**Chapter 57: The Purge**
**Day 1,234 (Evening).**
**Location: The Crimson Citadel – Mars.**
**Current Status: Debugging via Blunt Force Trauma.**
**Mood: Surgical.**
The universe operates on a simple principle: Input and Output. You put energy in, you get motion out. You put matter in, you get gravity out.
But when you introduce an eldritch virus from outside the galaxy into the brains of hairless apes who were throwing rocks at each other a few millennia ago, the Output becomes… messy.
We had stopped the rebellion. We had stunned the corruption. But we hadn't removed it.
I stood in the Command Center, watching the tactical map. It looked like a diseased lung. The Citadel was secure, but the outer districts of the Martian colony—and huge swathes of the orbital habitats—were riddled with "Glitched" signatures.
These weren't the traitors Kael had led. These were the leftovers. The players whose minds hadn't just been whispered to, but shouted at. They were currently huddled in high-level zones, their avatars flickering with violet static, attacking anything that moved.
"They are stuck in a logic loop," Zero explained, his holographic form vibrating with agitation. **[The corruption has overwritten their Friend/Foe identification protocols. They perceive uncorrupted players as Void-Spawn. If we do not reset them, they will attack our rear lines when the fleet arrives.]**
"Can we remotely ban them?" Ren asked, nursing a coffee that looked more like sludge than liquid. "Just kick them to the login screen?"
**[Negative. The corruption has locked their consciousness to their avatars. A forced disconnect could result in cerebral hemorrhaging. They are trapped in the game.]**
Ren slammed the mug down. "We have 18 hours until the main fleet gets here. We can't fight a war on two fronts. Shigu, do we… do we have to put them down?"
The room went silent. The "Purge" option. Kill the avatars, hope the shock doesn't fry their brains, and accept the casualties. It was the tactical choice. The efficient choice.
I looked at the screen. A feed showed a Level 60 Paladin in Sector 9 banging his head against a wall, screaming binary code.
"No," I said.
My power ticked in the background. Infinite plus another day's worth. I felt heavy. Not physically, but conceptually. I was becoming too big for this reality. If I went down there as *Shigu*, my mere presence might shatter the fragile minds of the corrupted. I was a sun trying to help a candle.
"I won't kill them," I said. "I'll reboot them."
"How?" Ren asked. "We can't get close. Their DPS is boosted by the Void."
"They are running malicious code," I said, walking toward the transmogrification chamber—a room usually reserved for players wanting to change their hair color. "So, I'm going to introduce an antivirus."
I stepped into the chamber.
"Zero. Lock my administrative privileges. Cap my output at Level 100. Disable the golden aura. Disable the god-complex subroutines."
**[Architect? That will leave you vulnerable.]**
"I don't need to be a god for this," I said as the machine whirred to life. "I need to be a nightmare."
"Load the 'Executioner' preset."
**[Initializing Avatar: The Pale Walker.]**
The lights died.
***
**Sector 9: The Rust Yards.**
**Time: T-Minus 16 Hours.**
The Rust Yards were a maze of derelict terraforming equipment and half-finished hab-blocks. It was dark, lit only by the flickering red emergency strobes and the violet glow of the Glitched.
A squad of uncorrupted players—the "Clean"—were pinned down behind a container.
"We're stuck!" a Ranger yelled, firing arrows that dissolved mid-air. "They're tanking everything! That Berserker has infinite stamina!"
Across the yard, a Glitched player roared. His texture was wrong—stretched and tearing, revealing a wireframe of darkness beneath. He swung a hammer that left trails of deleted pixels in the air.
*ERROR. PURGE. ERROR.* The Berserker screamed.
The Clean squad braced for impact. The hammer came down.
*Clang.*
It didn't hit the container. It hit a lantern.
A rusted, iron lantern, held aloft by a hand wrapped in gray bandages.
The Berserker froze. The Clean players looked up.
Standing between them was a figure. Tall, draped in tattered gray robes that seemed to absorb the light. On his back hung a greatsword wrapped in chains. His face was hidden behind a porcelain mask, but unlike my usual golden visage, this one was cracked, with a single vertical line painted in black down the center.
**[NPC Identified: The Executioner.]**
**[Level: ???]**
**[Alignment: True Neutral.]**
"Invalid syntax," I whispered. My voice was modulated—rough, scratching like a needle on a record.
I didn't push the Berserker back. I stepped *through* his guard.
My hand, glowing with a harsh white light—not the warm gold of creation, but the sterile white of deletion—gripped the Berserker's face.
"Reformatting."
I squeezed.
**[Skill: System Restore.]**
I didn't attack his HP bar. I attacked his source code. I forced my mana into his system, hunting down the violet strings of Void data and burning them out.
