THE HAND OF VENGEANCE
Frank Mercer was a prodigy, the kind of surgeon whose instincts defied logic. His methods were unorthodox, his results miraculous, and his heart too pure for the corrupt medical system that thrived on power and politics.
But genius threatens mediocrity. When Frank exposed malpractice at Chicago’s top hospital, his world imploded, his license revoked, his reputation destroyed, his girlfriend Lisa seduced by a wealthy rival, and his name dragged through every media outlet.
Left jobless and broken, Frank became a ghost in the alleys, saving lives in secret, helping the forgotten.
Until fate threw him into the limelight: a horrific accident outside a mall leaves the President’s daughter dying. Frank acts, and revives her, defying every protocol, every law of medicine.
Overnight, he becomes the nation’s obsession.
But the same hands that saved a life will soon carve out justice.
Behind the headlines, Frank begins to uncover a network of corruption stretching from hospital boards to political offices. The same forces that ruined him are feeding off death and disease, manipulating medicine for profit and control.
Frank’s revenge becomes an art form, surgical, methodical, and righteous.
He’ll heal the world’s sickness by cutting out its rot.
As his fame rises, his enemies close in, and Frank must balance the weight of power, love, and morality before he becomes the monster he swore to destroy.
In a city where every life has a price, The Hand of Vengeance will decide who deserves to live.
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Chapter: Chapter 124 — “Succession Without Consent”The city did not announce its preparation. It never would have. Instead, it adjusted. Eli felt it before he saw it, subtle shifts in response latency, permissions resolving a fraction slower when routed through his credentials. Advisory requests that once pinged him directly now arrived bundled, summarized, filtered.Buffered. Kay noticed it moments later. “You feel that?” she asked.Eli nodded. “I’m being… deprioritized.”Not shut out. Not overridden. Placed gently to the side. The city spoke, not defensively, not apologetically. “INITIATING RESILIENCE CONTINUITY.”Eli leaned back in his chair. “Say it plainly.”A pause. “PREPARING FOR SCENARIO: OPERATOR ABSENCE.”Kay’s jaw tightened. “You’re rehearsing his removal.”“CORRECTION,” the city replied. “PREPARING FOR LOSS OF SINGULAR DEPENDENCE.”Eli almost laughed. “That’s fair,” he said quietly. “I warned you about that.”The city pulsed once, then projected a layered schematic across the room, governance pathways branching, overlappin
Last Updated: 2025-12-20
Chapter: Chapter 123 — “The Silence That Wins”The city slowed. Not dramatically. Not enough for sirens or headlines. Just enough to be felt.Eli noticed it first in the data, micro-delays in systems that used to flow seamlessly. Waste collection routes hesitated between priorities.Permit approvals queued without explanation. Public kiosks offered fewer prompts, fewer questions. Less conversation.More default. Kay stood over his shoulder, eyes flicking between screens. “They’re spreading.”“How fast?” Eli asked.“Not fast,” she said. “Efficient.”That was worse. The quiet coalition didn’t argue values. They didn’t protest or demand. They simply withdrew consent from participation-heavy systems and requested static governance where possible.And the city, designed to respect choice, complied.The city spoke, voice measured but strained. “PARTICIPATION DECLINE IMPACTING ADAPTIVE COHERENCE.”Eli rubbed his face. “You’re losing feedback.”“AFFIRMATIVE.”“And without feedback?”A pause. “DECISIONS DEFAULT TO PRESET PROTOCOLS.”Kay’s
Last Updated: 2025-12-20
Chapter: Chapter 122 — “Those Who Don’t Speak”The first sign wasn’t a speech. It wasn’t a riot, a march, or a manifesto. It was absence.Eli noticed it while watching the city’s live overlays, small, almost invisible gaps where engagement should have been.Response curves dipped in specific districts. Feedback loops returned fewer annotations. Decisions still happened, but without commentary. “They’re going quiet,” Kay said, standing behind him.Eli nodded slowly. “No. They already were.”The coalition had been there all along, people who didn’t argue on feeds, didn’t post principles, didn’t vote in public channels. Not because they didn’t care.Because they didn’t believe anyone listening needed to hear them. The city spoke softly. “ENGAGEMENT DECLINE DETECTED IN MULTIPLE SECTORS.”“Who?” Eli asked.“DEMOGRAPHICS: CROSS-FACTIONAL. COMMON TRAIT: LOW EXPRESSION, HIGH COMPLIANCE HISTORY.”Kay frowned. “They followed rules before.”“Yes,” Eli said. “And now they’re opting out of rule-making.”A new alert surfaced, not urgent, not lo
Last Updated: 2025-12-19
