The violet beam of light wrapped around Lin Tao and Tie Shan in a silent, freezing metal tube of pure office energy.
The air pressure inside the beam collapsed to zero.
Sound ceased to propagate. The screaming of the panicked crowds, the groaning of the mid-air chains. The howling of the mountain gales were instantly silenced, replaced by the dead, choking static hum of an active system probe.
Before Lin Tao’s test left eye, the world dissolved into towering waterfalls of cascading scarlet tracking data:
A massive, glowing scarlet glyph—the ancient Precursor seal for QUARANTINE PURGE—burned into the air three inches before Lin Tao’s forehead.
The Precursor OS kernel had reached its verdict.
An entity that could take a four point eight megajoule land-wide cleave directly to the chest and register zero damage was not a fighter. It was a critical, fatal system vulnerability. A zero-day exploit that threatened the stone-built balance of the entire land-wide test model.
The kernel had issued a Grade-7 Quarantine Warrant.
