The Inverted Zone

The pact was a fragile thing, sealed not with a handshake but with the heavy, unbreathing silence of a tomb. They split into two pairs without a word, a division born of grim necessity. Katrina and Hector turned south, their forms quickly swallowed by the shadows, on the trail of the disgruntled powerhouse, Fat Bruno. That left Nicolas with Pazzo. The two of them struck out to the east, chasing the faintest ghost of a rumor—a whisper of another Zinox, an unknown variable in a world rapidly running out of solutions.

Their journey began under the weight of a silence so profound it felt like a physical pressure. Nicolas was acutely aware of every crackle of desiccated scrub under his boots, every rustle of his own clothing. Beside him, Pazzo moved with a detached, arrogant purpose, a predator on his own territory, and Nicolas couldn't shake the chilling memory of being bound to a stone slab, helpless beneath this man's clinical gaze. He was walking with his would-be executioner, and the unspoken tension between them was a razor's edge.

The landscape itself was a testament to the game’s creeping insanity. It was a dead geography, a sprawling canvas of cracked ochre earth and thorny, skeletal bushes that clawed at their ankles. But the deeper they went, the more the anomalies asserted themselves. Nicolas saw the salt-bleached spine of a long-dead fish half-buried in the dust, miles from any conceivable body of water. Later, he had to step over the skeletal remains of a coral reef, its intricate structures jutting from a dry mudflat like the fossilized ribs of some ancient leviathan.

He finally stopped, nudging a brittle fan of dried kelp with his boot. It crumbled into black flakes that the wind immediately stole. “This doesn't make any sense,” he said, the words feeling rough and loud in the stillness.

Pazzo paused a few paces ahead, not bothering to turn around. “And you expected a world built inside a server to adhere to the tedious logic of your own? Your lack of imagination is tiresome.”

“It’s not about imagination,” Nicolas retorted, his journalistic instincts overriding his caution. “It’s a contradiction. This place was clearly an ocean floor at some point. Now it’s a desert. What happened?”

Pazzo finally turned, and from the deep shadows of his cowl, his eyes glittered with a familiar, mocking light. “Are we suddenly colleagues, engaged in a scholarly debate? Or are you still trying to gather material for your pathetic little newspaper story?”

The condescension was the final spark. Nicolas’s patience, worn thin by fear and exhaustion, snapped. He strode forward, planting himself directly in Pazzo’s path, forcing the man to stop. “That story is the reason I’m here,” he said, his voice hard and level. “That story cost me everything. And if I’m going to die in this digital hell you built, I have a right to the answers. I’ve earned them.”

For a long moment, Pazzo simply stared, his expression unreadable within the cowl’s shadow. He seemed to be weighing this unexpected defiance. Then, with a sigh that was pure theater, he gestured magnanimously at the blighted landscape. “Very well. A final lesson for the doomed. This… all of this… was Doctor Aris’s grand experiment.”

“You mentioned him before. The one from the reports.”

“The sentimental fool who was my former colleague,” Pazzo corrected. “He was trying to prove a point. Have you ever wondered why the game is called OLDMIND?”

“I’ve been a little preoccupied,” Nicolas said dryly.

“Aris believed that the old minds—the minds of previous generations—were superior to the new,” Pazzo explained, beginning to walk again, his voice taking on the cadence of a university lecturer addressing a particularly dim-witted student. “He was obsessed with the theory that humanity was in a state of cognitive and moral decay. He believed the potential to save the world, to restore greatness, was still locked away inside the brains of the clinically deceased. A library of forgotten genius.”

“And he used them as NPCs,” Nicolas finished, the monstrous scale of the idea beginning to settle in his gut.

“Precisely! No one believed him, of course. The idea was grotesque, a scientific heresy. But when he framed the concept as a high-revenue, hyper-realistic game, our corporate overlords were… intrigued. They would make a fortune from the ultimate fantasy experience, and Aris would get the funding to prove his theory. A symbiotic, if distasteful, arrangement.”

A different sound began to intrude on Pazzo’s lecture—a deep, rhythmic pulse that seemed to vibrate up through the soles of Nicolas’s boots. It sounded impossibly like a great wave crashing against a shore. “What is that sound?” he asked, scanning the empty horizon.

Pazzo ignored him, his own attention captured by a strange, metallic device strapped to his wrist. A series of glyphs on its dark surface were flashing in a frantic, erratic pattern. The professor’s academic composure evaporated, replaced by a flicker of genuine alarm.

“Professor?” Nicolas pressed, the rhythmic booming growing louder. “What’s happening?”

“The sector we are in… it is an inverted zone,” Pazzo explained, his voice tight with urgency as he tapped frantically at the device. “A region that is actively regenerating within the game's cosmic structure. Its state is tied to a conjugate pair on the opposite side of the map. When one is the Sahara, the other is the Amazon. When one is bone-dry…”

His voice trailed off as he looked up from the device, his eyes wide. The ground beneath them was now trembling violently. The booming was no longer distant; it was everywhere, a deafening, all-consuming roar.

Nicolas’s mind assembled the terrifying logic in a flash of cold dread. “Then that means this place…”

He never finished the sentence. He didn’t need to. Directly in front of them, cresting a dune that now seemed pitifully small, rose a churning, roaring, impossible wall of water. It was a mountain of pure ocean, scraping the sky, its foaming peak wreathed in mist. A thousand-ton tsunami, summoned from a world away into the heart of a dead desert, was now collapsing toward them, ready to scour the land clean and swallow them whole.