The system interface turned white.

  Not blue. Not red. White—the color of a clean slate, a formatted drive, a system that had stopped displaying information and started displaying intent.

  [CRITICAL SYSTEM ALERT.]

  [Unauthorized Administrative Command detected in Sector 4.]

  [Logic Paradox identified. Root Access spoofed.]

  [Initiating Anti-Virus Protocol: "The Hounds of Tindalos."]

  David had been expecting a response. He hadn’t expected it this fast.

  Outside the train’s viewport, the Abyss tore open. Not the smooth dimensional transitions he’d experienced during travel—these were jagged, angular ruptures, as if the void’s geometry was being cut with broken glass. From the cracks, shapes emerged: wireframe constructs of blue-white light, canine in silhouette but wrong in every detail. No fur, no flesh—just interlocking polygons forming the minimum viable representation of a predator.

  System Eradicators. The Abyss’s immune response to unauthorized modifications.

  Three of them locked onto the Midnight Express. The Void Camouflage was irrelevant—they didn’t track visual or sensory signatures. They tracked logic anomalies. David’s spoofed administrative access was a corruption signature that lit up their targeting system like a beacon.

  The first Hound phased through the train’s hull as if the physical structure didn’t exist in the Hound’s version of reality. Its wireframe claw swiped at David. He dodged—barely. The claw passed through his left arm without cutting flesh but inflicted something worse: direct code-damage, a reduction of his system-recognized HP by 20% that bypassed all physical defenses.

  The pain was unlike anything he’d experienced. Not tissue damage but data corruption—a sensation of parts of himself being edited out, as if his existence was a document and someone was selecting paragraphs for deletion.

  The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

  "Emergency spatial jump! Target: Hub Bazaar!" David slammed the console.

  [WARNING: Spatial jump during Anti-Virus lock will result in severe coordinate scrambling.]

  "Execute."

  The train’s spatial drive screamed. Reality stretched. The Hounds—still reaching for David through the dimensional fold—were left behind as the Express punched through into hyperspace.

  David collapsed on the Engine Room floor. The Hounds were gone, but a new icon pulsed permanently in his interface: a red warning sigil.

  [Status Condition: Flagged by System Anti-Virus.]

  [Administrative privileges under severe monitoring.]

  [Further brute-force hacking will result in immediate Account Deletion.]

  David stared at the red icon. His breathing was ragged. His HP was at 80% with no physical wound to show for it—just a phantom ache in his left arm where the Hound’s claw had edited him.

  The system had an immune response. He’d known it was possible—any sufficiently complex system would have error-correction mechanisms. But the speed and aggression of the response told him something important: the Consortium’s modifications to the Abyss were themselves unauthorized. The system’s Anti-Virus didn’t distinguish between David’s hacking and the Consortium’s exploitation. It attacked both. The Consortium had simply learned to stay below the detection threshold.

  David had not stayed below the threshold. He’d spoofed root access, overwritten a dungeon’s code, destroyed a facility, and killed an overseer. The system’s immune response was proportional to the severity of the intrusion.

  Which meant brute force was over. No more admin overrides. No more direct code injection. The next time he tripped the Anti-Virus, the Hounds would come faster, in greater numbers, and they would not stop until his account was deleted.

  He needed to operate differently. Not as a hacker kicking down doors, but as a virus: subtle, persistent, invisible, modifying the host system one cell at a time without triggering an immune response.

  David stood up. He looked at the red warning icon and smiled—not the forced 30-degree carnival grin, but the thin, genuine smile of someone who’d just been told the rules of a new game and was already looking for the exploits.

  "Noted," he said to the icon. "I’ll be quieter next time."