisted the hilt, and grinned.

"Let’s make her bleed blue."

They moved as one.

Ava hit Rei with a vertical plasma lash from her system, sending arcs of magnetic data ripping through her defenses. Lucas followed up, blade humming, and drove her backwards—inch by inch—toward the edge of the Vault’s central chamber.

But Rei wouldn’t die easy.

She screamed—not from pain, but rage—and unleashed her override.

Architect code burst out from her chest, unraveling into a red lattice of corrupted logic, trying to rewrite the room.

Ava slammed both palms on the ground, blueprint thread lighting up the entire floor like a circuit diagram.

"Lucas—now!"

Lucas leapt.

And plunged the pulse-blade into the center of the lattice.

The red code howled—and began to eat itself.

Rei stumbled back, expression unreadable as the corruption imploded, trying to collapse the Vault with her.

But Ava was faster.

She hit the override.

[VAULT SEAL ENGAGED]

Rei vanished in the explosion of system collapse.

Her scream digitized, stretched—and ended.

Silence followed.

Then the Vault stabilized.

The stairs were gone.

The walls hummed again with only their code.

Ava staggered. Lucas caught her.

Breathing hard. Cut. Bruised. Alive.

"You alright?" he said.

"Yeah," she whispered.

Then looked up at the still-active interface.

"She wanted to rewrite everything her way."

Lucas wiped blood from his mouth and grinned.

"So let’s write ours."