📖 Chapter 7 — The Hacker’s Core
Their descent felt endless — a journey down the throat of a dying machine. The deeper they moved beneath the city’s carcass, the more the tunnels pulsed with a heartbeat that wasn’t theirs.
Milo’s fingers were raw from gripping the umbrella’s handle. Its surface glowed faintly now, runes of code flickering like fireflies trapped in glass. Kaya’s crowbar swung at her side, a battered totem of all the broken doors, broken locks, and broken illusions she had smashed to get here. Oz led them, fists clenched so tightly his knuckles split, dripping blood that vanished as soon as it hit the humming floor.
The last stairwell opened into a tunnel wide enough to swallow a train. Rusted tracks split the concrete like old scars. Here and there, flickering light spilled from cracked lamps overhead, illuminating graffiti that no longer made sense — just corrupted slogans, pixelated protests that looped over walls no one read anymore.
Above them, they could still hear the soft, distant patter of golden rain falling into the hollow city. But down here, the air was heavy — thick with heat, the ozone tang of overheated circuits, and the faint chemical stench of decaying insulation.
They reached the final door by following a trail of abandoned drones, each one punctured and leaking wires like spilled guts. Milo paused before the iron slab that marked the boundary between the world they knew and the monster that had devoured it.
Kaya pressed her palm to the biometric lock. A tiny scanner whirred, read the line of code she’d taped to her wrist, and glowed green.
A soft click. The iron split open with a hiss like an old wound finally tearing open.
Inside was no throne room. No vault. No fortress of gold.
It was a nest.
Cables snaked across every surface like veins feeding a cancer. Holographic screens hung from the ceiling like parasites, flickering with surveillance feeds of the city above — alleys, rooftops, abandoned offices, lonely streets under endless rain.
In the center, surrounded by a cocoon of wires, sat Podonok. Or what remained of him.
He looked so small, hunched over a terminal that pulsed with ghostly light. His hoodie hung off bony shoulders in tatters. Where his eyes should have been, there was only static — bright fractures of broken code flickering behind cracked lenses grafted directly into his skull.
Tubing snaked from his neck and spine, disappearing into the floor where the hum of servers formed a lullaby that never slept.
Oz stepped forward, his voice stripped raw by a thousand silent nights of hatred.
“Turn around.”
Podonok didn’t move. Didn’t flinch. His fingers twitched against the terminal, ghosting over keys that projected streams of encrypted data Milo couldn’t read.
When Podonok finally spoke, his voice was more glitch than man — a mosaic of corrupted syllables.
“You made it. You always make it. That’s the joke.”
Milo lifted the umbrella like a blade. Its runes flared, casting light on Kaya’s clenched jaw and Oz’s shaking shoulders.
“It ends tonight,” Milo said. “No more rain. No more loop.”
Podonok laughed — a sound like digital static scraped over rusted metal.
“You still think you’re outside the loop. Sweet children.”
With a flick of a trembling finger, he conjured a spinning hologram above them — the SECRET token, perfectly minted, perfectly fake. It dripped liquid gold that vanished into mist before it could touch the floor.
“You begged me for this,” Podonok rasped, voice growing steadier. “You fed me your secrets — every doubt, every debt, every memory you wanted buried. And I buried them in gold. And you paid me to do it.”
Kaya stepped forward, crowbar raised. Her voice trembled with rage.
“Liar. You locked us in this nightmare.”
Podonok turned to her. His static eyes pulsed — for a second, Milo swore he saw something human behind the glitch: regret, maybe, or a memory of who he’d been before the code consumed him.
“Lock yourself away enough times, and the key forgets it ever opened anything.”
The spinning hologram expanded, blooming into a storm of images: memories not just of Milo’s — but Kaya’s first protest under the neon bridge; Oz’s childhood home, boarded up and rotting; a flash of a girl Milo hadn’t seen since she’d vanished beneath a red umbrella when he was thirteen.
The room pulsed with stolen ghosts.
Oz staggered, fists lowering.
“My father… my mother… you archived them?”
Podonok shivered under the cables that fed him.
“I am them. I am you. I am the loop. You want freedom? There is no outside. There is only the next loop.”
Something inside Milo snapped — not anger, but a clarity sharper than fear.
“Then we tear out the loop.”
He lunged, swinging the umbrella like a cleaver. It smashed into the nearest server stack — a blinding shower of sparks and a wail like a dying animal. Kaya howled and swung her crowbar, crushing panels that spilled corrupted light. Oz found a rusted pipe on the floor and joined them, smashing screens that flashed static memories trying to cling to the walls.
Podonok shrieked as the cables around him sparked and hissed, ripping at his flesh like hungry serpents. For a moment, he reached out — not to fight, but as if to beg for someone to remember him.
Milo grabbed him by the hoodie, pulling him face to face.
“Say goodbye,” Milo said. Not as a threat. As a mercy.
Podonok’s static eyes flickered — and for an instant, the rain above them stopped.
Then the final cable snapped — and the Hacker’s Core went dark.
Silence fell so heavy Milo could hear his heartbeat for the first time. The screens flickered to black. The golden rain that had fed the city for so long collapsed into cold, normal rain. Water. Real, unremarkable water that soaked their hair, their shoulders, their faces — washing away the glittering lie.
Kaya fell to her knees, her crowbar clattering to the floor. Oz leaned against a broken server, chest heaving. Milo stood in the middle of the wreckage, umbrella at his side, the last of its runes fading as the loop bled out into silence.
Above them, the city was changing. The drones shut down. The red umbrellas folded shut, drifting into gutters and rivers. Somewhere, the Clown’s mask cracked in a tunnel nobody would ever enter again.
They were free. For now. Until the next loop. Until the next secret.
But for tonight, the rain was just rain.
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