The Purists’ paralysis was broken by a surge of pure, cold fury. The Architect’s betrayal was a wound, but they were a system designed for logic, not emotion. They bypassed the Architect, locking him out of the system he had helped create. Their new objective was simple: force the Nullifier’s activation. But the Architect’s sabotage was elegant. The activation codes he had given the Woven were now the only ones the system would recognize. The Purists were locked in a frantic race against their own creation, trying to write a patch that would override the Architect’s lock before the Woven could exploit the vulnerability. The fate of the Arboretum now rested on a handful of lines of code, a digital tug-of-war between two opposing futures.