SSS-Rank Corporate Predator System

The world was screaming.

It wasn't a sound.

It was a feeling.

Miles was a passenger in a runaway train, and the train was his own body.

He was on the floor of the lobby, but the floor was gone, replaced by a swirling vortex of screaming, corrupted data.

[OVERLOAD.]

The system's voice was no longer a calm, digital whisper in his mind.

It was a shriek.

A desperate, tearing sound, like metal being ripped apart.

[SOUL SHARD INTEGRITY… 17%… 9%… CRITICAL.]

He could see the code of his own existence unraveling.

The elegant, silver script of the Echo Protocol was flickering, breaking apart, being consumed by jagged, angry lines of red error messages.

He was a program, and he was crashing.

And he was taking the whole building with him.

He could feel the power pouring out of him, a raw, untamed tsunami of kinetic and spatial energy.

It had no direction.

It had no purpose.

It just wanted to break things.

He saw the marble walls of the lobby cracking, splintering under the invisible pressure.

He saw the last of the light fixtures explode in a shower of sparks and glass.

This was it.

This was how it ended.

He was a bomb, and the countdown was over.

He was going to die, a monster of his own making, a weapon that had finally misfired.

And he was going to kill the one person he had come here to save.

He could see her, a flickering image in the storm of static.

Clara.

She was standing there, her face pale, her eyes wide.

Run, a small, sane part of his mind screamed.

*Run away from me.*

Julian was already trying to.

The arrogant prince was now just a terrified boy, scrambling backward on his hands and knees, trying to crawl away from the epicenter of the storm.

His face was a pathetic mask of tears and disbelief.

He was irrelevant.

A piece of background noise.

The only thing that mattered was the girl who wasn't running.

Clara took a step.

Not away.

Toward him.

*What are you doing?* the sane part of his mind shrieked. *Are you crazy? I'm a walking nuclear reactor having a meltdown!*

The system agreed.

[EXTERNAL BIOLOGICAL ENTITY APPROACHING. DANGER. PROXIMITY ALERT.]

He tried to warn her.

He opened his mouth, but the only sound that came out was a distorted, inhuman roar of static and pain.

Arcs of silver and black lightning, the raw, untamed energy of his soul shard, lashed out from his body, striking the floor around her, leaving spiderwebs of cracked marble in their wake.

She didn't even flinch.

She just kept walking.

Her face was no longer pale with shock.

It was set with a fierce, stubborn determination that Miles had only ever seen once before.

In his mother's eyes, on the night they saved his life.

She reached him.

He was thrashing on the floor now, his body is now an unstable hologram, caught between the physical world and the screaming digital void in his head.

She knelt beside him, ignoring the dangerous energy that was making the air hum and crackle.

She ignored the cracks of the ceiling that were starting to rain down around them.

She reached out.

And she grabbed his hand.

The contact was a lightning strike.

It was a shock that cut through the static, through the pain, through the screaming code.

It was real.

It was warm.

It was an anchor in the middle of his hurricane.

He looked up at her, his vision flickering, his glowing, inhuman eyes locking with her steady, human ones.

"Miles," she said, her voice cutting through the chaos.

It wasn't a shout.

It wasn't a plea.

It was a command.

"Miles, listen to me!" she yelled, her grip on his hand tightening. "Fight it!"

He tried to pull away, a wounded animal lashing out.

But her grip was like iron.

"Don't let it consume you," she said, her voice dropping, becoming more intense, more focused.

She was leaning over him now, her face just inches from his, her eyes boring into his.

"You are not a weapon."

The words hit him harder than any physical blow.

"You are not a system. You are not a ghost."

She took a deep, shuddering breath.

"You're still you."

And in that moment, something inside him shifted.

Her voice.

Her touch.

Her unwavering belief in the boy she knew was still in there somewhere… it was a signal.

A clear, strong signal that cut through all the noise.

The system, the ghost in his machine, heard it too.

It latched onto her presence like a drowning man grabbing a life raft.

A new line of text appeared in his mind, calm and clear amidst the storm of error messages.

[EXTERNAL ANCHOR DETECTED.]

[SOUL RESONANCE STABILIZING…]

The screaming in his head began to fade, replaced by a low, steady hum.

The jagged, red lines of code began to recede, beaten back by the calm, silver light of his core programming.

[REBOOTING CORE PROTOCOLS.]

The violent energy that had been pouring out of him, the raw, untamed power, seemed to hesitate.

Then, it began to flow backward, retreating into his body, being pulled back into the cage it had broken out of.

The arcs of silver and black lightning flickered and died.

The pressure in the room vanished.

The flickering of his own body stopped.

He was solid again.

He was just a boy.

A very tired, very broken boy, lying on a shattered marble floor.

He looked up at Clara, his breath coming in ragged, painful gasps.

The glow in his eyes had faded, leaving only the haunted, exhausted gaze she knew so well.

She was still holding his hand, her knuckles white.

She hadn't let go.

She hadn't run.

She had walked into the heart of the storm and pulled him out.

From across the ruined lobby, Julian Cross stared, his mind a complete and total blank.

He had just witnessed the impossible.

He had seen a monster born from pure rage.

And he had seen a girl calm it with a word.

He couldn't process it.

His world of money and power and influence had no frame of reference for this.

This was something else.

Something ancient.

Something terrifying.

Miles looked at Clara, at her face, which was now streaked with dust and a single, clean track where a tear had run down her cheek.

He didn't know what to say.

"Thank you" felt ridiculously, laughably small.

So he just lay there, breathing, his hand in hers, saved from the brink, not by a system, but by the one person who had seen the monster and had still chosen to see the man.

And he knew, with a certainty that settled deep in his bones, that his life, his mission, his entire world, had just changed forever.

He was no longer just fighting for the ghosts of his past.

He was fighting for the anchor who was sitting right in front of him.