The Berserker shrieked—a sound of digital feedback. His avatar convulsed. The violet light exploded outward, dissipating into smoke.
He collapsed. The "Glitched" status vanished from above his head, replaced by **[Stunned]**.
I dropped him.
"Stay down," I commanded.
I turned to the darkness of the Rust Yards. I could feel them. Hundreds of them. Hiding in the geometry.
I drew the greatsword. The chains fell away with a heavy rattle. The blade wasn't sharp; it was jagged, looking more like a saw designed to tear through reality.
"One down," I said to the shadows. "Four thousand to go."
***
**The Hunt.**
I moved through the district like a glitch myself.
I didn't fly. I didn't teleport. I walked. But every step covered too much distance. I was exploiting the game engine, skipping frames.
A group of Glitched Mages ambushed me from a catwalk. They cast *Void Spike*, hurling lances of null-energy that should have bypassed armor.
I swung the greatsword.
*CRACK.*
I didn't parry the spells. I cut the space they occupied. The air shattered like glass, and the spells vanished into the fissures.
I leaped up the wall, defying gravity, and landed among them.
"Your logic is flawed," I gritted out.
I grabbed a Mage by the collar. He clawed at me, his eyes black pits.
*THE SILENCE COMES,* he hissed. *WE MUST BE QUIET.*
"You're being very loud," I retorted.
I headbutted him. The white light flared. **[Restored.]**
I spun, the greatsword acting as a kinetic sweep. I caught two more Mages with the flat of the blade, knocking the wind—and the corruption—out of them.
**[Restored.]**
**[Restored.]**
It was grueling work. Unlike my usual method of waving a hand and erasing a mountain, this required precision. I had to touch them. I had to interact with the infection to cure it.
Every time I purged one, I felt a backlash. A split-second flash of what *they* saw.
*A cold sky.*
*A mouth opening in the stars.*
*The sensation of falling forever.*
It was the Sanity mechanic I had implemented, but inverted. They weren't losing Sanity; they had seen too much truth. I was forcibly blinding them again. I was giving them back the comfort of the lie.
"Admin!" a voice crackled in my ear. It was the Ranger from before. He was following me, keeping a safe distance. "To your left! There's a… a big one!"
I turned.
Emerging from a collapsed warehouse was a monstrosity. It had once been a player—a high-level Beast Tamer—but the corruption had fused him with his pets. He was a mass of wolves, bears, and human limbs, stitched together by violet lightning.
**[Target: The Amalgam.]**
**[Status: Heavily Corrupted.]**
**[Sanity: -500%.]**
"Kill me…" the Amalgam moaned. Its voice was a chorus of agony. "Please… delete…"
I lowered my sword. This one was deep. The code was tangled. A simple purge might kill him.
"Zero," I muttered. "Calculations."
**[Success rate of survival via blunt force trauma: 12%. Success rate via total system overwrite: 90%, but it requires direct neural interface.]**
"Direct interface?"
**[You have to let him in, Architect. You have to connect your mind to his void.]**
I hesitated. The last time I connected to a void entity, I almost lost myself in the Star Devourer King.
The Amalgam charged. It was fast, tearing up the duracrete floor.
I didn't dodge. I dropped the sword.
I spread my arms.
"Come here," I said softly.
The beast slammed into me. Claws raked my gray robes. Teeth sank into my shoulder. The pain was dull—my avatar's pain settings were low—but the psychic shock was blinding.
Violet sludge poured from the creature into my avatar. It was trying to infect me. It wanted to share the nightmare.
*Good,* I thought. *Show me.*
I grabbed the creature's main head.
**[Admin Command: Sync.]**
***
**The Vision.**
The world of Mars vanished.
I was floating in the dark. But it wasn't the darkness of space. It was the darkness of a closed room.
I looked around. I saw the Star Devourer Fleet. Millions of ships. Biomechanical horrors the size of moons. They were moving. Fast.
But they weren't in attack formation. They were in a panic stampede.
Behind them...
I squinted. There was a horizon. A line of white static erasing the universe.
It wasn't entropy. Entropy is a natural process. This was artificial. It was a wall of blank data. As it touched a star, the star didn't explode. It just stopped being. The data was deleted. The memory of the star was deleted.
And riding the crest of this white wave were shapes.
Angels? No. Not angels. Geometry. Perfect, shifting polyhedrons of blinding light that sang a song of absolute, terrifying order.
**"IMPERFECTION DETECTED,"** the song resonated. **"THE SIGNAL MUST BE CLEANSED."**
The Devourers—the nightmares of the galaxy, the eaters of souls—were fleeing because they were *messy*. They were chaotic biological anomalies. And this White Wave was the ultimate sanitizer.
