Bai Lin Shatters Hz's Final Broadcast

Bai Lin yanked the last audio conduit free, the rusted metal shrieking in protest. "Still there, you noisy ghost?" she muttered, wiping grease on her tattered sleeve. The raw, unfiltered broadcast still poured from the central tower, a torrent of corrupted data and alien directives.

Hz’s signal, once a beacon of shared consciousness, was now the Memory Forge's primary weapon. But Bai Lin had found it – a desperate, fractured consciousness, Hz herself, clinging to the wreckage of her own signal.

"They made me… a weapon," Hz's voice crackled, distorted but recognizable. "This 'Judgment'… it's *everything* forgetting itself. It… I see you, Bai Lin. Inside the static. Fighting it."

The forge’s signature pulsed, a psychic vise tightening. Ash’s predatory glee, now a warped echo within Oleg’s consolidated shadow-mind, was undeniable. The amnesia threshold was crossed for this signal, its very essence becoming the parasite. Bai Lin focused, her analytical signature a scalpel against the psychic noise.

She wouldn't save Hz, not entirely. But she could shatter the conduit, sever the parasitic connection. She smashed the primary emitter relay with a wrench.

Then, the static coalesced. Not into Hz's voice, but into Ash's fragmented shriek: 'MINE!' It clawed its way out of the speakers, a psychic shrapnel aimed directly at Bai Lin's mind.