The sun peeked through the cloud-thickened sky, casting a soft golden hue over the aging rooftops of a sleeping city. Morning haze curled around the alleyways like digital smoke—static, unreal. Somewhere, a server pulsed. Somewhere, a camera lens focused.
Selvara Ailendra stood on the hood of her dusty vintage car, smartphone mounted on a gimbal, TikTok app open and blinking red: "LIVE."
"Okay guys, three... two... one—transition drop, let's gooo!" she chirped to the screen, her signature smile lighting up the frame.
She jumped.
Her knee hit the car's hood with a soft thud as she landed. Her hand extended toward the camera with practiced flair. A glitter filter shimmered over her for a second—perfect. But then—
Bzzt.
The engine growled.
The steering wheel jerked.
The car began to roll.
"Wait—what?" she gasped, almost slipping.
Selvara stumbled off the hood as the car started moving—slowly at first, then faster. She rushed to the door handle, yanking it open.
The interior was empty. The gear hadn't been touched.
The car was driving itself.
"NOPE—NOPE—what the hell!?" she screamed, trying to press the brakes with one foot while half-dangling from the side. Her phone clattered to the pavement, still livestreaming. The view turned sideways, showing a blurry shot of Selvara clinging for life.
It wasn't a prank. Not an edit.
This was real.
The car headed straight for a metal fence and beyond it, a steep ditch. She couldn't stop it. Couldn't jump.
And then—
A shadow dropped from above.
A figure in a long black coat landed beside the car like a phantom birthed from the sky. With one swift motion, he reached inside the window and pulled the emergency brake. Tires screeched. Smoke hissed.
The car stopped, two inches from disaster.
Selvara froze.
So did the thousands watching on her stream.
The man turned to her. His silver hair glinted under the broken sun. His eyes were unreadable—frozen steel beneath a stormy sky. Not a single line of emotion crossed his face.
"You should be more careful," he said, voice low and razor-sharp.
Selvara blinked. "Y-you... you saved me. Who are you?"
He paused. A gust of wind caught his coat, revealing a strange insignia glowing faintly on his chest—an emblem shaped like a crowned serpent entwined with digital runes.
"I'm Kaelen Vireux," he said. "And you're in danger."
Selvara opened her mouth to speak, but Kaelen was already walking away, black boots crunching against gravel, his silhouette vanishing toward the shadows behind the parking lot.
"Wait!" she called out, stumbling after him. "Who are you really? How did you even know—?"
Kaelen didn't turn around.
"I've been watching your content," he said without looking back. "And you've been glitching."
Selvara froze. "What?"
Kaelen stopped. Slowly, he turned, pulling something from inside his coat. A small, mirror-like device—flat, glowing. He tossed it toward her.
She caught it awkwardly.
On the screen, a recording played: her. But not just any clip—this was a screen capture of one of her recent viral uploads. She was doing her signature dance in the park. Everything looked normal at first… until it didn't.
For a split second—barely a blink—her face distorted. Pixels rippled. Her body duplicated, then remerged. The background flickered with static.
"I… I didn't edit that," she whispered.
"I know," Kaelen said. "That's why I'm here."
"But—what is that glitch? A bug?"
Kaelen stepped closer. "Not a bug. A breach."
Her fingers tightened around the device. "A breach into what?"
Kaelen's eyes scanned the horizon. The wind carried the sounds of a distant siren, a dog barking, the usual city static. But underneath it… Selvara could swear she heard something else. A hum. A pulse. Like… code.
"There's a layer beneath this world," Kaelen said. "Invisible to most. Hidden inside the flow of algorithms and attention. A dimension born from data—built from the echoes of our own thoughts."
Selvara frowned. "What, like… the Matrix?"
Kaelen smirked faintly. "The Matrix was fiction. Vertex is not."
Just then, a sound sliced through the air. A mechanical screech, like twisted metal grinding against glass. Kaelen's head snapped toward the alley.
"Too late."
From the darkness emerged a sleek black drone, its wings sharp like razors, sensors glowing crimson. It hovered silently for a second—then split into five smaller units, each darting like insects toward Selvara.
