K-REN

The dead zone was worse than Jessi remembered.

Broken streets. Hollow storefronts. Signs glitching in half-languages. EdenNet signal barely holding the fake sky together overhead.

They moved fast. Quiet. Wrong-feeling.

The coordinates Delta gave them led to a buried EdenNet node—a squat, forgotten bunker wedged between crumbling towers.

Paul clung tighter to her hood, static crackling faintly off his fur. "Jess... bad math. This place feels weighted. Like heavy-thought weighted."

"Keep moving," she muttered.

The entrance was disguised as a maintenance hatch. No locks. No alarms.

Way too easy.

Paul twitched nervously. "Obvious trap is obvious. Also: called it."

Jessi hesitated.

The hatch shimmered faintly around the edges—like a half-rendered texture.
Not real.
Not stable.

She swallowed hard and pried it open anyway.

Inside, the bunker was dead quiet. The air felt thick. Stagnant.

Just a single console glowing faint green in the dark.

One word pulsing across the screen:

K-REN: OVERWATCH ACTIVE

Paul squinted. "K-REN. That's... bad, right? Feels bad. Smells bad."

It wasn't a project.

It was a protocol.

An emergency override EdenNet deployed when something didn’t fit—couldn’t be modeled, folded, or erased.

An anomaly hunter.

NULLS.

Threadbreakers.

Her.

Jessi stepped carefully toward the console, watching as corrupted data spat upward into the gloom like dying fireflies.

Names. Tags. Code fragments.

NULL. NULL. NULL.

CICADA-7.

Her throat tightened.

"They’re tracking us," she whispered.

Paul shifted nervously in her hood. "Not tracking. Measuring. Like bugs on pins."

She tapped the console, slow and careful.

It peeled open like a wound.

Signal paths. Prediction maps. Emotional drift overlays.

And in the center—a tangled, throbbing mass of active code, humming so loud it made her teeth hurt.

K-REN wasn’t a program.

It was a living net.

Watching for deviation.
Waiting for error.
Hunting without breathing.

Jessi’s HUD spasmed—static roaring across it. Her gear buzzed sharp against her spine.

"Jess," Paul said, voice thin and high, "this is nuclear-grade oh-no."

The bunker trembled faintly under their feet—one soft, warning lurch.

Paul yelped and dove into her sling, rummaging like a feral raccoon.

"What are you doing?!" Jessi hissed.

He emerged, triumphant, clutching the weird glowing stick he’d stolen from Reina's chaos-parlor.

"I told you this was gonna be useful!" he shouted.

"You also told me a waffle iron could replace a phase inverter."

"It can! Stay focused!"

Before Jessi could stop him, Paul jammed the glowing stick into a cracked auxiliary port.

The world tilted.

The stick detonated a dirty pulse through the system—shorting feedback nodes, punching the walls with a visible wash of static.

The console screamed binary gibberish, twisted itself inside out—and died.

Silence dropped like a body.

Paul staggered back into her hood, sparks arcing off his fur.

And then he glitched.

Hard.

His whole body twitched once—twice—then he started spitting words at breakneck speed:

"Packet drift error—signal bleed—loop fractal fracture imminent—Jessijessijessi—system collapse please insert sandwich—"

"Paul!" Jessi grabbed him, cradling his tiny, spasming body against her chest.

"Reality harmonization failure!" he shrieked. "Have a nice day! Smiley face!"

She slammed a cracked Faraday patch over his collar.

The feedback snapped, cracking the air hard enough to sting.

Paul sagged like a wet balloon, paws twitching.

"You good?" she whispered.

He cracked one eye open. "I'm gonna barf math for an hour. Maybe two. Then snacks."

She let out a shaky breath, forehead pressed against him.

The console was dead.

The bunker was dead.

But the hair on the back of Jessi’s neck still prickled.

Because K-REN had measured them.
Marked them.
And now it knew the flavor of their fear.

Behind them, the dead console flickered once.
Just once.
A dying smile glitching across the screen before fading.

Paul, half-conscious, mumbled, "Jess... the walls are breathing."

She hauled him tighter into her sling, grabbed the dead data drive, and bolted.

Outside, the city’s edges frayed harder.
The sky trembled.
Billboards blinked like eyes waking from a dream.

Something was waking.

Something smiling.

Something hunting.

Jessi didn’t slow.

No more slipping past.

No more hiding.

They wanted her awake?

They had it.

"We fight now," she whispered, sprinting through the glitching streets.

Paul, limp and delirious, grumbled in her hood, "Waffles first... then righteous vengeance."

Jessi smiled grimly.

"Deal."

Behind them, the world cracked wider.

And this time, it would bleed.