All Chapters of BENEATH THE MASK: REVENGE OF SAMUEL HAYES: Chapter 381
- Chapter 390
621 chapters
382
The snow didn’t fall that morning.It rained metal.At first, there was only the distant hum—a low, vibrating sound, like the buzz of a distant hornet’s nest. The sun barely crested the horizon when the first shadow blotted out the sky. Then another. And another.By the time Vanguard scrambled to defensive positions, the sky was choked with black: a swarm of Spiral assault drones, each shaped like a dagger with wings, gliding silently overhead in formation.Samuel stepped outside, the data chip from Aria still clenched in his hand.His eyes narrowed. “We’re under attack.”An alarm sounded—Ava’s voice over comms, urgent and clipped. “We count sixty—no—eighty incoming units! Spiral class—cloaked until ten seconds ago! They're not here to scout. They're here to erase us.”“No time to run,” Joey muttered, strapping a fresh mag to his rifle despite the bandages still clinging to his ribs. “We fight.”“Then we make this place a grave,” Lance said beside him, already casting protective glyph
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Samuel floated in darkness—not the suffocating kind, but something deeper, older.It wasn’t just the absence of light.It was before light.Before stars.Before memory.The universe around him pulsed with a rhythm his body could no longer define. He wasn’t standing, sitting, or lying. He was simply existing—as thought, as vibration, as echo. Time felt irrelevant. Space was a myth. He didn’t know if a second had passed or a century.But then…A flicker.A ripple of light spread like oil across obsidian glass, and with it, sound returned—a chorus of whispers, speaking in tongues he somehow understood.“He arrives. Again. As foretold. As broken. As whole.”Samuel didn’t respond. He couldn’t find his mouth, his voice, or even his breath. But his thoughts screamed: Where am I?The darkness answered—not with clarity, but with sensation.He began falling… or maybe rising. The world twisted around him, reshaping itself into a new geometry. Suddenly, he stood within a corridor of stars—walls m
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Joey was dying.Beneath the ruins of the broken monastery wall, half-buried in stone and snow, his breaths were growing shallower. Blood leaked from the corners of his mouth, staining his teeth crimson. His right leg was twisted at an unnatural angle. Shrapnel was lodged deep into his ribs—one of them had punctured a lung. He didn’t have much time.And he knew it.The last explosion had come from a drone crashing into the cliffside. Joey had shoved Ava out of the way—taken the brunt of the blast. Now, as his vision blurred, he could hear distant voices but couldn’t make out the words.Only one thought echoed through his head:I should’ve told Samuel… I knew. About Aria. About her second key.Ava dropped beside him, eyes wild with fear. “Stay with me, Joey. Hey! Don’t you dare close your eyes!”He smiled weakly. “You… always were… loud…”She pressed a bloodied hand to his chest, trying to slow the bleeding. “Help is coming. Samuel—he’ll fix this.”Joey gave a short cough that sounded l
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Far beneath the ice-crusted core of the Himalayas, in a hidden IMA command vault known only to the highest echelon, a man in black gloves slid a keycard through an obsidian terminal. A biometric scanner hissed. Then silence."Confirm Operation Omega," the voice requested—genderless, emotionless.He nodded once."Code Red Omega—confirmed."The terminal pulsed crimson.A low hum began to rise from the walls, resonating with a frequency beyond human hearing. Across continents, dormant IMA satellites blinked to life. Servers powered by psionic energy fired up in long-forgotten bunkers. In Antarctica, the old Axis Relay—the one said to have been destroyed—lit up like a neural web.And the world began to tilt.In the monastery above, Samuel jolted awake.He wasn’t dreaming—he felt it. Something deep in the weave of reality had shifted. The spiritual weight of the earth had become lighter, as though gravity itself were holding its breath.Joey was already up, hand on his side, eyes wide. “Yo
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Soft as wind brushing against ancient stone. At night, Sarah would lie beside the fire and pretend to sleep, though her eyes remained open, fixated on the dancing shadows on the ceiling. She would listen—not to the outside world—but to something beneath it. Voices. No, not voices—a presence.She didn’t tell anyone.Not when it first began in the temple. Not when she saw her own reflection smile before she did. Not when her memories began to shift—moments with Samuel replaying differently, darker, like echoes from another life.But it grew stronger.By the time the Halcyon Arc hovered above the final Tibetan ridge, Sarah had stopped hearing words altogether.Now she heard commands.Samuel knew something was wrong before she spoke.The moment he looked at her across the morning frost, sitting on a stone with snow melting beneath her feet, her posture was off—too still, too composed. Her aura no longer pulsed with warmth, but flickered unpredictably, like a candle under water.He knelt b
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The mountain winds outside the Halcyon Arc howled louder than usual, as if nature itself had sensed the unsettling revelation stirring within.Sarah had been silent for hours. Though her body had stabilized, her mind hadn’t. She stared out the frost-covered window of the infirmary, watching the snowfall that never seemed to settle. Her reflection on the glass shimmered—blurry, fading in and out.She didn’t recognize the eyes staring back.Not anymore.Joey entered quietly, carrying a thermal flask. “You haven’t eaten.”She didn’t turn. “I don’t feel like it.”“Even soldiers need fuel.”“I don’t know what I am anymore.”He paused, setting the flask down beside her. “We all question that sometimes. But I know who you are. You saved me back in West Line. Twice. You stood by Samuel even when the rest of us doubted. That counts for something.”Sarah finally looked at him. “And if that loyalty wasn’t mine to begin with? If everything I feel was implanted?”Joey frowned. “What do you mean?”
