All Chapters of BENEATH THE MASK: REVENGE OF SAMUEL HAYES: Chapter 351
- Chapter 360
621 chapters
351
The wind over the frozen sea was dead silent—too still for a place that should be lashed by gales and subzero blizzards. As the Vanguard’s stealth ship descended toward the coordinates embedded in the final Orion file, even the clouds seemed to part with unnatural precision.“This is wrong,” Joey muttered, squinting through the frost-covered window. “It’s like the weather’s been... cleared.”Samuel didn’t answer. His eyes were locked on the horizon, on the strange, unnatural symmetry forming in the ice below.There, embedded in the frozen tundra like a wound refusing to heal, was a perfect circle—black and seamless—cut into the Arctic shelf. No one should have been able to build something there. No one should have known it existed.But someone had.And now, so had he.The ship landed with a soft hiss, the ice around it refusing to crack. Aria met them at the airlock, her coat lined with psychic shielding and a scanner pulsing faintly in her palm.“This facility predates IMA records,”
352
The Vanguard safe house was buried deep beneath the scorched remains of an old monastery in northern Kazakhstan. Its stone walls had been reinforced with psychic shielding and spectral cloaks, rendering it nearly invisible to most forms of surveillance. Even then, the team moved in silence—half from exhaustion, half from the weight of the revelations they'd uncovered in the Arctic.Samuel stood at the central terminal, the map of Tibet glowing on the screen. His gaze remained fixed on the blood-red blinking dot—Sarah’s signal, flickering like a heartbeat from the mountains that now felt more like a tomb.Joey leaned against a pillar nearby, cleaning the barrel of his rifle with methodical focus. “Two siblings. Three roles. Catalyst. Gate. Silencer.” He exhaled. “Feels like we’re stuck in the middle of someone else’s prophecy.”Samuel didn’t reply. His mind replayed the final moments in the Arctic vault—his father’s voice, the raw vial of Chronogen, and the implication that Sarah had b
353
The laboratory beneath the safehouse hummed with quiet electricity. It was old—a mixture of Vanguard salvage and repurposed IMA hardware, patched together with desperate brilliance. Despite the steel walls and faint traces of rust, it pulsed with an energy that mirrored Samuel’s condition.Unstable. Flickering. Brimming with danger.Samuel sat shirtless on the reinforced medical platform, muscles tight, his skin glowing faintly in uneven pulses of light and shadow. Veins of silver and black spiraled across his arms and chest like invasive roots—growing deeper with each minute.Across from him, Aria adjusted a tray of equipment with gloved precision. Her usually sharp expression was drawn, but focused.“How long do I have before this… overtakes me?” Samuel asked, voice low.Aria paused. “Not long. The exposure to the raw Chronogen in the Arctic vault accelerated your hybrid reaction. Your DNA is folding in on itself, trying to reconcile too many evolutionary codes at once. Most people
354
The city of Lisbon shimmered beneath a dusky sky, its tiled rooftops glowing gold as the sun dipped behind the horizon. Street vendors packed up their wares. Ships rocked gently in the Tagus River. To the untrained eye, everything seemed peaceful—undisturbed.But Samuel could feel it.The air was too still. The shadows stretched too long.Something was watching.From the rooftop of an abandoned hotel, he scanned the old quarter below. Joey crouched beside him, peering through a high-resolution scope, while Aria worked a signal scanner nearby, her fingers dancing over holographic glyphs.“We should’ve kept moving,” Joey muttered. “The signal flare from Mount Kailash could’ve alerted every rogue cell from here to Senegal.”Samuel didn’t respond. His senses were frayed—half tethered to the material world, half drifting in subtle frequencies only his evolved mind could hear. The recent stabilization of his double-helix had unlocked more than just balance. It had made him aware.Aware of e
355
The safehouse outside Málaga was built into the cliffs, hidden behind a waterfall that shimmered like fractured crystal under moonlight. It was one of the last untouched locations on Vanguard’s diminishing list—remote, untraceable, and more importantly, silent.The battle in Lisbon had nearly cost them everything. Joey still lay unconscious in the back chamber, recovering from a head wound. Aria was downstairs, calibrating another psychic screen to mask the remaining fragments of Samuel’s signature.And Samuel...Samuel sat alone in the upper chamber, the roar of the waterfall muffled behind reinforced glass. His hands trembled slightly—not from weakness, but from disconnection.The dampener was still active. No tether. No voices. No whispers from the Spiral. No pulse from the Vault. And most agonizing of all—No sense of Sarah.For the first time since he’d found her, it was like her soul had vanished from his reach.He stared at the fractured mirror above the sink. His reflection fl
356
The morning fog in the Andalusian hills rolled in thick, blanketing the landscape like a quiet warning. The safehouse, carved into the rock face, remained hidden beneath layers of enchantments and old-world architecture—shadows and silence clinging to every wall.Samuel stood alone in the communication chamber.The hologram on the table flickered—distorted briefly—then stabilized into the face he hadn’t seen in weeks.Lisa.Her hair was shorter now, uneven, as if cut hastily. Her face was gaunter than he remembered, and her eyes—once sharp with purpose—seemed distant. Not broken. Just... finished.“Samuel,” her voice echoed through the chamber, quiet and solemn. “If you’re hearing this, then I’ve already left.”Samuel said nothing. His hands rested against the edge of the table, fingers digging into the steel as he listened.Lisa continued. “I know you’re still fighting. Still chasing after truths that burn. And I know you think we’re all meant to stay by your side until the very end.
