The hum of the interface was low, steady—like a heartbeat buried beneath a thousand layers of silence.Samuel stood before the terminal inside the hidden sector of Vanguard’s underground base. The chamber, deep beneath the Black Tower ruins, had been long sealed off. Only Sarah and LUX had access—until now. And only Samuel possessed the neural signature capable of unlocking the last partition.“Are you sure about this?” Sarah asked softly, her expression drawn. Her left hand still bore the faint scars from Tibet, when her blood had saved him. “You said you’d never use the Sea.”Samuel didn’t turn. “I don’t have a choice anymore.”He placed his hand against the interface, and it came alive.Thin threads of light slithered across his palm like veins, recognizing him instantly. The core’s defenses dissolved. The terminal sank inward, revealing a suspended neural chamber at the center of the room. It resembled a cryo-pod fused with a throne, with silver coils extending outward like spider

The train screeched to a halt at an abandoned station near the southern edge of the Obsidian Mountains. Snow danced in the wind like fragments of memory, swirling in chaotic, beautiful patterns. No one had used this route in over a decade—not since Spiral declared the entire sector “contaminated” and sealed it off.Samuel stepped off the last car alone.His breath misted in the air as he glanced toward the looming cliff face ahead. Half-swallowed by ice and rubble, a structure jutted out—industrial, ancient, and crumbling with time. Faint carvings marked the exterior, blending Spiral symbols with something older, something... older than modern language.Joey’s chip had led him here. The place Spiral once called Echo-9.According to the stolen data, it was the first true neural facility—where they’d attempted to bind memory, pain, and psychic resonance into synthetic identity. And it was where Zero had first cracked—where his mind had split under the weight of what he wasn’t allowed to

The remains of the Amplifier tower smoldered against the dark horizon.All across the eastern district, lights flickered on and off as power slowly returned. The electromagnetic pulse caused by the pulse cannon had knocked out communications across five sectors. The air was still thick with static, smoke, and the ghostly echoes of shattered dreams.Vanguard teams moved through the wreckage with urgency. Some were searching for survivors. Others were scanning for latent psychic residue. The entire area still pulsed with unstable energy—what the engineers called “psychonic bleed.”Samuel stood at the heart of the collapse, blood still dripping from a cut above his eye, his armor cracked along his right shoulder. His breath came in shallow gasps, but his eyes remained locked on the unconscious figure lying at his feet.Zero.Unmoving. Barely breathing.Sarah walked slowly toward him, her boots crunching over broken glass and burned metal. She looked worse than he did—soot covering her ch

The blizzard above the ARK-NOVA base intensified, whipping through the mountains like angry spirits called forth from the abyss. Ice coated the communication towers. Signal interference reached critical. Within the base, sirens had been silenced—not from peace, but paralysis. The control systems were in full lockdown.And Sarah was missing.Or at least, the real Sarah was.What remained now was Saraphina-5.Down in the chamber where it all began, Samuel stood in the flickering ruin of the containment vault. The shattered pod hummed with residual psionic energy, faint and unstable. Aria sat slumped against the wall, arm bleeding, eyes dull. She hadn’t spoken since she was pulled out.Samuel crouched beside her, voice low. “You did what you could.”“No,” she said, voice ragged. “I hesitated. I knew she was compromised the moment the console activated. I should’ve pulled her out before it opened.”Samuel clenched his jaw. “You couldn’t have known.”Aria raised her eyes. “I did. The syste

The transport ship skimmed across the clouds above East Africa, its hull cloaked in spectral camouflage. Inside, silence reigned—each member of Vanguard lost in their thoughts as they approached another unknown.Samuel sat in the co-pilot seat, eyes locked on the digital map projected in front of him. A red pulsating dot marked the coordinates deep in the jungle region surrounding Lake Tanganyika.Nexus Site Two.Another pulse had been detected.Another echo of the Fifth Mind.Behind him, Sarah sat with her knees pulled to her chest, wrapped in an insulated cloak. Her skin still bore the faint glyphs that had appeared the night before, glowing like moonlight before fading again.“You okay?” Joey asked quietly.She didn’t answer right away.“I can feel it,” she finally whispered. “It’s calling again. Not like before—this one is... more broken. Like it doesn’t want to be found.”Samuel turned slightly in his seat. “Then we find it before Spiral does.”Joey checked his gear, a suppressed