He was staring at the broken sea dragon skeleton when his PDA screen shattered into a cascade of green code. A message appeared, not in English, but in raw hexadecimal.
ERROR: ENTITY "PLAYER" NOT FOUND. INITIATING ANTI-TAMPER.
He couldn't move his right arm. He couldn't open his base. The lifepod was just a wireframe in the distance. The triangle glided forward, silent and absolute.
Kael screamed and swam toward his base. He reached the hatch and activated it. Instead of opening, a prompt appeared:
It didn't roar. It crashed . The triangle passed through his Seamoth, and the vehicle didn't explode—it simply stopped existing. One frame it was there, the next, it was an error message in his inventory.