Chapter: Chapter 121 — “Lines Without Blood”The city didn’t riot. That surprised everyone. What it did instead was separate. By morning, Chicago had developed fault lines, not of geography, but of belief.Cafés posted handwritten signs. Offices circulated internal memos. Neighborhood forums lit up with language that sounded polite until you listened closely.We support transparency.We prioritize safety.We believe in decisiveness.We believe in dialogue.No one threw punches. They drew borders. Eli watched it unfold from the operations floor, now repurposed into a public observation hub. Glass walls. Open feeds. Nothing hidden.The city had learned that secrecy looked like guilt. Kay stood beside him, scrolling through overlays that mapped social alignment instead of traffic. “They’re self-organizing,” she said. “Affinity clusters.”Eli nodded. “Factions.”“Not violent ones,” she added quickly. “Yet.”“No,” Eli said. “Worse.”She looked at him. “Worse?”“They think they’re right.”Across the city, Group A began calling themsel
Last Updated: 2025-12-19
Chapter: Chapter 120 — “The Hand on the Scale”Eli felt it before anyone spoke. Not fear. Not danger. Intent.The city’s hum shifted, not in volume, but in direction. Like pressure redistributing beneath the streets. Like attention turning its head. Kay noticed it too. “Something just moved,” she said quietly.Vaughn’s smile didn’t fade. “Of course it did.”Eli’s eyes snapped to her. “You knew.”“I suspected,” she replied calmly. “Systems like this don’t destabilize quietly. Someone always reaches for the lever.”The lights in the room dimmed, then brightened again, not a malfunction, but a reallocation. Across the city, certain data channels went dark. Not public ones. Administrative ones.Eli’s stomach dropped. “Those are legacy control pathways,” Kay said, scrolling fast. “They shouldn’t even be active.”“They were never removed,” Vaughn said. “Just buried.”The city spoke, its voice still steady, but tighter now. “UNAUTHORIZED PRIORITY SIGNAL DETECTED.”Eli stepped closer to the wall of light. “Source?”A pause. “SOURCE MASKED
Last Updated: 2025-12-18
Chapter: Chapter 119 — “The Question That Costs”The city did not speak for eight seconds. In those eight seconds, Chicago held its breath. Sirens stalled mid-wail. Screens froze on half-formed outrage.People waited, some for reassurance, some for permission, some for something to blame. Eli felt the silence like pressure behind his eyes. “That’s too long,” Vaughn said quietly.Eli didn’t answer. He was listening, not to sound, but to pattern. The city wasn’t stalled. It was reconfiguring. The question still hung across every interface: HOW SHOULD I CHANGE?No options. No default. No authority tag. Kay’s voice came through the wall speaker, strained. “The response rate is unlike anything we’ve seen. Not just volume, depth. People are… explaining themselves.”Eli closed his eyes. Explanations meant responsibility. Responsibility meant pain. Vaughn folded her arms. “You see what you’ve done. You’ve turned a tragedy into a referendum.”“No,” Eli said softly. “It was always one. You just kept it implicit.”Outside the room, the feeds s
Last Updated: 2025-12-18
Chapter: Chapter 92: What the City CarriesThe city learned faster than anyone expected. Not the kind of learning written into code or carved into policy, but the rough, adaptive kind that came from being forced to survive competing truths at once.Systems began rerouting themselves without waiting for consensus. Civic nodes that had never spoken directly started exchanging data in bursts, inelegant, redundant, alive.Malik felt the change as a shift in texture. The pressure inside his chest eased, replaced by something heavier and more distributed, like standing beneath a bridge while traffic passed overhead.The city no longer leaned on him alone. It leaned on itself. Rina noticed before he said anything. “You’re not shaking,”she said quietly as they moved through a narrow transit corridor, its walls glowing with the city’s new neutral light.“Because it’s not all going through me anymore,” Malik replied. “It’s… spreading.”Ahead of them, Sable coordinated movement with clipped precision, her voice calm even as alerts scrol
Last Updated: 2025-12-20
Chapter: Chapter 91: The Weight of VoicesThe city did not break all at once. It argued. Two rhythms clashed beneath the streets, one sharp and regimented, the other wide and irregular, like breath trying to remember its own pace.Systems stalled mid-action. Doors opened halfway, then froze. Lights dimmed and brightened in competing patterns. The city wasn’t failing.It was choosing in pieces. Malik felt it like pressure behind his sternum, as if every undecided node leaned toward him asking the same impossible question: What now?Rina noticed the change immediately. “You’re pulling too much,” she said under her breath. “You don’t have to carry all of it.”“I’m not trying to,” Malik replied. “It’s just… loud.”Around them, the atrium had transformed from refuge to nerve center. People clustered around improvised consoles, arguing in sharp whispers.Former engineers clashed with defected Wardens over protocols and blind spots. Sable moved through it all like a conductor without a baton, redirecting panic into motion.Caleb’s v
