Even lagged and glitched by the extreme heat, Rinzler can see the blow coming. There's just absolutely nothing he can do about it. His own strike is only half-executed when the disk crashes down, and even without the active blade, it's not hard to hear the crunch on impact.

This isn't the first time Rinzler's taken a disk blow there in recent memory. Not even the first time it's been from his own blade, depending on the definitions. The first day Rinzler stepped foot on the Moira, he'd fought Tron in this same hallway, and the damage from that fight had never been repaired. Rinzler had refreshed the armor template, covered it up, and over time, the instability faded. But the flaw beneath his outer shell, the gap of missing code? Remained.

It takes three strikes to make it fracture.

Armor caves. Code splinters. Rinzler curls inward as geometric cracks spiral up and out, a hash of instability splitting further through the program's core. Circuitry flickers like a desperate gasp for breath, but there's no sound, no voice, not even now. Only the stutter of his errors, only cascade warning: critical threshold blanking through all of the program's senses on a loop. Rinzler fights it with sheer stubbornness, but he can't tell whether his strike connects. He can barely tell when he hits the ground.

Fingers twitch, numb and empty (and that's wrong, that can't happen—they can't take his disks, no matter what). He has to get up. To keep fighting. The hand he knows he can still move unclips a baton, but it's too little, and much too late.

It won't take much more.