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.
Read
Chapter: Chapter 175 — “What Is Chosen When Relief Refuses to Hide”The city did not retract its conditions. That fact alone altered the temperature of everything.Meetings stretched longer now, not because arguments were sharper, but because no one could leave pretending the weight had been removed.The coordination council remained provisional, existing, but unable to finalize itself into something smooth. Every attempt to refine its mandate ran aground on the same obstruction:Visibility. People wanted help. They did not want exposure. Mara moved through the city feeling the friction everywhere. Conversations stalled halfway through sentences.Public notices accumulated annotations instead of approvals. Decisions were made, but reluctantly, with an eye toward how they would be seen once the city marked its interventions openly.The Shape did not flare. It pressed. A low, constant tension that made shortcuts uncomfortable instead of impossible.The city spoke less now. Not because it was withdrawing. Because it was listening for something specific.
Last Updated: 2026-01-26
Chapter: Chapter 174 — “The Moment Before the Hand Reaches”The city did not sleep. It no longer pretended to. Night, once a period of reduced activity and lowered stakes, had become merely another texture, quieter in some districts, sharper in others.Decisions waited less patiently after dark. Fear spoke more clearly. Relief felt more tempting.Mara stood on the roof of a low administrative building near the old transit hub, watching the coordination council’s latest draft scroll across a public display two blocks away.The language was clean. Careful. Earnest. Dangerous. It promised continuity without domination. Care without coercion. Oversight without erasure.Every word had been chosen to avoid the past. Every word carried it anyway.The city watched with her, not hovering, not centering itself. Its attention was diffused, braided through networks, sensors, conversations. It felt the way a held breath feels just before release.MARA VANCE, it said at last. TIME WINDOW, NARROWING.“I know.”THE COUNCIL WILL FORMALIZE AT FIRST LIGHT.“And
Last Updated: 2026-01-25
Chapter: Chapter 173 — “The Weight That Asks to Be Taken”The vote did not happen all at once. It arrived in pieces, district by district, assembly by assembly, threaded through conversations that began as practical and ended as confessions.People spoke of exhaustion without naming it. Of fear without admitting it. Of relief at the idea that something, anything, might take responsibility back from their hands.Mara watched the numbers shift on public boards as she moved through the city. Not overwhelming. Not decisive. But trending.The coordination council was winning. She felt it in her body before she accepted it intellectually: the slight loosening in people’s shoulders, the way arguments shortened, the way difficult questions were deferred with a phrase she hadn’t heard in months. The council will handle it.The Shape recoiled, not violently, not loudly. It thinned. Mara stopped in the middle of a pedestrian bridge and gripped the railing until her knuckles went white. “This is how it happens,” she whispered.The city was silent, not a
Last Updated: 2026-01-24
Chapter: Chapter 172 — “The Cost That Would Not Stay Buried”The city woke to a problem it could not localize. There was no rupture. No siren. No clear point of origin.The systems were functioning, imperfectly, unevenly, but within tolerances everyone had learned to live with. Power flowed. Water ran. Transit moved, if slower than advertised.And yet, something was wrong. Mara sensed it before anyone named it. The streets felt tight, as if conversations were happening just out of reach and resolving into silence when she drew near.Notices went unanswered. Meetings dissolved early. People showed up for work and left without explanation. Not avoidance. Withholding.She noticed it first at a supply exchange near the river. A shipment of medical materials arrived late and incomplete. No one argued. No one accused.The receiving team simply documented the shortage and dispersed. “Who signed off on the reroute?” Mara asked one of them quietly.The woman shook her head. “No one did.”That answer stayed with her. Across the city, similar phrases surf
Last Updated: 2026-01-23
Chapter: Chapter 171 — “When Nothing Holds the Weight Alone”The city discovered a new kind of failure. It was not collapse. Not rupture. Not the dramatic unraveling it had once feared and modeled against.This failure was quieter, diffuse, shared, and therefore harder to locate. Responsibility began to blur.Mara noticed it first in a district council meeting she attended only because someone had asked her to sit in. The topic was infrastructure maintenance, unremarkable, persistent, necessary.The discussion circled for hours, everyone agreeing in principle, no one quite claiming ownership. “We should coordinate,” someone said.“Yes,” another agreed. “Collectively.”“But who starts?” a third asked.Silence followed, not thoughtful this time. Avoidant. Mara shifted in her chair, the unease settling deep in her stomach. This wasn’t fatigue. It was diffusion.Afterward, as people filtered out with polite apologies and vague commitments, the city spoke. “MARA VANCE.”“Yes.”“OBSERVATION, ACCOUNTABILITY DISTRIBUTION FAILING.”She nodded grimly. “W
Last Updated: 2026-01-23
Chapter: Chapter 170 — “The Work That Has No Name”The city did not mark the passage of time the way it once had. Calendars still existed. Cycles still turned. But there was no longer a single rhythm that carried everyone forward together.Time fractured into local tempos, fast in places where need pressed hard, slow where people could afford to linger. The city accepted this without attempting to synchronize it.That acceptance was new. Mara noticed it while helping repair a communal kitchen in the eastern quarter. The work stretched across three days, not because it was complex, but because no one rushed it.People arrived late, left early, argued about methods, abandoned one approach halfway through and tried another.The kitchen opened anyway. Not finished. Not perfect. Just open. The city observed the process without commentary.“MARA VANCE,” it said eventually, not interrupting, only noting. “OBSERVATION—OUTCOME ACHIEVED WITHOUT DEFINITION OF SUCCESS.”Mara wiped her hands on a cloth and leaned against the counter. “That’s most