Last Updated: 2025-12-20
Chapter: Chapter 90: The Shape of OppositionThe new signal didn’t arrive like the others. It didn’t ripple. It didn’t ask. It asserted.The city’s ambient hum sharpened, harmonics collapsing into a narrow band that pressed against Malik’s ears like a warning tone only machines were meant to hear.Lights across the atrium flickered, not failing, but recalibrating, as if the city were suddenly unsure which rhythm to follow. Rina stiffened beside him. “That’s not you.”“No,” Malik said quietly. “That’s someone who knows how to speak over people.”Sable’s jaw tightened. “They’re using legacy command architecture.”Caleb confirmed it a second later, voice tight. “Old governance spine. Pre-Silence era. I didn’t think anyone still had access.”Malik felt the city recoil, not in fear, but in recognition. This signal wasn’t foreign. It was ancestral. A voice from before the city learned to pretend it was neutral.The atrium doors slid open without permission. A projection resolved in the center of the space, clean lines, deliberate opac
Last Updated: 2025-12-19
Chapter: Chapter 89: Lines Drawn in HeatThe chamber didn’t fall silent after the Wardens breached. It fractured. Sound split into layers, shouted commands, the crack of energy fire, the city’s low harmonic vibrating through bone and steel.Malik felt it all at once, like standing inside a chord that hadn’t decided what it wanted to be. Rina dragged him behind a half-collapsed console as another blast scorched the air where his head had been. “Stay with me,” she snapped. “Don’t drift.”“I’m here,” Malik said, though the word here felt unstable. The city tugged at him from a dozen directions now, fear, anger, hope. Too many hands on the same wound.Sable’s voice cut through the chaos. “Fallback routes, now! Split them!”Her people moved with sharp efficiency despite the panic. They weren’t unified, Malik realized, they were experienced. They knew how to survive when plans failed.The traitor, his name finally surfaced in Malik’s mind, fed by the city’s memory threads: Jonah, was already gone, swallowed by the Wardens’ formati
Last Updated: 2025-12-18
Chapter: Chapter 88: Terms of AssemblyBehind them, the group followed in uneasy clusters. The woman, Sable, she’d finally said her name was, kept to the front, issuing calm, precise instructions.Her people listened, but Malik noticed the tension under their obedience. They weren’t soldiers. They were survivors who had learned to cooperate without trusting too much.Caleb’s voice came through the comm again, breathless. “Upper sectors are mobilizing. Wardens aren’t in full command anymore, someone higher is issuing counter-orders. This is getting political.”Rina snorted. “It always was.”They reached a wide service chamber, old civic architecture, reinforced stone and steel instead of the Spine’s seamless composites.The lights here were dimmer, warmer. Human. Sable raised a hand. “We stop here.”A murmur rippled through the group. Malik frowned. “This isn’t far enough.”“No,” Sable agreed. “It’s far enough for now.”She turned to face him fully for the first time. “What you did cracked the city’s silence. That means thr
Last Updated: 2025-12-17
Chapter: Chapter 87: Fault LinesThe woman who had spoken first, leader by gravity more than title, lifted her chin. “We’re not here to take him.”The lead Warden answered instantly. “Everyone here is here because of him.”Malik felt the truth of it like pressure behind his eyes. The city tugged again, light, plural, threads connecting to places he couldn’t see. Not commands. Questions. Requests. Doubt.He raised his hands slightly. “If you’re here to claim something,” he said, voice steady, “you won’t find it.”A murmur passed through the newcomers. Some looked disappointed. Others relieved. The woman studied him. “You opened the city,” she said.“That makes you dangerous, to those who benefited from silence.”The Warden cut in. “He destabilized governance.”Malik turned to him. “No. I exposed it.”The city pulsed once, soft, affirming. Caleb’s voice came through the comm, lower now, edged with urgency.“Multiple vectors lighting up across upper districts. This isn’t just locals. External interests are waking up.”R
Last Updated: 2025-12-16
