CHAPTER III

Hollow Logick didn't run. Running required friction, and friction was inefficient.

He glided.

He moved across the obsidian dunes of The Binary Expanse like a drop of ink falling through water—his silhouette wrong in ways that made observers uncomfortable. Too tall. Too thin. His limbs articulating at angles that suggested his joints were made of liquid rather than bone. White bandages wrapped his torso and arms in overlapping strips, the fabric stained with glitch-dust and old battles. An orange sash cinched his waist—the only warmth in his color palette, the only thing that wasn't black or white or the neon pink that marked his kills.

His domain wasn't Louisiana like the others. The Binary Expanse sprawled across Cross-Fade Province, which used to be called Crossville, Tennessee—a liminal territory where the old world's data centers had collapsed into something stranger. The black sand beneath his feet was crushed server hardware. The pink binary code raining from the sky was the ghosts of deleted files. This was the space between code and blood, where AI met organic, where the architecture shifted between ones and zeros made flesh.

This was the curse of the Marfan genotype. A connective tissue disorder that had stretched River Nobles into a wireframe ghost, stripping away his durability but granting him the reach of a spider. His chest wall was convex and fragile. His fingers were too long. His heart was a time bomb wrapped in tissue paper.

And his eyes were dying.

He stopped, his breathing shallow. The thin air of the digital desert pressed against his malformed ribcage like a hand trying to crush him slowly. At his side, Necrovi coiled tighter—a spectral serpent of pure white scales that seemed to glow against the black sand. The familiar's tongue flickered, tasting frequencies that Hollow's failing eyes could no longer see. They'd been bonded since he'd joined The Network, since the day his deception had been uncovered and Grim Logick had chosen to keep him anyway.

The Deceiver who stayed. That's what they called him. The artist who had come to The 3NIGMA BRED Vibe, LIVE! pretending to be fully organic—hiding the AI-assisted tools that helped him produce, concealing the machine in his creative process. The Network had discovered his lie. The deception should have meant exile.

Then the Marfan diagnosis became known. The countdown revealed.

Four years, three months, twelve days. That's how long he had until complete blindness. The doctors had explained it with gentle voices and clinical detachment, as if they were describing weather patterns and not the death of everything he'd ever see.

Grim and iLLLogick had looked at the countdown and seen something else. Not a liability. A man fighting time itself. His AI leverage became a tool The Network learned to wield. His deception became their evolution.

Now he paid for that second chance in vision. Every day. Every battle. Every time he used his power.

"Warning." Indexor-Prime's text appeared as a gentle blue overlay on Hollow's retina—soft, because Indexor knew how precious his remaining sight was. "Hostile signature detected. SIMULEX Protocol active. Deepfake rendering in progress."

Hollow stood still. Necrovi's white coils tensed against his leg. Around them, the desert shifted. The black sand began to rise, forming shapes. Three figures manifested from the dust. They weren't monsters. They were him.

Three perfect copies of Hollow Logick stood before him—same impossible proportions, same white bandages, same black hood, same mask with the pink X-eyes that marked him as something between alive and erased. Their Vibro-Katanas were drawn, neon pink blades humming with stolen frequency. They were Viral Clones—perfectly rendered, high-resolution lies designed to bait him into exposing his position.

If he struck the wrong one, The Mainframe would triangulate his location instantly. If he hesitated, they would cut him down. And with his bone density, a single solid hit would shatter him like porcelain.

He had to look. He had to really look. Hollow closed his eyes behind his mask. He reached deep into the terrifying, cold logic of the Sight Debt.

Open, he whispered.

He didn't open his physical eyes. He activated True Sight.

The world stripped down to wireframe. The texture of the sand vanished. The pink binary code raining from the sky dissolved into raw hexadecimal. And the three clones before him flickered—two of them hollow polygons, beautiful renders with nothing inside. But the middle one had a heat signature. It had a pulse.

Got you.

The cost was immediate. A timer in his peripheral vision—a literal countdown clock burned into his optic nerve—ticked down:

4 Years, 3 Months, 12 Days... 4 Years, 3 Months, 11 Days...

Twenty-four hours of future sight. Gone. Paid for five seconds of clarity. The Mainframe collecting interest on a debt he could never repay.

Hollow moved. He triggered Gliding Serpent Flow—not pushing off the ground but exploiting the lag between frames, existing in the spaces where reality hadn't finished rendering. He appeared in front of the middle clone before the code could process his arrival.

His left hand drew the Binary Dagger—black blade, white edge, the weapon for close work. His right hand was already swinging the Lantern Katana, its vibro-blade blazing neon pink, Phantom Blue flame licking along the edge where the lantern's light met the steel.

The katana didn't slash. It passed through the clone's guard like a glitch through stable code, severing the connection between the entity and the server. The dagger followed—a precise thrust that fragmented the clone's core before it could transmit data.

The copy didn't bleed. It shattered into white noise and vanished.

Hollow didn't celebrate. He recoiled instantly, sliding back ten meters into the shadows. Necrovi hissed a warning, her white scales flashing. Because he wasn't alone.

Behind him, a massive shadow peeled itself off the ground—the Shadow Demon, the persistent parasite attached to his own silhouette. It grew taller now, fed by the energy he'd just expended. Every power he used made it stronger. Every debt he accrued made it more solid. It shrieked—a digital feedback loop that echoed across the desert like a beacon.

"Beacon active," Indexor warned. "You lit a flare in a dark room, Hollow. VORATH is watching."

VORATH. The Unseen Hand. The Overseer of Erasure, who deleted the non-compliant and scrubbed artists from history. She'd been hunting him since he joined The Network—since he'd proven that a man with borrowed time and borrowed sight could still cut through her illusions.

Hollow leaned on his katana, his long spider-like fingers trembling. The Phantom Blue flame guttered and steadied. The countdown clock in his eyes stabilized, but the number was lower than it had been a minute ago. The dark edges of his vision—the peripheral blindness that crept inward every time he used True Sight—had advanced another fraction of a millimeter.

Necrovi slithered up his arm and coiled around his shoulders, her white scales cool against his bandaged skin. She couldn't give him back what he'd spent. But she could see what he was losing. She could be his eyes when his own finally failed.

He thought about Lyrick. Nine years old. The future worth sacrificing sight for. He thought about Miley. Two years old. The joy that made the debt worth paying. He thought about Grim, who had looked at a liar with dying eyes and seen something worth saving.

He looked at the empty space where the clone had been. He was The Deceiver who stayed. The doorway between human and machine. The one who taught The Network how to use AI as a weapon instead of fearing it as a threat.

Every deception cost him days. Every lie shortened the countdown. He paid anyway.

"Let them watch," Hollow whispered, dissolving back into the glitch-dust of the storm. Necrovi's white form flickered beside him like a ghost made of scales. "I don't need to see them to kill them."

Four years, three months, eleven days.

The clock was always running. But so was he.