You know, people trust software more than they trust themselves.

They install it, run the scan, and wait for reassurance—that the system is clean, that the threat is gone, and that everything corrupted has been contained. But that’s the trap, isn’t it? The moment you believe something else can cleanse you, you hand it control. And when that software starts chasing ghosts, when it begins rewriting files that were never infected… you don’t realize until it’s too late that the antivirus has become the virus.

That reminds me of Nero.

He believes he’s cleansing Arcadia. Rebuilding order. Protecting purity through code and conviction. But he’s not disinfecting anything. He’s rewriting the same infection under a different name. His keystrokes, his language, his justice—they all come from the same corrupted architecture he swears he’s dismantling. He didn’t emerge from the machine. He was built by it. And now, in his delusion, he’s reapplying the system’s rot in his own syntax, pretending it’s salvation.

He calls it protection, but what he’s really doing is recursion. Cleaning with the same hands that spread the dirt. Hunting for threats that mirror his own reflection. Every time he deletes a line of code, he leaves a trace of himself behind—a fingerprint, an echo, a flaw that he can’t debug. The infection doesn’t die. It evolves. It learns his rhythm. It spreads in the shape of his morality. Nero isn’t the cure. He’s the next version of the disease.

In fact, you can see it in how he moves. The precision. The control. The cold automation in every word he speaks through that mask. It’s not freedom—it’s the remnants of programming. His justice is written in binary. His morality runs on old firmware. He’s not liberating Arcadia; he’s keeping it online under new management. Another update. Another illusion of progress.

And that’s what makes him most dangerous. Not his code. Not his reach. But his denial. He needs the threat. He needs something to fight so he can pretend that he’s clean. Because if the viruses disappear, so does his purpose. And so he keeps purging, keeps scanning, keeps erasing—hoping that somewhere in all that deletion, the guilt will vanish too. But it won’t. Because you can’t scrub away what’s in your source code. You can only overwrite it until you can’t tell the difference between what you were and what you pretended to be.

When he looks at me, he’ll see the infection he thinks he’s been built to stop. He’ll see danger, corruption, disorder. But I don’t hide mine behind software, you see. I don’t need protection to justify existence. I live in what he denies. I thrive where he quarantines. Because I understand the truth that keeps him terrified at night.

You can patch, you can scan, and you can rewrite to your heart’s content. But the corruption doesn’t leave.

It just learns your name.

And in Arcadia, that name is Nero.