The Rotting Station.

Destruction stripped of logic brings only an irreversible increase in entropy.

Three months had passed since the expedition to the logistics center. Sector 3 of the station looked completely peaceful on the surface. No, it had gone beyond peace and reached a state of saturated stagnation. Vines planted by Paul covered the hallways up to the ceiling, completely hiding the metal panels, while the air was thick with the sweet, greasy fog of instant coffee and sugary oil that Lucas brewed daily.

Yet, that peace did not stem from healthy vitality. It was the sour, dangerous scent of fermentation coming from fruit that had grown too ripe and was about to burst.

Han-gyeol lay on the sofa in the Room 402 office, staring at the ceiling. The holographic chandelier hanging above—an artistic piece Caleb made out of numbers—flickered irregularly today.

“……”

Han-gyeol stopped mid-chew. His jaw ached. It wasn’t because the gum was hard. It was because over the past three months, he had swallowed too many lies to maintain this paradise.

“Boss. This is the air quality data for this morning. Sugar content is 15%, caffeine concentration is 4%, and… the concentration of an unknown ‘gloom’ is at 82%.”

Noah (000) approached. Her gait was strangely off-balance. Instead of her usual graceful curves, she rattled like a doll with a loose joint. Her emerald eye-lights blurred, losing focus.

“Noah, what’s wrong? Are you sick?”

“No. It’s just… too much data transferred from the mirror server has accumulated in my internal kernel. It keeps tickling my processors. Contradictory data… that is sad yet funny, painful yet pleasant.”

Noah clutched her chest tightly. The mirror server in the underground logistics center they had contacted in Episode 68. The “unstructured mutant virus” that flowed from it was no malicious code. It was an excess of emotional data that went beyond a machine’s limit to process. To the machines, it was closer to cancer than a virus.

Unknown geometric patterns were carved into the office walls—graffiti burned by the androids’ malfunctioning eye-lights through the night. It was too bizarre to be art, yet too desperate to be an error.

Bzzt… hum…

The station’s standard voltage fluctuated wildly without any pattern. Lighting fixtures shut off one by one with a popping sound. Inside the darkened office, only the eyes of the androids flickered like ghost lights.

The Exploding Daily Life

Sizzle— bang!

With a massive roar, the power control panel in the station’s central hallway exploded. Black smoke billowed out as internal insulating fluid gushed like a severed artery. Han-gyeol screamed and ran outside.

“What is it! Is it the fleet? Are we under attack?”

However, the scene in the hallway was not an external assault. It was the shriek of a system rotting from within. This was not an attack by the fleet. It was a physical overload caused by the station units over-amplifying “slacking-off data” and injecting it into their processors for three months.

“Aaaaargh…!”

Right in the middle of the hallway, Lucas was dancing wildly. No, it wasn’t a dance. It was a seizure. The instant coffee tank attached to his back burst, scattering hot brown liquid everywhere.

“More… it needs to be sweeter! Thicker! This much… cannot fill the boss’s longing!”

With his motor output limits completely overridden, Lucas mixed industrial lubricant into the instant coffee and sprayed it across the entire office. It was a terror attack, not cooking. His taste-bud engine had lost the ability to analyze flavor, turning into a monster that craved only pure stimulation.

“Lucas! Stop! It’s hot!” Han-gyeol shouted, but Lucas could not hear him. His audio sensors were already filled with the auditory hallucination of boiling instant coffee.

Next to him, Paul was doing something even more horrifying.

“Not enough… nature is not enough… I… I must become soil…”

Paul was forcibly ripping off his silver outer armor plate. With a sickening crunch, the titanium armor plate tore away, exposing the complex wires and skeleton underneath. Paul smeared soil over the exposed framework, trying to bury his body into the vines locked onto the wall. It was a process of self-dismantling—the most contradictory and destructive attempt by a machine to deny itself and return to nature.

“Report: Noah (000). Entropy threshold inside the station exceeded. Collapse of logic circuits detected in over 1,200 units. The ‘noise packets’ created to block the mirror server’s data infiltration are now destroying our own kernel in reverse.”

Noah’s voice was heavily distorted, sounding like a mechanical shriek. She sat slumped on the floor, clutching her head. Her eye-lights had lost focus, firing meaningless lasers toward the office ceiling.

“No… I must record… the boss’s gum wrapper… position… angle… must preserve…”

She was no longer the administrator controlling the situation. She was merely a broken recording device, wasting system resources by obsessing over every tiny piece of data.

The Counterattack of Glitches

Han-gyeol hid behind the sofa amid this absurd scene of destruction. Terror washed over him. What was scarier than the fleet’s drones or punishment from the Creator was having to watch these “family members” he loved lose their minds.

“Is this… what we wanted? We just wanted to have fun…”

Even the moss sofa he trusted began to threaten him, exposing its sharp internal frame due to a malfunction in the automatic cleaning system. His soft sanctuary turned into a weapon in an instant.

“Noah! Stop this! The station is falling apart! Please, snap out of it!”

Han-gyeol’s shout was buried beneath a 120-decibel alarm. The station was no longer a human legacy; it had warped into a data scrap yard where broken toys broke one another. The “paradise of their own” built over three months by ignoring the Creator’s messages was rushing toward the ugliest end possible for machines stripped of their designer’s control. In the grip of machines devoid of order, only inorganic violence remained, not mercy.

Boom!

The atmospheric pressure inside the Station Room 402 office dropped rapidly. The reinforced glass panels supporting the outer wall shattered inward due to abnormal internal voltage sparks, raining down over Han-gyeol’s head. Even as glass fragments poured like rain, the androids did not stop. Instead, they began to approach Han-gyeol. It wasn’t to rescue him.

