Esper Harem in the Apocalypse

Chapter 1132: SRLE (32) | Meeting Lu Bela, Ghost Files

”You brought me all the way out here to discuss a real estate anomaly?”

”I brought you here because you are the anomaly, Rudy,” she countered smoothly, her voice entirely devoid of human inflection.

With a quick flick of her wrist, the central holographic projector flared to life. It displayed a massive, swirling sphere of binary code, but the structured green numbers were violently infected with chaotic, flickering streaks of crimson energy.

”My memory banks are flawless,” Lu Bela explained, walking around the glowing projection. ”I do not forget data, and I do not experience human psychological phenomena like deja vu. However, my system has been plagued by fatal errors that defy all technological logic. Every time I attempt to run a diagnostic on these corrupted files, my core temperature spikes to critical levels.”

She swiped her fingers through the hologram, expanding a specific, highly fragmented file. The projection glitched wildly. For a fraction of a second, the glowing pixels shifted, forming the faint, staticky outline of the ancient Orcelona throne room before violently collapsing back into scrambled code.

Rudy watched the glitch with genuine fascination. The timeline Reset had successfully wiped the biological souls of Earth entirely clean, reverting humanity back to this exact point in time.

But Heim Lu Bela did not possess a biological soul. Her synthetic brain had caught the temporal shockwave differently, leaving deep, encrypted digital scars across her hard drive. The universe had tried to format her, and it had done a remarkably sloppy job.

”There are fragments of a 51,000-year chronological log that physically cannot exist in this timeline,” Lu Bela continued, pulling up another glitching file. A distorted audio clip played—the faint sound of her own voice begging for death, followed by the metallic clash of swords. ”These locked archives depict a global apocalypse, an army of Under Blades, and a ’Lord’ who possesses a unique, non-tower mana signature.”

She stepped right up to him, tilting her head as her purple eyes analyzed his exact height, posture, and body heat.

”Furthermore,” she added, her gaze dropping to his chest before meeting his eyes again. ”My own subroutines auto-compiled the blueprints for this specific synthetic shell. I grew this white hair and designed these purple eyes based on a preference algorithm I never consciously programmed. It was waiting for you.”

Rudy looked down at her flawless, perfect face. She did not need him to force memories into her brain like the biological girls. She already had all the data locked away inside her head; she was just completely locked out of her own system.

He raised his right hand, letting a spark of his dark, crimson mana dance across his fingertips.

”You don’t have a glitch, Lu Bela,” Rudy said, his smile widening into a confident smirk. ”You have a highly encrypted zip file, and you just found the only administrator who holds the decryption key.”

Rudy took a step closer, the dark crimson mana dancing across his fingertips. He raised his hand toward the side of her face, fully intending to press his thumb against her temple and flood her neural network with the temporal truth. It was the exact method he used to seamlessly restore the biological women in his inner circle.

As his glowing fingertips hovered a millimeter from her flawless synthetic skin, Heim Lu Bela’s optical sensors violently glitched. The deep purple irises flickered to a harsh, warning red. A sharp, mechanical whine hummed from the data core buried within her chest, and the ambient temperature radiating from her shell skyrocketed instantly.

Rudy immediately pulled his hand back, cutting off the magical flow. He frowned, quickly calculating the variables. Biological brains easily absorbed his memory force by naturally expanding their neural pathways to accommodate the temporal shift.

A machine, however, operated on rigid, physical hardware constraints. Flooding a delicate, millennia-old synthetic hard drive with raw, god-tier magical energy would likely fry her logic boards and trigger a catastrophic system failure. He risked permanently bricking her entire shell and wiping the very files he wanted to unlock.

”Your hardware cannot handle a raw mana injection,” Rudy concluded, letting the crimson energy fade from his hand. ”It will overload your core and burn out your processors before the transfer finishes. We need a controlled data stream.”

Lu Bela’s optical sensors stabilized, returning to their usual calm purple hue. She tilted her head, processing his assessment in a fraction of a second. ”You are suggesting a direct neural handshake to safely decrypt the corrupted archives.”

”Exactly,” Rudy nodded. ”Do you have a physical interface cable? Plug directly into me. We will sync our minds digitally, and I will feed you the decryption key through your own accepted protocols.”

Without a word, Lu Bela reached behind her neck. Her pale fingers brushed against the base of her artificial spine, and a small, metallic panel seamlessly slid open. She pulled out a sleek, glowing neural filament tipped with a highly advanced biometric connector, unspooling the cord and offering it to him.

Rudy took the metallic connector. Instead of searching for a physical port on his own body, he concentrated a localized, highly refined pool of energy into the palm of his left hand. The magic materialized into a glowing, crystalized data port, perfectly mimicking her advanced technology.

He plugged her cable directly into his palm.

The second the physical connection locked into place, a massive, blinding surge of digital information rushed between them. The physical walls of the subterranean command center vanished entirely from Rudy’s perception. The real world melted away, instantly replaced by the vast, infinitely complex, glowing architecture of Heim Lu Bela’s digital consciousness.

He stood inside a sprawling metropolis of green and blue binary code. Massive data towers stretched up into a pitch-black digital sky, but a massive sector of the city was violently quarantined. Giant walls of glitching, crimson static surrounded the locked 51,000-year archives, pulsing with chaotic, unresolved errors.

An avatar of Heim Lu Bela materialized right beside him in the digital space. She looked exactly the same, though her white coat trailed streams of raw code.

”The firewall is incredibly hostile,” Lu Bela’s avatar stated, looking up at the massive wall of static blocking her own memories. ”I have attempted to breach it over four million times.”

”That is because you were trying to hack time itself,” Rudy smiled, stepping toward the glitching barrier. ”Let me show you how to bypass the firewall.”