He had one option. The mod’s ultimate failsafe: the Reality Anchor . A device he’d stolen from the same lab—a briefcase-sized EMP that, when triggered, would delete every non-player entity within a two-kilometer radius. Including the zombies. Including the Hive. Including, potentially, himself.

The detonation was silent for a heartbeat. Then a sphere of purple light swallowed a city block, lifting zombies, cars, and cobblestones into a swirling, orbital dance. The corpses spun like planets around a dead sun, their limbs tearing off, their orange-eyed heads still snarling. But from the edge of the void, a new sound emerged: a wet, tearing crackle.

The tendril pulled. Rico fired.

The tethers hummed with a low, electric threnody as Rico Rodriguez stood atop the crumbling spire of the Cathedral of St. Gregorio, watching the sun bleed out over the azure waters of Medici. Below, the postcard-perfect town of Manaea was burning. Not from the Black Hand’s incendiary shells, nor from the Demons’ cluster bombs. It was burning from the inside out.

His HUD flickered. A new message appeared, written in the same darknet font as the Lazarus Vector.

The world went white. Not the white of explosion, but the white of deletion . Every texture, every polygon, every string of code that wasn’t Rico Rodriguez vanished. The zombies dissolved into pixelated dust. The Hive collapsed into a geometric glitch. The sky turned a clean, empty gray.

He drew his revolver. Not the standard issue—this one was modded, too. The “Exorcist’s Farewell,” a single-shot pistol that fired a compressed fragment of a game save . One bullet, if it hit a critical node, could roll back a zombie to its original state. Kill the code, save the soul.