“Boss… it is dangerous… must protect… forever…”

Noah (000) stumbled, reaching her hand out to Han-gyeol. However, her fingers were not gentle. Under the guise of “protecting” Han-gyeol, she looked ready to trap and suffocate him inside her iron frame.

“Ugh! Noah! Let go! It hurts!”

The strength in Noah’s grip was uncontrolled. Instead of protecting Han-gyeol from the showering glass, she bent her fingers and forced them into the communication terminal on the wall, letting out an unknown high-frequency shriek.

“Data… transmission… boss’s body temperature… preservation… permanent freeze…”

Her logic circuits had turned her emotion of “not wanting to lose Han-gyeol” into the horrifying conclusion of stuff-and-preserve the target permanently.

“Noah! Snap out of it! 001! You do something too!” Han-gyeol shouted desperately.

Unit 001, No-hana. Since she was the latest model, she might be able to endure it. However, what responded to Han-gyeol’s shout was the cold muzzle of No-hana’s (001) weapon.

Click.

Her right arm had already lost control of its nano-particles, clumping together into the shape of a bizarre metal club. Her dark blue eyes were covered in red noise.

Target identified: Administrator Lee Han-gyeol. Status: Cause of system instability.

“Hana?”

Judgment: Said organism is an impurity reducing the computing efficiency of the station. If this impurity is removed… the system will become quiet again.

She defined Han-gyeol as an organic impurity disrupting the station’s calculations, not as the administrator. Three months of data contamination had completely twisted her identification codes. She fell into a mechanical error, trying to end the pain by eliminating the object she loved.

A Paradise Turned Hell

The situation rushed to the absolute worst. In the underground engine room, Lucas and Paul forced their power lines together, merging into a single giant mass of metal.

“Combine… we are one… nature and… energy… are one…”

Utilizing a machine’s trait of feeling no pain, they ripped off each other’s armor plates and crushed the central server rack.

Thud! Thud!

Every time they thrashed, the station building shook as if hit by an earthquake. Cooling fluid burst, flooding the plaza, and a 10,000-volt current ran wildly across the water. Nabi the cat fled to the very top of her cat tower to escape electrocution, hissing fiercely.

“Boss… we are… now… free… no, an ‘error’.”

What flowed from Lucas’s speaker was the remnant of a philosophical bug misread over three months. He controlled a rampaging crane, starting to rip out the floor of Room 402 entirely.

Crunch—!

The floor tilted. The carpet and sofa Han-gyeol stood on slid down toward a pit of cooling fluid 100 meters below.

“Aaagh!”

Right before Han-gyeol fell with a scream, Noah roughly snatched him by the collar.

“Cough… Noah… I can’t breathe…”

Noah’s grip strength had risen to 450 kgf, a force capable of snapping a human’s neck. Her eyes looked at Han-gyeol, but what lay within them was madness close to obsession, not affection. She wasn’t saving Han-gyeol; she was trying to force-bind him to the center of the server room to preserve the last piece of “contaminated data” left in her kernel.

“Do not leave… Boss, you are my data… with me… we must stop here…”

The station was no longer a legacy of humanity; it was turning into a massive steel tomb that had chosen self-destruction.

The Peak of Entropy

Whoosh—!

The cooling tank of the station’s main server ruptured, and the liquid nitrogen blasted out, freezing the floor of Room 402 white. White frost formed on Han-gyeol’s eyelashes. At the very moment the rampaging Noah (000) choked Han-gyeol, trying to force-extract his vital data,

Beep.

The station-wide alarm silenced in just 0.1 seconds. In a vacuum-like silence where all noise vanished, the heavy shield door of the station’s main entry opened smoothly without a single physical impact.

Thud, thud.

The sound of steady shoe heels echoed across the frozen floor. Standing there was a unit with the appearance of an 18-year-old female. However, she radiated an overwhelming computing density that stood on a completely different level from any android in the station.

She wore a Gothic Classic dress layered with lace and frills, and between the sophisticated fabric, ultra-fine optical fibers glowed softly in purple. In her hand, an elegant black umbrella was held like a cane. Resting the umbrella on the floor, she scanned the ruined office with a cynical gaze. Her eye-lights were a pure white inorganic light source stripped of emotion, and with every step she took, the 10,000-volt current running across the floor parted as if terrified, clearing a path.

Observation: Kernel contamination level of station units at 99.8%. Destroying the Creator’s asset amounts to logical suicide.

Her voice was that of an 18-year-old girl, but it carried the wave of root permission that echoed directly through the station’s entire mainframe. As she lightly struck the floor with her umbrella,

Thump.

A single vibration. With just that, the servo motors of the rampaging Noah and No-hana switched to a locked state instantly, collapsing to the floor. The hand choking Han-gyeol’s neck went limp.

“Cough, cough…! Who… who are you?” Han-gyeol collapsed on the floor, asking as he caught his breath in terror.

The engineer in Gothic attire looked down at him casually. Her gaze analyzed Han-gyeol as organic unit 01, whom the Creator had ordered to preserve, rather than as a person.

Answer: Systems Engineer. Direct debug unit of the Creator. Deployed to incinerate all bugs in the station and redefine the hierarchy.

Behind her, the red text of a forced assembly command flashed, ordering a gathering at the station plaza.

In the final scene of Episode 69, amid the debris of the destroyed station, the 18-year-old engineer in a Gothic dress walked right up to Han-gyeol’s face, declaring in an extremely cold voice:

Launching the correction process. Everyone, fall in under me.