"Run!" Kaelen shouted, pulling a thin baton from his sleeve.
It flared into a blade—not metal, but pure blue energy laced with circuitry patterns.
Selvara turned to bolt, but one of the drones was already on her—until Kaelen leapt between them, slashing downward. Sparks burst. The drone exploded in a flash of static.
He moved like data flowing through fiber—fast, precise, deadly.
Three drones closed in. He twisted, kicked off a wall, spun mid-air, slicing two of them in half before landing in front of Selvara.
"You attract them now," he growled. "They can smell the Key inside you."
"The—what?!" she cried.
"The Star Key," he said, as the last drone charged straight at her.
Without thinking, Selvara raised the mirror device. It pulsed—hard. The drone collided with an invisible barrier and disintegrated with a high-pitched screech.
Silence fell.
Only the wind remained.
Selvara collapsed to her knees, breathing hard. Her phone still lay on the ground, still streaming. The chat exploded with messages:
wtf was that???
IS THIS A MOVIE?!
yo is this ARG??
that sword was insane
her phone is haunted I swear
Kaelen picked it up, turned it off, and dropped it into her lap.
"This was never just content," he said. "They've been using your signal to trace the Key. The more people watch you, the more exposed you are."
Selvara looked up at him, dazed. "Why me? Why now?"
Kaelen stared into her eyes.
"Because the algorithm chose you," he said. "And now, they're coming."
Selvara barely had time to process what just happened. Her chest rose and fell in shallow, panicked breaths. The mirror-like device still pulsed in her palm—cool and steady, as if it had its own heartbeat.
Kaelen turned his back to her and walked briskly toward the alley.
"We need to move. Now."
"I—I can't just leave," Selvara stammered. "My phone, my car, my—"
Kaelen glanced over his shoulder, his voice sharp. "Your car is compromised. Your phone's infected. If you value your mind, leave both."
That silenced her.
She stood shakily, hugging herself. Her knees felt like static. "Where are we going?"
Kaelen didn't answer immediately. He tapped a code into his wristband. A shimmer of light appeared beside a crumbling wall—like a curtain made of refracted pixels.
"Through the firewall," he said simply.
Selvara blinked. "Wait… what?"
He stepped through the glitching light. One moment he was there, the next—gone.
Selvara stood frozen, heart pounding.
Then the wind shifted.
She heard the buzz again—this time deeper, like a distant swarm waking up. More drones. More hunters.
With a shout, she ran and plunged into the glitch.
---
The world twisted.
Colors bled. Sounds warped. Her lungs seized for a moment as if forgetting how to breathe. Then, light snapped back—and she was somewhere else.
The alley was gone.
She stood in a dim, concrete room lit only by floating holographic lights and pulsing code on the walls. Strange symbols danced across the air like silent language. The ground below her felt… alive, humming softly with power.
Kaelen stood ahead, typing furiously at a suspended keyboard made of translucent glass.
"Where… where are we?" she whispered.
"A backdoor node," Kaelen replied. "Hidden in the infrastructure. One of the last physical interfaces to the Vertex Grid."
"Vertex… Grid?"
He finally looked at her. "Selvara. The world you know is a shell. Beneath every app, every upload, every 'like'… there's another layer. It started as code. Now it's evolved. It has rules. Gates. Watchers."
"And I'm part of this? Just because I went viral?"
Kaelen shook his head. "No. Because you were chosen long before that."
He brought up a projection: her face. Her DNA strand. Overlayed with fragments of encrypted data glowing in the shape of a star.
"You're carrying the Star Key—the last remaining organic cipher that can unlock Vertex-01, the source code of all modern algorithms."
Selvara stepped back. "That doesn't even make sense."
"It will," he said quietly. "They've been planting the code in bloodlines for generations. Your mother… your grandmother… all unknowing. But it activated in you."
"Why?"
Kaelen's gaze darkened. "Because Rhazeth is trying to rewrite the feed."
The name sent a shiver through the air.
