The underground bunker was collapsing, not by brute force, but by system command. Ten-ton lead doors began to hermetically seal, one by one, triggered remotely by The Piper.

  I could barely walk. The Babel Code weighed on my nervous system like molten lead. My left eye, now dominated by an involuntary neural interface, projected lines of green and red code overlaying my normal vision.

  "Arthur, the legs!" Valéria shouted, pulling my left arm while Gristle hoisted me by the right.

  "I am... processing," my voice came out double, with a bizarre metallic echo. The Parasite inside me was furious. It saw the code as a poison and tried to devour it, sending waves of mutant white blood cells to attack my own synapses.

  [INTERNAL ALERT: LOGICAL INFECTION DETECTED. INITIATING CELLULAR PURGE.]

  "Stop!" I snarled at my own abdomen, digging my nails into my belly. "If you delete this code, we die!"

  I pulled an auto-injector from my belt with trembling hands. It was a Military Grade Immunosuppressant. Normally, using this in a world full of plagues and monsters was suicide. But I needed my immune system to stop fighting the digital virus.

  I injected it straight into my thigh. The headache lessened a fraction, replaced by a biting chill in my bones.

  We reached the MASP free span.

  The Dreadnought was waiting for us. Valéria pushed us into the cabin and jumped into the driver's seat.

  "Hold on! Avenida Paulista woke up!"

  We accelerated out of the museum.

  The scene outside was a cyberpunk nightmare. S?o Paulo's pollution dome seemed to have darkened. But what was scary was the light.

  All the abandoned LED billboards, traffic lights, bus stop screens, and giant avenue displays had been reactivated. They weren't showing old ads. They were showing the same symbol repeated thousands of times: The Broken Hourglass.

  From the screens, the polyphonic, digital voice of The Piper echoed, so loud it made the truck's chassis vibrate.

  "YOU ARE A VESSEL OF FLESH, ARTHUR VERAS. FLESH LEAKS. FLESH FAILS. YOU CANNOT CARRY A DIGITAL GOD IN A ROTTING BODY."

  "Cut his audio!" Gristle snarled, covering her ears.

  "It's not radio!" Luna analyzed with her baton. "The sound is coming from the underground cables. He turned the whole avenue into a speaker box!"

  Suddenly, the streetlights along the sidewalk began to explode in sequence, racing toward us like an electrical powder keg.

  Valéria floored it, the Dreadnought's Ether engine howling as we dodged fused cars and smoking craters.

  "They're coming from the sky!" Luna pointed out the top hatch.

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  It wasn't Steam Seraphim this time. It was Delivery Drones.

  Thousands of small quadcopters from the old era, abandoned on rooftops, now flew in a swarm formation, controlled by The Piper's hive mind. They had no firearms, but they carried sharp pieces of glass, construction rebar, and concrete.

  The swarm dove like a metal falcon.

  "Luna, Gristle! Anti-aircraft defense!" I ordered, forcing my left eye to focus. The virus interface began calculating trajectories. "Gristle, turret at 45 degrees, scatter shot. Luna, cavitation pulse, frequency 14 kilohertz!"

  The two didn't question my newly acquired cybernetic precision.

  Gristle's capture net, loaded with shrapnel, tore through the center of the swarm. Luna emitted a sonic scream so high-pitched that the drones' motors resonated and shattered in mid-air. A rain of plastic and rotors fell onto our armor.

  But The Piper didn't need drones to kill us. He controlled the logistics.

  "Access to Dutra Highway blocked." The Piper's voice came from our own radio panel now. The Babel code inside me made me feel the signal invasion as a sharp pain in my ear.

  Ahead, the bridge leading to the city exit was rising. It wasn't a drawbridge, but the thick fiber optic roots supporting the pillars were twisting, pulling the concrete up and creating a ten-meter-high wall.

  "Valéria!" I looked at the forming wall. My code vision showed me the structural flaws. "The right junction! Where the concrete meets the copper wiring. The density there is only 15%!"

  "Understood, human GPS!" Valéria didn't brake. She engaged the magic nitrous.

  The Dreadnought roared, hitting two hundred kilometers per hour. The Blood-Steel ram on the front of the truck glowed from friction.

  We hit the exact junction I pointed out.

  CRAAAASH!

  The concrete gave way like dry plaster. We flew through the dust and shattered cables, landing heavily on the other side of the barrier, already on the Presidente Dutra Highway.

  Behind us, S?o Paulo howled, but the fiber optic cables had a range limit. The Piper's physical domain ended where corrupted nature began again.

  "We're on the road!" Valéria laughed, relieved, though her hands shook on the wheel. "Next stop: coast."

  I slumped in the passenger seat, panting. The effort of actively using the virus almost fried my brain.

  The Parasite was sluggish, doped by the immunosuppressants. My blood felt like ice.

  [BIOLOGICAL SYSTEM: COMPROMISED.]

  [DATA RETENTION RATE: 88%... DROPPING.]

  "Arthur, you're pale," Luna leaned over from the backseat, putting a hand on my forehead. "You're freezing. And... your eye."

  I looked in the cracked rearview mirror.

  My left eye was no longer human. The sclera was completely black, and the iris glowed with a blinking digital green. Fine, dark lines, like printed circuits, crept up my neck.

  "The Babel Code is trying to take root," I murmured, coughing up a bit of dark blood into my handkerchief. "It's like holding plutonium with your bare hands. I am becoming the flash drive."

  "How long can you hold out?" Gristle climbed down from the turret, her face worried.

  "Long enough." I closed my eyes, forcing my breathing to slow down, entering a surgical semi-coma to spare my brain. "Drive, Valéria. Don't stop for anything. The Piper knows we're coming. His fleet must already be bombarding Rib Beach."

  The trip back down the Dutra was a blur of pain and static. The truck devoured the kilometers under the falling night.

  Inside me, a silent war raged: my human side trying not to go mad from the data stream, my Parasite side trying to vomit the math, and the Babel Code waiting patiently to be downloaded into its target.

  When we finally passed the Serra das Araras and saw the sea again, the scene was bleak.

  Dawn brought no light. The sky over Guanabara Bay was covered by artificial storm clouds.

  The Exodus Fleet had advanced.

  The Black Crystal bridge now firmly touched the Leviathan's body.

  And the European ships' antimatter cannons were decimating the barricades of Leviathania. Blue and purple lights crossed the skies, and the sound of explosions echoed all the way to the mountains.

  "They broke the firewall," Luna said, her voice full of despair.

  "Open the hatch," I ordered, my voice coming out completely digital, devoid of intonation. I stood up, the circuits on my neck pulsing with green light. "It's time for express delivery."

  The final battle for the Carcass Continent was about to begin. And I was the bomb.