The sky over Valaria didn't just change color; it "Glitch-Refracted." In the 21st century, we called this "Artifacting"—those jagged, multicolored squares that appear when a video file is corrupted. But when it happens to the horizon, and those squares are the size of city blocks, you don't call it a glitch. You call it an "Extinction Level Event."
I stood on the deck of the O.S.S. Venture, the Empress's cracked tablet vibrating in my hand like a dying heart. The "Data-Sphere" I'd seen rising was no longer a distant threat. It was a "Physical Presence," a moon-sized orb of shifting binary and glowing circuitry that was literally "Overwriting" the atmosphere. The "Server Merge" wasn't a metaphor; it was a "Hardware Integration" of two different realities.