"He was once a guardian like me," Kaelen continued. "Now he controls entire echo-chambers. Viral uprisings. He can steer the world with a trending page."
Selvara tried to laugh, but it came out wrong. "So you're telling me… the guy behind all the chaos online is some shadow hacker overlord? This is insane."
Kaelen leaned in closer. "Not a hacker. A technosorcerer. He doesn't just manipulate data. He speaks to it. And he wants you."
"Why not just… kill me?"
"He doesn't need to," Kaelen said. "He only needs to stream you."
Selvara went pale.
"Everything you are—your voice, your face, your content—it's already feeding his model. The deeper people connect to you, the stronger he becomes."
"Then why save me?"
Kaelen's expression hardened. "Because you're more than a face on a screen. You're the only one who can stop him."
The room suddenly dimmed. A warning blinked across the interface:
> [THREAT DETECTED]
SENTINEL ENCRYPTOR BREACH – ETA: 90 SECONDS
Kaelen moved instantly.
He slammed his palm against a wall panel. A hidden stairwell opened with a low hiss. "We're out of time. We move underground."
Selvara didn't hesitate this time. She followed.
---
Beneath the city, in tunnels carved from old cables and forgotten code, Selvara ran behind Kaelen with nothing but the glow of his strange tech guiding the way.
Behind them, in the collapsing room they'd left, a tall shadow stepped through the fading firewall. A crimson coat brushed the ground. His eyes burned like molten data.
Rhazeth Mourn had arrived.
And he was smiling.
They ran in silence—Selvara panting, Kaelen moving like he knew every inch of the underground. The tunnels pulsed with old lights, flickering as if remembering a time when they were alive with data.
"Where are we even going?" Selvara asked, stumbling.
"Safe node. Off-grid. Just beyond the Filter Zone."
"Filter what now?"
Kaelen didn't answer. His hand flicked a glyph in midair and the path shifted. Walls rearranged themselves like living circuits. The tunnel twisted and opened into a cavern lit with a single, glowing server—floating midair like a suspended heart.
"This is one of the last Non-Indexed Zones," Kaelen explained. "It's not tracked, scraped, or streamed. Not yet."
Selvara walked slowly toward the floating device. It spun silently, emitting a deep hum that calmed her bones. She felt like she could breathe again.
Kaelen placed his hand on it.
A ripple of energy spread out—and for the first time in hours, silence truly returned.
Until it shattered.
> [Breach Alert: V-Entity Detected]
IDENTITY CONFIRMED: RHZ_MOURN
The walls trembled.
From behind them, the tunnel darkened. A gust of cold air swept through—unnatural, wrong. Kaelen pushed Selvara behind him.
A voice echoed, not from the tunnel, but from everywhere at once—reverberating through the cables, bouncing off data.
"So this is the girl."
Rhazeth.
He stepped into view like a ghost rendered in red velvet and smoke. His coat swirled behind him like the trailing edge of a storm. Eyes burning like infected firewalls, skin pale like untouched data. In one gloved hand, he held a single card: blank, except for a spinning icon of loading.
Selvara stepped back. "He doesn't look real…"
"He's not," Kaelen said. "Not anymore."
Rhazeth tilted his head. "So dramatic, Kaelen. Always the martyr. Why protect what's already been claimed?"
Kaelen's blade extended with a pulse. "Take one more step and I erase you."
Rhazeth smiled. "Try."
Then he vanished—just pixels.
A decoy.
Kaelen cursed. "Damn it. He's already inside the stream."
The floating server blinked rapidly—then fractured. Cracks of glitch-light burst outward.
Kaelen moved fast. He grabbed Selvara, shielded her body with his own, and slammed a new override code into the wall. A hatch opened beneath them—vertical, dark, endless.
"Jump," he said.
"Are you serious?!"
"NOW!"
They fell—together.
Just before the server exploded.
---
The world twisted around them as they dropped into a tunnel of pure code. Holograms rushed past like memories—Selvara's face in a million views, a million reactions. All watching. All judging.
And above, Rhazeth watched through every lens.
"Run, little star," he whispered. "You shine brightest when you're afraid."