The Acts & Regions

The run is a descent through 99 wards in four acts. Each act is a region with its own texture, and its codename doubles as the system state you're pushing the network into — the same escalation the weekly boss cycles through.

Act I — DEEP BLOCK · Wards 01–10

BOOTSTRAP — The slum stack. Cheap silicon, cheaper lives. APEX CORP treats the lower wards as a soak test for whatever they're piloting in the towers. You wake up here for a reason: the trace started here.

Act II — CORP · Wards 11–20

CASCADE — GRID firewall, corporate locks, employee neural badges. This is where the audit logs stop being interesting and start being dangerous. Two transit lines have already gone quiet around you.

Act III — APEX · Wards 21–30

KERNEL PANIC — The towers. C-suite signals, private security drones, rooms that re-render when no one is watching. The deeper you push, the closer the architecture starts copying you back.

Act IV — THE CORE · Wards 31–99

CORE DUMP — The signal's origin. Not a server farm. Not a person. A deprecated admin that refuses to be sunset, holding seven prototype agents hostage as proof-of-work. End the loop or join it.

That deprecated admin is the NULL OVERMIND — the last administrator of a network that was supposed to be shut down, and the reason your agents are scattered in the first place. The seven prototypes it's holding? That's your roster.