Chapter 13: The Proxy

  The physical manifestation of Silas Vane stepping into the Aurelia Cluster did not look like a magical portal opening. It looked like a catastrophic drop in the city’s framerate.

  Just outside Moonveil’s western gate, a merchant’s cart heavily laden with glowing crystal-apples suddenly stuttered. The merchant froze mid-shout, his voice dragging out into a deep, synthesized drone. For a two-block radius, the hyper-vibrant colors of the fantasy metropolis instantly desaturated into bruised, sickly grays.

  Silas Vane stepped out of the desaturated air.

  He hadn't changed his clothes to match the realm. He still wore his tailored, obsidian Earth overcoat, a jarring anomaly against the medieval stonework and bustling fantasy citizens. But no one looked at him. As Vane walked through the frozen crowd, the local NPCs’ optical sensors simply slid off him. He was running a localized cloaking script—a minor edit to the server's light-rendering protocols that made him fundamentally imperceptible to anything beneath a Level 2 Observer.

  Vane closed his solid black eyes and inhaled deeply.

  The air in Aurelia tasted thick, overloaded with inefficient data loops and bloated magical syntax. But beneath the noise of the city, he could smell it: the distinct, ozone-and-paper scent of Golden Code.

  // TRACE_ROUTE: INITIATED.

  // TARGET_PROXIMITY: 0.8 MILES.

  Vane opened his eyes and began to walk toward the Adventurer Guild. He didn't navigate the winding cobblestone streets; he simply walked in a perfectly straight line. When a stone wall or a market stall blocked his path, his physical form briefly dissolved into a swarm of black pixels, clipping smoothly through the solid object before instantly re-rendering on the other side.

  Inside the Guildhall, Alexander was suffocating in a sea of red text.

  // PROXIMITY ALERT: 0.6 MILES.

  // THREAT LEVEL: FATAL.

  "Alexander, look at me," Lyra demanded, her voice cutting through the ringing in his ears. She grabbed his shoulders, shaking him slightly. "Your eyes are glowing. Stop it. If Jaxen sees you—"

  "I can't stop it," Alexander choked out, squeezing his eyes shut. "He's pinging my location. The guy from the crypts. The encryption owner. He's here, Lyra. He's walking right toward us."

  Lyra didn't ask how he knew. She didn't doubt him. She instantly calculated the variables and moved into action. "We need to mask your signature. Whatever energy you emit when you edit the weave, it's acting like a beacon."

  Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

  Thorne suddenly slid into the alcove, nearly tripping over his own boots. He slammed two glass vials and a tin of poultice onto the table. "Got the ambrosia! The apothecary wanted twelve gold, but I bartered him down to—"

  "Drink this," Lyra interrupted, shoving one of the glowing green vials directly into Alexander's hand. "Now."

  Alexander uncorked the vial and downed it. It tasted like liquid sunlight and pine needles. The ambient processing power hit his lagging biological hardware like a defibrillator. The violent trembling in his hands stopped, and the agonizing heat in his skull rapidly cooled.

  // HARDWARE STABILIZED.

  // SYSTEM LATENCY: NOMINAL.

  "Better," Alexander gasped, wiping his mouth. "But the ping is still active. He's closing in. Half a mile."

  "Out the back," Lyra ordered, grabbing Thorne by the arm. "Leave the rest of the gold."

  "Leave the gold?!" Thorne squawked.

  "If we stay, we die, Thorne! Move!"

  They slipped out the reinforced kitchen door of the Guildhall and into a narrow, muddy alleyway behind the taverns. The smell of roasting meat faded, replaced by the damp stench of the city's drainage grates.

  // PROXIMITY ALERT: 0.3 MILES.

  "He's moving too fast," Alexander said, his boots splashing through a puddle. "He's not taking the streets. He's clipping straight through the architecture."

  Lyra skidded to a halt at a four-way intersection of twisting alleys. She looked wildly up at the towering, obsidian spires of Moonveil. "I can't cast a cloaking incantation. I don't have the mana, and even if I did, an optical illusion won't hide you from someone who can track your... your code."

  Alexander leaned against a damp stone wall, his Architect vision overlaying the city. He could see Vane's approach now—a sphere of corrupted, black code slowly moving through the wireframe schematic of the city. Everything the sphere touched experienced severe packet loss.

  If he's tracking my Golden Code... Alexander thought, his newly refreshed brain firing on all cylinders. Then I need to spoof my IP address.

  "Lyra," Alexander said sharply. "Do you have any raw magic left? Anything?"

  "A spark," she said, holding up her hand. A tiny, pathetic flicker of blue flame hovered over her palm. "Maybe enough to light a candle."

  "Give it to me."

  Lyra didn't hesitate. She pressed her glowing palm directly against Alexander's chest.

  Alexander didn't pull the Golden Code outward to rewrite the environment. Instead, he forced his Level 4 Architect privileges inward. He grabbed the tiny, pre-compiled string of Lyra's fire syntax and rapidly duplicated it, wrapping the mundane, native Aurelian code around his own core directory.

  // COMMAND: SPOOF_SIGNATURE

  // WRAPPING LOCAL_VARIABLE: FIRE_MINOR

  // BROADCASTING FALSE PING...

  The agonizing red warning banner in his vision abruptly halted.

  Two streets over, Silas Vane stopped dead in his tracks. He was standing in the middle of a crowded bakery, having just clipped through the oven wall. The baker stared at him, completely frozen by the localized lag.

  Vane tilted his head. The massive, glaring beacon of Golden Code he had been tracking had just vanished. In its place, the system was registering nothing but a pathetic, flickering spark of low-tier fire magic. A Copper-Rank signature. Utterly insignificant.

  Vane’s black eyes narrowed. The rogue hadn't just run; he had learned how to encrypt his own hardware on the fly.

  Vane let out a slow, synthesized breath that instantly wilted the fresh bread on the shelves. Clever. Back in the alley, Alexander slumped against the stone, the golden light completely fading from his eyes. The red warning banner dissolved into a quiet, ambient blue HUD.

  "The trace is broken," Alexander whispered, his voice shaking with relief. "He lost the lock."

  "Who lost the lock?" Thorne demanded, gripping his sword, looking frantically at the empty rooftops. "Who is chasing us?"

  "The man who corrupted the crypts," Lyra said quietly. She looked at Alexander, her expression unreadable. "You hid yourself inside my spell."

  "I used it as a proxy shield," Alexander confirmed, pushing himself off the wall. "But it won't hold forever. If I use my... if I edit anything else, the shield will break, and he'll see exactly where I am. I'm completely grounded."

  "Then we can't stay in Moonveil," Lyra said, her analytical mind already plotting the next move. "If he knows you're in the city limits, he’ll start a manual grid search. We have to leave."

  "Leave?" Thorne protested. "We just got here! We have thirty gold pieces! We're sanctioned!"

  "We're dead if we stay, Thorne," Lyra snapped. She turned to Alexander. "Jaxen Ironheart said Grandmaster Alaric is tracking anomalies in Valerius Prime. The capital. The heart of the server's processing power."

  Alexander nodded slowly. "If this guy is a virus, Valerius Prime is the mainframe. It's the only place with enough defensive architecture to keep him out."

  "Then we head north," Lyra decided,

  pulling her hood up over her head. "To the capital."