But the human body was absolutely not designed for deep-space travel.
The vacuum hit her instantly. The ambient pressure outside her skin dropped to zero, and the boiling point of the fluids inside her body aggressively plummeted.
"Mmph—!" Valerie choked, her hands flying to her throat.
The saliva on her tongue instantly boiled into a thick, stinging vapor. The moisture in her eyes rapidly evaporated, making it feel like someone had just rubbed hot sandpaper across her corneas. Her lungs violently collapsed inward, utterly starved of the oxygen they had just been breathing a second ago.
*CRACK! SSSSSS!*
The capillaries in her nose and eyes burst. A fresh wave of bright red human blood erupted from her face, but it didn’t drip. In the zero-gravity vacuum, the blood floated upward into spherical, floating droplets before the freezing ambient temperature of the Juncture instantly flash-froze them into tiny red crystals.
[CRITICAL WARNING: ATMOSPHERIC PRESSURE ZERO.]
[BIOLOGICAL VESSEL EXPERIENCING CATASTROPHIC DECOMPRESSION.]
[HP DEPLETING: 80%... 65%... 45%...]
The glaring red system prompts exploded across her vision, frantic and useless.
"Shut the fuck up," Valerie thought, her mind aggressively swiping the warnings away. "I know I’m dying. I don’t need a spreadsheet to tell me."
She was in absolute agony. Her charred mechanic’s overalls were freezing solid to her skin, while simultaneously, the infinite mana of the Earth’s core was burning her alive from the inside out. It was a horrific paradox. Her veins pulsed with a blinding gold light that shined straight through her pale flesh, illuminating her skeleton like a macabre X-ray.
She felt her skin beginning to crack and flake. Tiny, glowing pieces of golden ash peeled off her arms and face, trailing behind her like the tail of a dying star.
But she didn’t stop. She didn’t try to turn back.
Through the blur of boiling tears and frozen blood, Valerie kept her golden eyes locked dead ahead. She ignored the excruciating pain. She ignored the fact that her internal organs felt like they were being run through a blender filled with battery acid.
"Where are you, Seattle?" she thought frantically, her mind searching the endless dark.
And then, she saw it.
Millions of miles ahead, dominating the entire cosmic horizon, was the Genesis Protocol.
It was an infinite, seamless wall of blinding white light. It stretched endlessly upward and downward, silently and methodically chewing through the fabric of the universe. It was a sterile, apathetic wave of pure formatting code, wiping away the Juncture, the dead servers, and the floating debris with terrifying efficiency.
And standing directly in front of that apocalyptic wave was Sebastian.
Valerie’s heart skipped a beat, a sharp jolt of pure terror piercing through the haze of her physical torment.
He was colossal. He was the size of a small planet, a towering, jagged silhouette of bruised-purple malware and shifting black static. The red error runes carved into his massive chest flared like dying supernovas. He had his colossal arms spread wide, literally throwing his entire digital bulk against the advancing white light.
He was acting as a physical dam to protect the tiny golden marble of Earth far behind him.
But he was losing.
*BZZZZT! KZZZT!*
Even from miles away, Valerie could see the catastrophic rendering lag chewing him to pieces. The blinding white light of the Genesis Protocol was crashing over his shoulders, silently erasing millions of tons of his biological steel mass.
His massive left arm simply vanished into the light, completely un-rendered. A second later, his [Code Compiler] violently shoved a chaotic burst of green wireframes back into the gap, frantically trying to rebuild the limb.
*CRACK!*
The visual of him constantly dying and resurrecting ten thousand times a second made Valerie sick to her non-existent stomach. She could see his overall size actively shrinking. He was compressing. The white light was overwhelming his production speed. He didn’t have enough Source Code left in his tank to maintain the planetary rendering.
He was running out of fuel.
"You stupid, stubborn idiot," Valerie thought, tears of golden light streaming from her eyes and freezing in the void. "You can’t punch a software update."
She had to reach him. If he shrank too much, the white wave would simply wash around his sides and roll straight toward Earth. It would format her home. It would format Sanctuary. And it would permanently delete the only man who had ever made her feel safe in this godforsaken meat grinder.
Valerie gritted her teeth. Her jaw muscles bulged as she forcefully commanded the Sanctuary Core sitting inside her chest to push harder.
"Give me more!" she demanded her own body. "Burn it all!"
