CHAPTER 4: SYSTEM REBOOT

  SCENE 1: QUARANTINE

  Waking up felt like being plugged directly into a high-voltage server.

  There was no groggy transition from sleep to wakefulness. One second there was blackness, and the next, a violent, screaming influx of data. Laksh gasped, his back arching against a stiff hospital mattress.

  He was in a sterile, brightly lit room, strapped to a bed with thick leather restraints. But the room was barely visible beneath the chaotic overlay of digital information burning his retinas.

  Every single object possessed a hovering, golden text box. The IV drip next to him read: [SALINE SOLUTION. PURITY 98%. FLOW RATE: 2ml/sec.] The heart monitor beside his bed didn't just beep; it projected a real-time, three-dimensional wireframe of his own rapidly beating heart.

  "Too much," Laksh choked out, squeezing his eyes shut. It didn't help. The UI was projected directly into his optic nerve. The sensory overload was a DDoS attack on his brain.

  To his left, a terrifying sound—a mix of a furious roar and a digital screech—tore through the room.

  Rudra was awake. And he was panicking.

  SCENE 2: THE GLITCHES

  "Get me out! Unplug me!" Rudra thrashed violently. His eyes were wide open, flooding with a violent, radioactive purple light.

  The heavy metal door of the quarantine room burst open. Four military guards in tactical gear rushed in, shock batons raised.

  In a game, when a player is ambushed and doesn't know the controls, they panic. They mash the keyboard. They spam every ability they have, hoping something works.

  That is exactly what Rudra did.

  Driven by pure, unadulterated terror, Rudra screamed and thrust both of his hands toward the nearest guard. He didn't know what to expect. He just wanted the threat gone.

  [ABILITY SPAM DETECTED. OVERRIDING SAFETY PROTOCOLS.]

  A concussive shockwave of purple kinetic energy erupted from his palms. It didn't just hit the guard; it hit the space around the guard. The air warped. With a deafening boom, the guard was thrown backward, crashing through the drywall into the hallway. A massive, jagged crater was left in the concrete wall behind him, rebar twisted and groaning.

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  "Holy—!" Dhruv yelled from the third bed, tearing his own restraints apart as glowing green energy accidentally rusted the metal buckles into dust.

  Laksh, seeing the remaining guards raise their weapons, lost his legendary composure. The Architect panicked. He threw his hands up to shield his face, his mind screaming for a barrier.

  [RAPID-FIRE CONSTRUCT INITIALIZED.]

  Instead of a shield, jagged shards of golden, hard-light geometry fired from Laksh's fingertips like a fully automatic weapon. The projectiles ricocheted wildly off the hospital floor, shattering the overhead fluorescent lights and tearing into the ceiling tiles. Sparks rained down in the darkness, illuminated only by the manic flashing of their own glowing eyes.

  "Stop spamming! You're going to bring the roof down!" Laksh screamed over the chaos, though he couldn't stop his own hands from shaking.

  "I don't know how to turn it off!" Rudra roared back, blasting the reinforced door completely off its hinges to clear a path. "Run!"

  SCENE 3: THE ESCAPE & THE CRASH

  They scrambled through the blasted doorway, slipping on debris and glass. Alarms blared, bathing the corridor in a harsh, strobing red light. They sprinted blindly, moving entirely on the adrenaline of their impossible new existence.

  They burst through a set of double doors, stumbling out into the cold, driving rain of a hospital courtyard. Freedom.

  But reality has a hardware limit. And their human bodies were overheating.

  It hit all three of them at the exact same millisecond.

  Rudra dropped to his knees, clutching his skull as a sound like screeching metal tore through his eardrums. Laksh collapsed into a puddle, vomiting acidic fluid as his vision fractured into agonizing static. Dhruv staggered against a brick wall, gasping for air that felt like liquid fire in his lungs.

  The blinding migraine wasn't just pain; it was the feeling of their central nervous systems being microwaved.

  A massive, flashing red warning banner dominated their vision, overriding all other data:

  [WARNING: NEURAL LOAD AT 85%.]

  [CRITICAL THRESHOLD REACHED. HARDWARE FAILURE IMMINENT.]

  [FORCING COOLDOWN.]

  The glowing purple, gold, and green lights in their eyes sputtered, flickered, and died out completely. The world plunged back into ordinary, mundane darkness.

  "My... my arms," Rudra gasped. He tried to summon the kinetic force again. He visualized the purple energy. Nothing happened. His muscles were just dead weight, screaming with lactic acid. "It's gone. The lag... the cooldown is real."

  Footsteps splashed in the puddles behind them. Shouts echoed from the breached hospital doors. Flashlights cut through the rain.

  Laksh forced his head up, rain plastering his hair to his forehead. Ten yards away stood a towering, chain-link perimeter fence topped with barbed wire. There were no hard-light constructs to build a bridge. There was no kinetic blast to blow a hole in it.

  The gods had been nerfed.

  "We have to climb," Dhruv choked out, pushing himself off the wall, his face pale and purely human.

  Rudra looked at his hands. They weren't glowing weapons of mass destruction anymore. They were just the bruised, trembling hands of a terrified teenager.

  "Climb," Rudra whispered, the horrific reality sinking in.

  They ran for the fence, leaping onto the cold metal grating. The wire bit into their raw fingers. Their boots slipped on the wet metal. They weren't avatars anymore. They were just prey, desperately pulling themselves up the fence with bare, shaking hands as the flashlights closed in below.