The tethers hummed with a low, electric threnody as Rico Rodriguez stood atop the crumbling spire of the Cathedral of St. Gregorio, watching the sun bleed out over the azure waters of Medici. Below, the postcard-perfect town of Manaea was burning. Not from the Black Hand’s incendiary shells, nor from the Demons’ cluster bombs. It was burning from the inside out.

The smile of a man who had just found a new game.

He had one option. The mod’s ultimate failsafe: the Reality Anchor . A device he’d stolen from the same lab—a briefcase-sized EMP that, when triggered, would delete every non-player entity within a two-kilometer radius. Including the zombies. Including the Hive. Including, potentially, himself.

Rico laughed—a hollow, desperate sound. He’d turned Medici into a playground, then a warzone, then a tomb. Now, he’d turn it into a ghost town.

Rico looked at his grapple. He looked at the peaceful town below. He looked at the countdown timer now permanently etched into the corner of his vision.

The detonation was silent for a heartbeat. Then a sphere of purple light swallowed a city block, lifting zombies, cars, and cobblestones into a swirling, orbital dance. The corpses spun like planets around a dead sun, their limbs tearing off, their orange-eyed heads still snarling. But from the edge of the void, a new sound emerged: a wet, tearing crackle.

Three weeks ago, the mod had been a joke—a line of code on a darknet forum frequented by the world’s most bored anarchists. “The Lazarus Vector,” they called it. A harmless tweak that reanimated ragdolls. Rico, ever the magpie for chaos, had downloaded it, dragging the file into Just Cause 3 ’s directory with a cynical smirk. He’d expected glitchy corpses twitching through concrete. What he got was the apocalypse.