357
The night air was unusually sharp over the Spanish coast, the waves crashing against jagged rock formations with an almost rhythmic menace. At the southern edge of the Vanguard safehouse compound, the lab sat mostly abandoned, its halls dim and silent—except for the soft humming of exposed wires and flickering power cells.Dr. Aria Lin worked alone, crouched over a console, her gloves stained with synthetic compound. A glowing sphere hovered beside her—a neural stabilizer prototype she'd been crafting in secret. It pulsed in sync with her heartbeat.She hadn’t told Samuel yet.She hadn’t told anyone.Because if this worked, it wouldn’t just stabilize his psychic tether.It would unlock the core of Project Orion’s hidden data structure—information too dangerous for anyone, even Samuel, to access without risk of total system collapse.She paused, brushing a strand of damp hair behind her ear.Something in the air had shifted.She stood slowly, her hand hovering near the emergency pulse
358
The morning fog in the Atlas foothills was unusually thick—unnatural, even. Like a curtain drawn by something sentient. Vanguard’s outpost in northern Morocco sat tucked between two ravines, its low visibility supposedly a defense against aerial tracking.But today, that fog was a weapon.Sarah stood at the edge of the perimeter, her breath curling in the air, eyes scanning the opaque valley below. She’d been restless since dawn, the whispers returning—distant, warbled, like ancient voices beneath water. At first, she thought it was residual trauma from the last gate pulse in Tibet. But now...Now it felt like something was calling.Joey stood a few paces behind her, one hand on the sidearm holstered at his hip.“You shouldn’t be out here alone,” he muttered, narrowing his eyes at the horizon. “We haven’t fully re-secured the perimeter.”“I couldn’t sleep,” Sarah replied. “It’s louder at night.”“The whispers?”She nodded. “They’re different now. Focused. Like they’re... searching for
359
The silence in the war room was anything but peaceful.Every corner of the chamber buzzed with the weight of unspoken accusations. The Vanguard leadership team—those who remained—stood in a broken circle around the central holographic table, its light casting ghostly shadows on their strained faces.At the center of it all sat Dr. Aria Lin. Unbound, unarmed, but undeniably dangerous.The air between her and the others pulsed with tension—anger, suspicion, fear.“Let me get this straight,” said Commander Vale, his voice a barely controlled growl. “She was a Spiral architect. She helped build the psychic amplifiers. And now we’re just going to let her sit here like one of us?”He slammed a gloved fist onto the table. “How many people died screaming because of what she made?”Aria didn’t flinch. “Too many.”“You don’t get points for honesty,” Vale snapped.Joey, his side still bandaged from the ambush, stepped forward. “She also just got stabbed trying to keep Sarah alive. That counts fo
360
Snow howled against the facility’s ancient, iron-reinforced blast doors like a hungry ghost. Vanguard’s stealth transport had landed hours earlier, camouflaged beneath a shifting blanket of artificial snowdrift, and now the team was buried deep beneath a forgotten Siberian mountain—moving through corridors where frost coated even the light fixtures.They had come looking for intel. What they found felt more like a tomb.“This place gives me the creeps,” Joey muttered, sweeping his light across the icy walls, where symbols from the Orion files were half-scraped away—as if someone had tried to erase their meaning but failed.Sarah walked beside him, pulse rifle at the ready. “It’s a cryo-lab. Maybe even the first one. Samuel’s father was here.”Aria remained silent, her eyes scanning every crack in the steel walls. “Not just his father,” she said. “This is where the backups were stored. The genetic templates, the failed prototypes… and the ‘if everything goes wrong’ protocols.”Samuel,