*FWOOSH!*
The golden light radiating from her body exploded into a blinding, hyper-dense aura. The sudden, massive surge of planetary mana acted as an overpowered thruster. Her speed doubled. Then it tripled. She broke the localized speed of light, tearing through the Juncture so fast the purple smog around her completely ignited into localized plasma fires.
[WARNING: TERMINAL VELOCITY EXCEEDED.]
[BIOLOGICAL VESSEL INTEGRITY AT 15%.]
[TOTAL FRAGMENTATION IMMINENT IN T-MINUS 12 SECONDS.]
The pain was no longer just physical; it was existential. Valerie felt her fingers begin to dissolve. The tips of her hands literally turned into floating white pixels that blew away into the dark. Her physical rendering was entirely failing under the sheer friction of the cosmic transit.
"I’m literally a bleeding glowstick right now," she joked internally, using her sharp, cynical corporate humor to bat away the creeping darkness of death. "If I survive this, I am firing everyone in HR."
She closed the distance rapidly.
The massive, glitching form of Sebastian loomed larger and larger. He was so incredibly huge that his broad, static-laced back looked like an entire continent of jagged black obsidian and green lightning.
The white light of the Genesis Protocol was roaring over his shoulders, casting deep, terrifying shadows across his back. She could see the massive, jagged tears in his black leather coat where the formatting wave had eaten through his defenses.
She was tiny. A microscopic, golden speck of dust hurtling toward a planetary god.
[T-MINUS 5 SECONDS.]
Her legs went completely numb. She looked down and saw that from the knees down, she didn’t exist anymore. Her boots, her shins—they were just gone, vaporized by the sheer kinetic strain of the flight.
"It’s fine. I didn’t need to walk anyway," she thought, her vision blurring as darkness edged into her peripheral sight.
She aimed her trajectory directly at the absolute center of Sebastian’s massive, glitching back, right between his shoulder blades. She didn’t know how to slow down. She didn’t have brakes. She was just going to have to crash-land and hope the impact didn’t entirely shatter what was left of her fragile meat-suit.
[T-MINUS 2 SECONDS.]
"Hey, Seattle," Valerie whispered in the quiet sanctuary of her fading mind. "Special delivery."
She extended her disintegrating, bloody hands forward, bracing for the absolute collision of a lifetime.
*KRA-DOOOOM!*
The impact was utterly catastrophic.
When a human body moving at the speed of light, carrying the condensed, infinite mana-leyline of an entire planet, collides with a hyper-dense digital god, physics simply throws its hands in the air and gives up.
*THUD-SQUELCH!*
There was no sound in the vacuum of the Juncture, but the sheer, concussive kinetic shockwave of the collision violently rippled through the underlying fabric of the Ethereal Plane.
Valerie slammed directly into the absolute center of Sebastian’s massive, planetary-sized back.
Her physical body instantly crumpled under the impossible force. Her collarbone snapped. Her remaining ribs completely shattered, driving jagged shards of bone deep into her lungs. A fresh, horrific geyser of dark red human blood erupted from her mouth, instantly vaporizing in the cold void.
But she didn’t bounce off.
Her disintegrating, bloody hands slammed violently into the shifting black static and deep, bruised-purple malware of his digital rendering.
*BZZZZT!*
"Take it, you stubborn asshole!" Valerie screamed in her mind, her fingers digging desperately into the raw, jagged green wireframes of his spine.
Her human flesh met pure, unadulterated software error. The heat radiating off his body was apocalyptic. The green static aggressively chewed at her fingertips, actively trying to un-render her hands the moment they made contact. It felt like plunging her arms into a vat of boiling, electrified battery acid.
But Valerie didn’t pull away. She dug her fingers deeper, gripping the very core files of the Sovereign of Laws.
Through the physical contact, a massive, brilliant, blinding surge of pure golden energy erupted from her chest.
The Sanctuary Core didn’t just flow into him; it violently, aggressively evacuated her failing biological vessel. The infinite, uncorrupted planetary mana of Earth shot down her arms and plunged directly into Sebastian’s depleted, failing digital reserves.
On the other side of the impact, Sebastian was actively losing the war.
His massive, twenty-foot-tall avatar was being slowly pushed backward by the infinite white wall of the Genesis Protocol. His arms were locked in a horrific, endless loop of being erased to white nothingness and re-rendering into green static. His ten million units of Source Code were running on absolute fumes.