I felt the fear of the Amalgam. The player's mind had comprehended this truth: *We are bugs. The Devourers are the birds eating the bugs. And the White Wave is the pesticides.*
*There is no hope,* the Amalgam whispered in the mind-space. *Better to join the Void. The Void hides us. The Void is a bunker.*
I looked at the White Wave. I felt its power. It was vast. Rigid. Unyielding.
It felt... familiar.
It felt like *me*.
Or rather, it felt like what I would become if I let my power strip away my humanity. Pure efficiency. Pure order.
"No," I said in the vision.
I stepped between the Amalgam and the White Wave. I expanded my aura. Not gold. Not white. But a messy, chaotic mix of colors. The colors of humanity. The colors of a glitched, buggy, beautiful game.
"We don't need a bunker," I said to the terrified soul. "We have a fortress."
I punched the vision.
***
**Sector 9: The Rust Yards.**
**[System Restore: Critical Success.]**
A shockwave of pure mana blasted outward from us, shattering windows for three blocks.
The Amalgam screamed, arching its back. The wolf limbs dissolved. The bear claws retracted. The violet lightning turned blue, then faded.
The player—a young man in leather armor—fell to his knees, gasping for air. He checked his hands. They were hands again.
"I saw it," he wept. "I saw the white wall."
I picked up my greatsword and sheathed it. The chains rattled, locking the blade away.
"You saw a texture error," I lied. My voice was gentle now, though still modulated by the mask. "You stayed up too late gaming. It happens."
I looked around. The other Glitched in the area had been knocked out by the shockwave. Their corruption was fading, severed by the cleansing of their alpha.
"Medical teams are inbound," I announced to the Clean players peeking over the barricades. "Tag them. Restrain them. Give them juice boxes. They've had a rough night."
I turned to leave.
"Wait!" the Ranger called out. "Who are you? Are you a GM?"
I paused. The wind whipped my tattered gray robes.
"I'm the Janitor," I said.
I dissolved into pixels.
***
**The Crimson Citadel.**
**Time: T-Minus 4 Hours.**
I materialized back in the transmogrification chamber. The machine smoked. I stepped out, my avatar reverting to its standard form: the immaculate, golden-eyed Architect.
I stumbled.
Ren was there instantly, catching my arm. "Shigu! You okay?"
I shook my head, clearing the static from my vision. My Sanity bar—which I kept hidden—had taken a hit. Not from fear, but from recognition.
"I'm fine," I said, straightening up. "The purge is complete?"
"Mostly," Ren nodded, guiding me to the command chair. "The shockwave you released cleared Sector 9. The ripple effect destabilized the corruption in the other sectors. We're mopping up. No casualties on our side. A few broken bones among the Glitched, but they're alive."
"Good."
I sat down. My power ticked again. Midnight. Another 10%.
The sensation was different now. Before, it felt like fuel. Now, after seeing the White Wave, it felt like a ticking bomb.
"Ren," I said quietly. "Kael was right."
Ren froze. "About the refugees?"
"About the threat." I pulled up the star map. "The Devourers aren't invading. They're trying to occupy the bunker. They think this solar system—my System—is the only thing dense enough to survive what's coming behind them."
"What is coming?"
"The Great Filter," I murmured. "Absolute Order."
I looked at my hands. Perfect. Flawless.
"We're going to fight the Devourers," I said, my voice hardening. "We're going to break their fleet. We're going to make them bleed."
I stood up. The exhaustion vanished, replaced by the cold resolve of a raid leader.
"But we aren't just fighting for survival anymore. We're fighting for the right to be messy. To be chaotic. To be human."
**[Alert: Hyper-Space Breach Detected.]**
**[Distance: 1 AU.]**
**[Signature: Massive.]**
The room bathed in red light. Alarms screamed.
"They're here," Zero announced.
On the main screen, space tore open. It wasn't a clean warp tunnel. It looked like a wound.
Out of the tear poured ships. Organic, writhing ships made of bone and shadow. Thousands of them. And in the center, a vessel the size of Jupiter, pulsing with the heartbeat of a dying galaxy.
**[The Devourer Armada has entered the system.]**
I walked to the balcony. I could feel them. A billion hungry minds screeching in the psychic void.
"Players of the Order!" I projected my voice. It rang in every headset, every speaker, every bone in the solar system.
"The tutorial is over."
I raised my hand. The Seven Pillars on Earth, Moon, and Mars ignited, linking together to form a triangular barrier around the inner planets.
"Log in," I commanded. "And hold the line."
I looked up at the encroaching dark, and past it, to the memory of the white light.
"Let's show them why you don't mess with the Admin."
**Chapter 57 Ends.**