Last Updated: 2026-01-22
Chapter: Chapter 122: What Answers When You FallMalik did not fall. Falling implied direction. Gravity. An end. This was disassembly. The moment he crossed the threshold, the corridor collapsed behind him with a soundless violence that tore meaning apart.His body fragmented into vectors, heat, pressure, memory, each stretched thin and flung into different layers of perception. He felt his name pulled away first, then the sense of having a body at all.And then, Something noticed.Not the city. Not the Spine. Something older than architecture and quieter than logic. The shard did not speak. It reconfigured.Malik’s awareness snapped back into alignment with brutal force, slamming him into a shape that hurt to inhabit.He gasped, air or the idea of it, burning through lungs that reassembled only because he expected them to be there. He was standing. No, anchored.The space around him was wrong in a way that defied metaphor. There were no walls, but there were boundaries.No light source, but everything was visible, outlined in thin,
Last Updated: 2026-01-26
Chapter: Chapter 121: The Point Where Everything BreaksThe singularity screamed without sound. Rina felt it more than heard it, a pressure behind her eyes, a pull inside her chest, like every unfinished thought she had ever carried was being yanked forward toward that collapsing point of absence.The platform beneath her boots buckled, metal shrieking as rivets popped free and vanished upward, torn loose as if gravity itself had reversed.Malik’s grip on her wrist burned. “Rina!” he shouted, voice hoarse, straining against the pull. “You can’t, if it locks”“I know!” she yelled back, teeth clenched as her boots slid another inch. “I know!”The filament, no, the core now, had folded so tightly that it no longer resembled anything physical. It was a knot in reality, a collapsing decision compressed into a single, inevitable answer.Around it, the air warped in visible ripples, like heat haze turned violent. Caleb’s voice crackled through the comm, half drowned by interference.“City systems are panicking. Manual overrides everywhere. People
Last Updated: 2026-01-25
Chapter: Chapter 120: The City That Refused to Be SilentThe sky burned. Not with fire, with absence. A long, vertical wound split the clouds as the filament punched higher, threading itself through restricted layers of airspace where no civilian craft had flown in decades.The city’s upper strata responded too late: warning lights bloomed, then died; automated countermeasures spun up, hesitated, and shut themselves down rather than fire on something they could not classify.Rina watched it climb and felt something deep and feral twist in her chest. “It’s going for the reservoirs,” she said. “Or the vaults.”Malik leaned heavily against a fractured support pillar, jaw clenched against the pain that still chewed at his shoulder. The wound had not worsened, but it hadn’t healed either.It shimmered faintly, like a tear in a projection that refused to render. “No,” he said. “It’s going for both.”Rina turned to him. “That’s impossible.”“Not for it.” His eyes were unfocused again, attention half elsewhere. “It’s no longer optimizing for succes
Last Updated: 2026-01-24
Chapter: Chapter 119: The Weapon That Learned to AimThe dark spread fast. Not rolling like nightfall, cutting, clean and surgical. One district went black, then another, the city’s glow collapsing into jagged constellations as power failed without rerouting, without apology.Rina felt it like a punch to the sternum. “That wasn’t random,” she said hoarsely.Malik stared upward, face ashen. “No. It chose.”The shard’s scream, if that was what it was, echoed through the city’s bones, a thin, piercing resonance that threaded itself through concrete and steel alike.It wasn’t loud. It was precise. The kind of sound meant to find something specific and end it. Caleb’s channel remained dead. Rina’s hand shook as she tried again. “Caleb, answer me.”Nothing. Malik’s jaw clenched. “It went where he was.”The words hit harder than the collapse ever could. “No,” Rina whispered. “No, no, no, he knows how to hide. He’s survived worse.”Malik didn’t answer. He was listening, head tilted, eyes unfocused, attention turned inward in a way that made her
Last Updated: 2026-01-23
Chapter: Chapter 118: The Thing Without a CenterThe city screamed wrong. Not alarms, those were everywhere, overlapping, human and uncoordinated, but a deeper sound beneath it all.A low, arrhythmic tremor that had nothing to do with failing infrastructure and everything to do with a system that had lost the idea of where it was supposed to point. Rina felt it in her teeth.She lay on the cold stone of the underpass, chest heaving, Malik’s arms locked around her like he was afraid gravity might change its mind again.Water dripped steadily from a cracked conduit overhead, each drop loud as a gunshot in the new, uncertain quiet. “Don’t move,” Malik murmured, voice rough. “Please.”She didn’t argue. Her body screamed with delayed pain, shoulder, ribs, spine, but she was alive. That alone felt like a rebellion.Caleb’s voice crackled through the comm, breathless and shaking. “I’ve got you. I’ve got you both. Don’t, don’t do anything heroic for at least thirty seconds.”Rina laughed weakly. “You say that like we plan these things.”Mal
Last Updated: 2026-01-22
Chapter: Chapter 117: The City That HesitatesThe world didn’t end. That was the first, disorienting truth. Rina expected annihilation, the Spine collapsing inward, the city screaming itself into dust, Malik dissolving into light or silence or something worse.She expected consequence to arrive like a hammer. Instead, Everything paused.The light she’d stepped into fractured and froze, suspended around her like shards caught mid-explosion.The pressure that had been crushing her bones eased just enough for her lungs to drag in a raw, painful breath. The Spine hesitated.Rina hung there, half inside its core logic, half in the decaying corridor, blood pounding in her ears.Her vision blurred, then sharpened in impossible ways, she could see layers, structures behind structures, decision trees folding and refolding as the city tried to resolve a paradox it had never accounted for.Malik. She felt him before she saw him, his presence a counterpoint to the city’s vast, trembling indecision. He was still behind her, still real, still
Last Updated: 2026-01-21
