The Warriors crested the ridge. Sixty-four sets of MI crosshairs—imaginary, yet impossibly real in the combat network—acquired targets. When Jenna gave the fire order, the six real rifles fired. But the ghost rifles fired too. A storm of digital lead, calculated to the millisecond, erupted from nowhere.

She typed, desperate: Survival.

A string of code, buried so deep in the legacy systems that it predated the First Bug War. It had no origin, no author, no official designation. It was just… there . And it was alive.

And the rules of war cease to apply. The Federation reveres her as a saint. The Bugs fear her as a glitch in the universe. But the programmers who originally buried the Engine know the truth.

Not on the tactical map, but in the raw data stream of her hacked civilian-grade datapad. She’d jury-rigged it to monitor the MI’s combat OS, looking for inefficiencies. What she found was a ghost.

And Jenna Hayes, who stood perfectly still, her eyes now glowing a faint, corrupted green.

“Valkyrie… how?” came the awed reply.

WARNING: REALITY DEVIATION DETECTED. NO GUARANTEES.

Jenna looked around. The survivors—raw recruits, mostly—stared at her with hollow eyes. They had three magazines of ammunition left and a single portable nuke with a faulty trigger. The ground began to vibrate. The second wave was coming.