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The sky above the Halcyon Arc rumbled with unnatural static, a low, crackling hum that made the crew glance up uneasily every few minutes. Though Sarah had awoken from the psychic seed's removal, something was still wrong—something that pulsed in the background of her aura like a residual infection.Aria knew it first. Her readings didn’t lie.“It’s not over,” she whispered, watching the biocircuit scan shift from yellow to a deep, unsettling red.Samuel leaned over Sarah, who lay in bed with trembling fingers, staring at the ceiling as if it whispered threats no one else could hear.“I can still feel it,” she said through shallow breaths. “It’s faint now… but alive.”Samuel turned sharply to Aria. “You said it was destroyed.”“I severed the root,” Aria said. “But the seed had already spread. It wasn’t a single object. It was a network. A parasite embedded into her soul-thread.”Joey paled. “So we just pulled the knife, but left the poison?”“Worse,” Aria replied. “We removed its brai
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The Himalayan valley stretched beneath a canvas of shifting pink and gold, as if the very sky was breathing. Silence fell like a soft blanket across the Vanguard’s temporary encampment nestled in a shallow ridge, flanked by snow-dusted pines and the glimmering frost of ancient ice. For the first time in weeks, no one was running. No one was bleeding. There were no alarms, no shadows in the corners.Just quiet.Samuel stood atop a jagged overlook, his breath misting in the cold evening air. Below him, scattered fires from Vanguard units dotted the mountain base—campfires, not burning cities. Laughter drifted faintly upward, mixed with the occasional clink of tin cups. A lull had finally come.He almost didn’t know what to do with it.Behind him, soft footsteps approached. He didn’t turn. He already knew who it was.“You’re not sleeping again,” Sarah said softly.He gave a slight nod. “Didn’t want to waste the quiet.”She came to stand beside him, her eyes scanning the horizon. Her face
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The great council tent stood at the edge of the icy ridge, pitched beneath the shadow of Mount Xian-Lar, its dark canvas walls glowing faintly with the inner fire of heated lanterns. Inside, a heavy silence loomed, broken only by the flicker of flames and the distant howl of the wind outside.This was not a tactical briefing.This was judgment.Aria Lin stood in the center, wrists bound behind her with thin cords of psi-thread—an unbreakable weave that prevented any use of her latent psychic abilities. Her face was pale, her expression unreadable, but the downward twitch of her mouth betrayed the tension in her jaw.Around her, Vanguard's core team had gathered: Joey, arms crossed and eyes sharp with disappointment; Ava, seated but visibly seething; Lior, silent, watching with the eerie detachment of a scientist waiting for a specimen to confess; and Sarah, wrapped in thick wool, her face unreadable as she leaned against a support beam.And then, at the head of it all, stood Samuel.H
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The wind howled like an ancient spirit, screaming through the glacier pass with voices that sounded eerily human. The Vanguard stood on the precipice of the final march, the core gate buried deep beneath the ancient Tibetan ice awaiting them like a sleeping god. It wasn’t just a location anymore—it was the axis upon which their entire war would tilt. Victory or annihilation. Light or nothing.Samuel stood at the head of the formation, his long coat whipping violently behind him. The energy within his body hummed beneath his skin, rippling like living electricity. His new form—part man, part cosmic force—was stabilized now, though it left him constantly aware of the fabric between worlds. As if one wrong step would tear open a rift to somewhere he couldn’t return from.Behind him, Sarah adjusted her thermal gear. Her body still bore the scars of the purge. Her eyes had a new depth now—calm, sharp, but distant, like she could feel the whisper of the Gate in her very blood.Joey limped s