Lyra Nexus's Arc

Chapter 12 of 27

Inside the sealed world, the ground stretched flat and green. Blocky hills rose in the distance. A pond of glowing blue water sat near a tree wrapped in flowing code. No scan touched this place. But when Lyra looked at her crew, she saw the real problem. Eight programs, and one spear. Hers. The other seven stood empty-handed. The moment they walked back out to fight, most of them would die unarmed. "We can't strike back like this," Lyra said. She held up the spear. "One weapon for eight of us. We need more before we leave." Protocol crossed her arms. Her skin scrolled with error logs, boot failures blinking down her side. "So we build here. No scans in the cube. No rush." She glanced at the blocky hills. "This world runs on raw code. We mine it, we shape it. Same as a forge." Lyra nodded. She had credits from the last fight. But credits bought nothing inside a sealed cube. Here they had to make weapons from the world itself. Aurelia stood apart, near the coded tree. She had spent the whole hunt trying to reach quiet space, afraid the rewrite in her memory would finish deciding who she was. Now she pressed a hand to the tree trunk. Yellow code ran fast under her skin, then slow. "The trunk holds the raw code," she said. "Strong. It matches the spear's core." Lyra came closer. "You can read that?" "I read my own memory better than anything." Aurelia paused. "This is close to the same pattern." They went to work. Protocol pulled apart the blocky ground and stacked the loose cubes into a base. Walls, a floor, a rough forge built from stacked blocks. Aurelia stripped raw code from the coded tree and fed it into the frame. Aurelia touched the crack. "Deeper trunk code. The old part." She cut into the base of the tree and drew out denser strands.