Thick, oily streams of black digital blood wept from the empty eye sockets of his cracked porcelain mask. The jagged red runes carved across his chest and arms flared with a blinding, aggressive light, practically hissing as they burned through his localized reality.
He was losing his grip.
Every second that passed, a piece of his physical rendering dissolved into the dark purple smog. His left boot vanished, turning into a swarm of disorganized green numbers that floated away into the void. A massive chunk of his right shoulder simply ceased to exist, leaving behind a smoking, pixelated crater.
"System!" Sebastian gasped, his voice barely a skipping, robotic whisper. "Run diagnostic! Execute auto-repair!"
There was no cheerful blue UI. There was no helpful prompt. The system was entirely unresponsive, overwhelmed by the localized crash he was experiencing.
