Before Frank could take another step toward the Akashic Mainframe, the dying leftovers of the ancient darkness made their final move.
Deep within the fiber-optic channels of the end-post’s underground motherboard, a distorted wisp of oily black vapor began to coagulate.
It was the lingering psychic shadow of the corrupted Scribe Lord. The ancient First Epoch scroll-keeper whose backstabbing had allowed the Nether-Void to breach the World Core one hundred thousand years ago.
The entity had lost its physical body, its army of demon generals, and its titanic Demon Monarch.
All that remained was a malignant, leech-like line of corrupted code nestled in the end-post’s firmware buffer.
SZZZZZT!
The curved glass of the CRT monitor flickered wildly, the green glowing distorting into the twisted, screaming face of a horned demonic phantom.
“MORTAL FOOL!” the phantom shrieked through the end-post’s test speakers, its voice crackling with digital static and ancient malice. “You have breached the vault, but you shall never touch the roots of Heaven! I have seized the master boot record! I’m deleting the partition tables! The Jiuzhou Plane shall be wiped from existence!”
