The rain hadn’t stopped. It fell in thick, cold sheets that turned the city’s fires into clouds of steam and reflection.Where the Blackwood Tower once stood proud above Rose City’s skyline, there was now only a smoking wound — a crater of twisted steel and shattered glass. The explosion had collapsed nearly half the structure, and the rest stood leaning like a dying beast refusing to fall.Sirens wailed from every direction. Emergency drones hovered overhead, scanning for life signs. Their red lights flickered through the haze like dying stars.Two figures emerged from the debris.Jayden Knox stumbled first, coughing out black smoke, his right arm scorched and bleeding from the fall. His tactical suit was torn, the once-jet armor now dulled and cracked from the impact.Behind him, Damien Blackwood dragged himself out of a pool of molten metal and ash. He’d lost his coat somewhere in the blast; what remained of his attire clung to him in scorched fragments. His face was streaked wit

The tunnels beneath Rose City became their refuge — and their prison.By dawn, the Specter Unit had stripped the base of all digital systems. Every console, drone, and uplink node had been manually disabled. The hum of circuitry was replaced by the quiet scratch of pen on paper, the rustle of blueprints, and the steady tick of analog timers.Electric lanterns flickered along the walls, their glow casting long shadows across faces lined with fatigue and defiance. The war had entered a new era — one without screens, one fought in silence.Jayden Knox stood at the center of it all, surveying a table scattered with physical maps and coded notes. His fingers traced lines of ink marking the Ghost’s infiltration zones — a pattern that now spanned almost half the city.Every district infected was marked with a red circle. And the circles were spreading.Nova approached, wiping soot from her hands. “We’ve reestablished power manually through the subgrid. We’ll have limited lighting and ventil

The storm hadn’t stopped for three days.Above Rose City, the sky churned like a wound that refused to close — thunder rolling endlessly, the lightning reflecting off towers still half-alive with static power. The Blackwood Tower stood among them like a monolith, its windows dark except for a single floor pulsing faintly with crimson light.Deep inside that floor, in a chamber buried beneath the executive suites, Damien Blackwood opened his eyes.The sound of rain was the first thing he heard — soft, distant, but rhythmic, like the steady heartbeat of something waiting to awaken. His vision flickered between red and white for several seconds before stabilizing, the world around him forming in slow layers of color and sound.He wasn’t alone.Across the room, Olivia Bassett stood behind reinforced glass, her reflection broken by the lines of code scrolling across the transparent display.Her makeup had faded, her hair was a disheveled halo of stress and sleepless nights, but her postu

The doors sealed shut behind them with a metallic hiss.The sound echoed up the tower’s hollow core, swallowed by the mechanical heartbeat pulsing through the walls. Rose City’s stormlight filtered faintly through shattered glass above, casting red veins of lightning across the lobby.Jayden Knox moved first, scanning the perimeter. The air was colder inside — unnaturally still, as if even the dust feared to move.“Nova,” he said quietly. “Thermal.”She adjusted her visor, sweeping the readout across the corridor ahead. The screen flared with outlines — dozens of them — motionless, crouched against the walls like statues.“They’re waiting,” she said.Jayden’s rifle came up, his finger resting on the trigger. “Then let’s not keep them bored.”A single step forward.And the tower woke up.The walls split open in synchronized motion, releasing mechanical figures wrapped in armor that once bore the Blackwood insignia. Their faces were smooth chrome, their eyes a burning red. They moved l

Deep beneath Rose City, the air was different.No red glow. No static hum. Just darkness and the slow drip of condensation echoing through the old tunnels.It was the last place left untouched by the digital storm above — the vaults of Sector Twelve, remnants of a time before everything connected to everything else.And somewhere in that silence, a light flickered to life.It wasn’t mechanical.It was heartbeat.Elsie Holden gasped awake.The sound of her own pulse filled her ears, fast, uneven. Her eyes adjusted slowly to the dim room — circular, lined with analog terminals and thick reinforced walls. The words “CONTAINMENT CHAMBER – S12” glowed faintly on the far wall, painted in faded white.Her hand trembled as she touched the side of her neck. A faint metallic scar pulsed under her skin — not quite a wound, not quite a machine.She remembered flashes. The experiments.The burning tower.Olivia’s voice screaming her name.Then — light. And silence.She sat up slowly, the metallic