“Bram… The Core… it’s not even *here*.” Bram, brandishing a glistening, deep-fried bust of an ancient admiral flexing its potato-chip epaulets, blinked. “What do you mean ‘not here’?” “The physical server!” Joost gestured wildly at his screen, then toward the ceiling. “Orbital Platform A-27X! Twelve hundred kilometers up! We’re about to be wiped from the bottom up, and the thing doing it is practically in another zip code!” As if on cue, a shudder ripped through the Aegis-Spire. A low, grinding groan echoed from below, not metal, but something far more unsettling. The floor, still sticky with chili oil, tore along raster lines. Tiny cubic fractures chewed through the ferrocrete, devouring texture maps. A faint, almost musical hum vibrated through Bram’s bones. Then the acoustic footprint vanished. A vacuum of sound replaced the sub-bass drone, the entire under-tier scrubbed from memory allocation. Plaster dust drifted down from the severed ducts. Above, the crimson sky ticked down in blocky monospace glyphs. Pitch-black trails plunged through the red gloom, diving like a pestilence of predatory locusts. Null-Swarms, retasked by the purge routine into scouring blades. “The Total Server Wipe is running,” Joost muttered, fingers twitching above his terminal. “They’re unraveling the foundations first.” Bram looked at the admiral bust, now spitting tiny, crackling bolts of spiced aioli at the ceiling. He looked at the legion of crispy-cheese sheep bleating around their ankles, at the deep-fried, porcelain dolls with noodle hair brandishing miniature skewers. “Well, that’s just rude,” Bram grumbled, his temper flaring at the terminal’s insolence. Nobody zeroed out his prep station and walked away clean. “We need to get up there,” Bram declared, eyes scanning the vast, industrial kitchen. His gaze landed on a colossal, battered autoclave, easily the size of a shipping container, originally built for sterilizing mass rations. It sat inert beside a stack of scavenged sci-fi canvas boards. “How exactly do you propose we reach orbit in… that?” Joost pointed toward the giant cylinder, then at an oil canvas showing a crude, chrome-plated fuselage with swept fins. “Standard launch protocol, Joost,” Bram said, baring his teeth. “Just… a little more *flavor*.” He dragged the canvas, labeled ‘Stardust Dreamer’ in grease pencil, over to the autoclave. “Fetch the industrial chili oil,” he barked at the nearest scrubbing officer. “And the capsicum concentrate! Every drum!” The officer, caked in cornmeal batter, balked. “Sir, that grade is unstable! It’ll torch the whole bay!” “Exactly!” Bram slammed the frame against the autoclave’s flank and kicked the hatch dogs loose. “You want to avoid getting dereferenced into scrap memory? Move your feet!” The captives hauled freight across the shuddering tiles. Drums of refined pepper oil, carboys of volatile oleoresin, and crates of experimental fusion seasoning crashed onto the apron. Bram smeared raw extract across the interior seal, matching the painted shuttle's thruster lines. [SUMMON: ORBITAL LAUNCHPAD. ABILITY: 'THERMAL CATAPULT'. WARNING: UNSTABLE COMBUSTION RATE. HIGH EXPLOSIVE POTENTIAL.] Joost dragged his feet across the buckled deck, clutching his scorched ribs. “You’re rigging a bomb under us, aren’t you?” “Better orbit than a recycle bin,” Bram retorted, scanning the debris. His boot kicked a dented, four-ton cast-iron stockpot. Thick walls, zero structural flex. “Found our capsule.” He dragged the iron pot over with a metallic shriek. “Climb in, Joost. Pack light.” Seeing cubic tear lines shear the deck plates beneath his boots, Joost scrambled over the iron lip. Bram jumped in after, hauling an armful of postcard-sized space illustrations he had plunged into hot tallow—now spitting orange embers like deep-fried solid boosters. [ARBITER-CORE: DELETION PROGRESS 17%. AEGIS-SPIRE FOUNDATION CRITICAL. INITIATING PHASE TWO: ACCELERATED DATA PURGE.] The steel vessel groaned, its rivets singing as internal pressure spiked. The chili slurry flared magmatic orange, superheated by the fry-oil enchantment. Null-Swarms slammed through the shattered skylights in a black torrent, disintegrating against the perimeter ward of golden grease. “Brace!” Bram yelled, locking his boots against the pot’s iron ribs. The deck plating beneath the vessel dissolved into raw null space. The autoclave blew its primary valve with a concussive crack. A geyser of volcanic capsaicin vapor detonated downward, hurling the iron vessel through the ceiling girders like a mortar shell. Pure g-force flattened both men against the cast iron. Beneath them, the lower spires vanished into missing memory addresses. They punched clean through the swarm layer, scorching carapaces to carbon flakes. At forty kilometers, the sky bruised into black vacuum. Ahead hung Platform A-27X, a cage of titanium girders and server banks glinting against open space. Then a wall of corrupted logic cut off the stars. A construct of interlocking quarantine routines coiled out of the upper troposphere, yawning wide to reveal rows of segmented firewall teeth. The beast clamped shut around the column of thrusting pepper fire, choking their acceleration and wrenching the iron hull back toward the collapsing metropolis.

Pressure Cooker