"You mirror me," Voi said to the circle of white machines closing in. "You have no soul. You have no hesitation. You are almost perfect."

He parried a baton strike that would have shattered a tank's armor and drove his hand into the P-Unit's chest, ripping out the glowing blue power core. The machine died instantly, collapsing like a puppet with cut strings.

"But you are copies," Voi said, tossing the core aside. "And a copy always fades."

He raised the sword. The air around him grew heavy. The pressure dropped. He stopped trying to hit the moving targets. He stopped playing their game of geometry.

"Subtraction," Voi commanded.

He didn't swing at a unit. He swung at the space between them. He swung at the concept of their formation.

The shockwave was localized, intense. It wasn't a wind; it was a deletion of stability. It shattered the ceramic armor of the five nearest units like glass hitting a high note. They didn't fall; they crumbled into white dust, their internal structures failing under the resonance of the void.

High above, High Er frowned.

"He is adapting," the General noted. "He realizes they are brittle against vibration. He is attacking the material, not the form. He is ceasing to fight them as soldiers and starting to fight them as obstacles."

"We have two thousand more in storage," Ani said, checking the logistics tab. "They are fully bonded."

"Deploy them," High Er ordered. "All of them. Flood the courtyard. Turn the floor white with them. Burry him in porcelain. Make him drown in the mirror."

SCENE V – THE NEON GRAVEYARD

Nolif and Nerve ascended.

They climbed the service ladders for an hour, leaving the industrial noise of the lungs behind. The air grew thinner, colder, and the smell of ozone became sharper, mixed with a sickly sweet synthetic perfume.

Then, they opened a hatch and stepped into Level 2: The Residential Ring.

Nolif stopped. Her eyes widened. She raised a hand to shield her face.

It was blinding.

Unlike the grey wasteland or the dark pipes, this place was screaming with color. Neon signs in purple, pink, and toxic green covered every inch of the cramped, towering apartment blocks that lined the narrow streets. Holographic advertisements danced in the air, selling "Joy-Rations," "Memory-Suppression Therapy," and "Pragna-Loyalty Credits." The light was aggressive. It assaulted the eyes, demanding attention, demanding compliance.

The streets were crowded. People—real people, not drones—walked with heads down, illuminated by the artificial light. They wore masks to filter the smog. They moved fast, afraid to stop, afraid to look at each other, afraid to be noticed by the cameras that clustered on every corner like spiders.

It was a city of silence covered in loud light.

"The Neon Graveyard," Nerve whispered, pulling his hood up to hide his glowing veins. "This is where the citizens live. They work, they sleep, they consume. They don't look up."

Nolif walked into the street. She was covered in toxic sludge, dried blood, and oil. She held a massive cleaver. She looked like a demon rising from the underworld to judge the living.

A man bumped into her. He wore a plastic suit and carried a briefcase.

He didn't scream. He didn't apologize. He didn't even widen his eyes. He simply stepped around her as if she were a pile of trash or a glitch in the hologram, and kept walking.

Nolif stared at him. She stared at the crowd.

No one looked at her.

They were so beaten, so conditioned to ignore the ugly truth of their world, so terrified of acknowledging anything outside the routine, that they literally filtered her out. To see her was to acknowledge a disturbance. To acknowledge a disturbance was to invite the police. Therefore, she did not exist.

"They don't see me," Nolif said, her voice trembling. She felt small. In the wasteland, she was a predator. Here, she was a ghost.

"They see you," Nerve said, guiding her through the flow. "They just don't care. Caring gets you killed. In Pragna, apathy is survival. If they ignore you, you aren't real. It is the ultimate defense mechanism."

Nolif gripped her cleaver. She wanted to scream. She wanted to cut the neon signs. She wanted to smash the holograms. She wanted to make them look. She wanted to force them to feel the fear she carried.

"We are close," Nerve said, pointing to the massive black needle-tower that rose from the center of the ring, piercing the clouds. "High Er is in there. And Voi is at the door."

Nolif looked at the tower. Then she looked at the apathetic crowd, a river of grey faces bathed in pink light.

"I will burn this whole city," she promised, stepping into the stream of bodies. "I will turn off the lights."

She disappeared into the crowd, a drop of poison entering the bloodstream, while far below, the courtyard began to fill with a rising white tide of machines.

END OF CHAPTER X