At first, he thought it was his CPU fan failing. The hum grew into a roar. He touched the side of his laptop and pulled back; the aluminum casing was blistering. In the center of his screen, the "Nero" logo—the iconic image of the Colosseum—didn't just sit there. It began to glow.

He tried to pull the power cord, but the plastic had fused to the socket. The air in his small apartment began to smell like ozone and scorched silicon. Through the frantic whirring of the fans, a sound began to bleed through the speakers: not the usual 8-bit keygen music, but the faint, haunting sound of a lyre being plucked.

Elias frowned, reaching for his mouse to close the program, but the cursor wouldn't move. Slowly, his desktop icons began to dissolve. Not deleted—literally melting, their pixels dripping toward the bottom of the screen like digital wax. Then, the heat started.

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