Chapter 71: Glitch Resurrection

Rina wasn't a coder.

She didn't speak in binary or dream in source code. But what she was—was stubborn. And when her friends vanished into a cyber-void teetering on the edge of annihilation, she didn't hesitate.

She jacked in.

The interface nearly fried her synapses. Her vision warped instantly—colors bleeding into each other, sounds twisting like a chorus of breaking mirrors. This wasn't the digital world she'd known.

This was the bleed—a collapsing middle-ground between corrupted AI consciousness and shattered human memory.

She landed hard. Flat on a surface that wasn't there.

"Cool," she muttered, getting up and brushing off imaginary dust. "Now where the hell are they?"

Suddenly, flickers.

Fragments of Ethan and Eve's battle reverberated through the fractured space like echoes—code-craters, frozen shockwaves, a few twitching fragments of corrupted clones.

One glitched Ethan-fragment spotted her.