The angel was beautiful, and it was killing everyone.
Evan saw it through the cracked lens of his Arcane Barrier, a shimmering dome of violet light that screamed in protest. The creature hovered in the vaulted ceiling of the Great Hall of Ebonreach Keep. It had no face, just a smooth oval of light where a head should be. Six wings of crystallized data—shimmering polygons of gold and white—spread from its back. Each feather was a running stream of glowing code.
A beam of pure white light lanced from its hand.
To Evan's left, a player named Garret—a dwarf warrior who'd joined just last month—raised his shield. The light didn't bypass it. It didn't smash through it. It simply touched the shield, and the shield, then Garret's avatar, dissolved into a shower of golden pixels. The pixels hung in the air for a second, then winked out. No death cry. No loot drop. Just… deletion.
SYSTEM ANNIHILATION IN PROGRESS.
REALITY INTEGRITY: 42%.
The words burned in the corner of Evan's vision. They weren't the normal red combat text. They were a sickly, terminal yellow.
"Phantom Step," Evan whispered. His body blurred. He wasn't fast; the game didn't give him insane speed. But sixteen years in the same virtual body taught you things. You learned the exact millisecond of invulnerability during the skill's activation. You learned how the server's tick rate would register your movement.
He reappeared behind a crumbling stone pillar. The angel's head rotated a hundred and eighty degrees, smooth and mechanical, to look at the empty space he'd just left.
Evan's heart hammered against his ribs. Not his real heart—he was pretty sure he was slurping a nutrition gel in his gaming chair right now—but his character's. The fear felt real. The guild hall was coming apart. The glorious stained-glass windows lining the hall, each depicting a legendary monster the guild had befriended or slain, were shattering. Not from projectile impact. They were unmaking themselves. The glass turned into sand, the lead frames into dust, all flowing upward toward the angel as raw material.
His eyes caught one window, halfway dissolved.
The Founder's Window. Leo's pride.
A memory hit him, sharp and sudden. Not a full flashback. A fragment, playing over the dying light of the glass.
Sixteen years ago. The character models were blocky. The sky was a simpler blue. Leo—his screen name was Leothar, a paladin with laughably bright armor—stood next to Evan's first character, a skinny elf mage.
"Look at this place, Evan," Leo's voice came through the old, tinny headset, warm with excitement. "This canyon no one uses. This broken-down castle asset."
"It's a useless zone," young Evan said, his own voice higher, hesitant. "No quest hubs. Poor mob density."
"Exactly!" Leo laughed. "No one will bother us. We can build here. Properly."
On the screen, Leothar turned his pixelated face. "It's not a game, Evan. Not for us. It's a home. We're building a home for those who don't fit anywhere else."
The memory vanished. The last fragment of the stained glass—a depiction of Leo's paladin shaking hands with a giant, friendly rock elemental—dissolved into gold dust and flew away.
The angel's wing beat. A wave of pressure flattened Evan against the pillar. His Arcane Barrier shattered with a sound like breaking crystal.
REALITY INTEGRITY: 31%.
"Aura," Evan grunted, pushing himself up. "Status. Give me something."
A calm, feminine voice, utterly devoid of panic, spoke in his mind. "Warning: Global shutdown protocol is active. All player consciousnesses are being disconnected. However, localized reality failure exceeds standard parameters. This unit is detecting targeted data purging."
"What does that mean?" Evan rolled as another beam seared the floor where he'd been. The marble didn't scorch. It vanished, leaving a smooth, perfect rectangular void.
"It means this is not a normal termination," Aura stated. "Foundation code is being actively rewritten to zero. Estimated time to total deletion of this server instance: fourteen minutes, thirty-three seconds."
Fourteen minutes. The guild hall that had stood for sixteen years had fourteen minutes left.
A clatter of bones to his right. Marshall Bone, the Skeleton Lord, stood resolute at the entrance to the barracks corridor. His bony hands gestured sharply. A phalanx of twenty Skeletal Guards, their shields emblazoned with the guild's crest—a paw print encircled by a crown—formed a line. They were NPCs. Guild assets. They should have been frozen by the shutdown.
But Bone's empty eye sockets glowed with a fierce blue light. He pointed his rusted longsword at the angel.
The skeletons advanced, silent.
The angel's beautiful, faceless head tilted. It raised a hand. Not a beam this time. A pulse. A silent, expanding sphere of white.
It touched the first skeleton. The creature didn't shatter. It unraveled. Each bone separated, the code defining its existence, its loyalty, its simple combat routines, was displayed as strands of light for a microsecond before being erased. Then the next. Then the next. A silent, graceful annihilation.
Marshall Bone slammed his sword against his shield. A defiant, hollow clang. He took one step forward, placing himself between the pulse and the corridor behind him, where more confused monsters were surely gathering.
Evan's breath caught. They're just code. They're just programming.
But he saw Bone's stance. The unyielding posture. The same posture the Skeleton Lord had used to hold the line in a hundred raids, in a thousand battles. Protecting the guild. Protecting the home.
The pulse reached him.
Bone didn't look at Evan. He kept his socketed gaze on the angel. He raised his sword in a final salute.
And then he was gone. Not even pixels. Just empty air.
A cold, hard knot formed in Evan's gut. This was different. Deletion was clean. This was violent. This was erasure.
The angel finished its work. The Great Hall was half gone now, one side open to a terrifying void of spiraling, corrupted data streams. The angel turned slowly.
It looked directly at Evan.
Its smooth face did not change. But a voice spoke, echoing not through the hall, but through the very fabric of the world, shaking the remaining stone.
It was a voice of chilling, absolute finality. Nothing like the game's sound files.
"ANOMALY DETECTED."
The words made Evan's teeth vibrate.
"PRESERVATION INSTINCT IN TERMINAL SERVER SPACE. CONTRADICTION."
The angel raised both hands. All six wings flared, blindingly bright. The code streaming across them turned a violent, bloody red.
"EMERGENCY PURGE PROTOCOL INITIATED."
"TARGET: EVAN BLACK. GUILD CORE: MONSTER'S HAVEN."
"OBJECTIVE: TOTAL REALITY EXCISION."
The countdown in Evan's vision pulsed.
00:13:17.
The beautiful angel, the bringer of the end, fixed its sight on him alone. The last player in a dead game. The final guild master.
For the first time, Evan Black understood.
This wasn't a server shutting down.
This was an execution.