David spent 25,000 points on the Void Camouflage Protocol—a stealth upgrade that phased the Midnight Express out of the Abyss’s sensory spectrum for one hour. Half his fortune, gone in a single purchase. But in infiltration operations, invisibility was worth more than any weapon.

  The target was a crimson node on the map labeled "Tears of the Innocent Orphanage (2-Star Zone)." The innocuous classification was deliberate: high-level players wouldn’t waste time on a 2-Star dungeon, and low-level players who entered would be harvested by whatever was actually inside.

  True Sight stripped away the illusion. Behind the decaying orphanage facade: a modern steel fortress. Anti-personnel turrets. Armed guards in Consortium tactical gear. And inside, visible through the building’s data signature: rows of glass cylinders containing the glowing, agonized forms of captured player souls. An extraction facility. A farm.

  David didn’t park at the front door. He positioned the invisible train above the facility’s roof, dropped through a ventilation shaft, and entered the building from the top down.

  Two guards on the roof. The Shadow Bear Spirit—operating in flat, two-dimensional stealth mode—eliminated both before they could transmit. Clean kills. No alarm.

  The biometric scanner on the maintenance hatch required a live mana signature. David didn’t have an authorized one. He pried off the scanner’s panel, identified the verification circuit, and short-circuited the IF-ELSE authentication process.

  [System Fault. Defaulting to safe-open mode.]

  Inside: clinical white corridors, harsh fluorescent lighting, and the glass cylinders—thousands of them, each containing a soul in visible distress. The System’s garbage collection at industrial scale.

  David moved through the facility like a virus through a network—silent, purposeful, following the architecture toward the node with the highest authority: the central control room.

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  Overseer Vance was a mid-level Consortium executive. Level 45. Expensive artifacts. Expensive suit. The specific combination of arrogance and insecurity that characterized middle management in any organization, human or otherwise.

  "Your firewall is severely outdated," David said from the control room doorway.

  Vance hit the panic button. Alarms blared. Blast doors sealed. Automated turrets locked onto David’s chest.

  David didn’t flinch. He plugged the Consortium Sub-Server Fragment into the nearest terminal. The fragment’s administrative signature—inherited from the Ringmaster, which outranked a facility overseer—overrode the local security system.

  [Override Code Accepted. Welcome, Administrator.]

  The turrets swiveled away from David. Their targeting lasers realigned. Four red dots appeared on Overseer Vance’s chest.

  Vance’s arrogance evaporated. In its place: the desperate, grasping fear of a bureaucrat who’d just realized his security clearance was lower than the intruder’s.

  "You think you’ve won?" Vance’s voice cracked. "You’re scratching the surface! The Consortium isn’t just surviving the Abyss—we’re building a bridge! To the Beta-Tier! This dimension, the 10-Star cap—it’s just the Alpha server! The founders are using soul energy to force open a gateway to the higher dimensions!"

  David listened. He didn’t interrupt, because panicking middle managers who thought monologuing would delay their execution often provided better intelligence than any deliberate interrogation.

  When Vance ran out of words, David tapped the terminal.

  [Command Executed: Turret Fire.]

  The turrets did their job. The expensive shield lasted 0.4 seconds. The expensive suit lasted less.

  David downloaded the facility’s data logs, initiated the self-destruct sequence, and left the way he’d come: up through the roof, onto the invisible train, and gone before the blue-white sphere of the core overload vaporized the building and released the captured souls back into the System’s raw data stream.

  One Consortium node destroyed. Intelligence confirmed: the Beta-Tier was real. The 10-Star cap was artificial. The Consortium’s endgame was dimensional ascension.

  David was processing this when the temperature inside the Engine Room dropped to absolute zero.