The ground shuddered beneath Kian’s feet as the first tremor rocked Bastion-09. Dust and debris rained from the ceiling. Alarms blared. Walls cracked. He had only seconds to react.“Elena—go!” he shouted, pushing her toward the emergency exit tunnel marked on Leo’s stolen schematics.But she didn’t move.“Kian—Marcus! He vanished—”“I’ll find him. But you need to live.”Her eyes searched his, torn between the instinct to run and the fear of losing him again.Another explosion thundered through the foundation.“Elena,” he said, voice breaking. “Please.”Her fingers lingered on his chest—then she turned and ran.Kian spun around as a steel beam crashed behind him, sealing the corridor. He was alone.With Marcus.Or so he thought.Because out of the darkness came another pulse. But this one wasn’t red. It was white.Pure. Blinding. Ancient.And then he heard them.Children.Voices—unmistakably young, yet mechanical, reverberating through the collapsing walls like echoes from another worl

The three figures stood beneath the fractured sky—Kian at the center, flanked by the two living echoes of what he might have become.The Architect on his right—the pristine version—radiated a cold, precise authority. His robes shimmered with system runes, his eyes pure gold, as though the Core itself had blessed him.The second—on his left—was brutal, raw. Dressed in ragged remnants of ancient armor, scars webbed across his face. His eyes, though dulled by pain, held fire.Neither of them blinked.The Children circled nervously. The girl—Aera, as she was finally called—stepped between them.“This wasn’t supposed to happen,” she whispered.“No,” Kian said flatly, “it wasn’t. But that’s the story of my life, isn’t it?”The scarred Architect moved first.“Don’t trust him,” he rasped, pointing a trembling hand at the pristine one. “He was corrupted before he ever touched the Core. They used him as a prototype—pure, yes, but empty. A puppet built for perfection, not purpose.”The golden Ar

************Flash Back**************The flickering light from the underground corridor painted long, ghostly shadows on the walls as Kian sat beside Leo’s unconscious form. The rain still fell in sheets outside the reinforced safe house, but inside, the silence was deafening.Elena had been taken.Not just abducted—ripped away, again, from everything that made her human. Leo’s cryptic words echoed in Kian’s skull like a war drum: “They have Elena.”Kian had seen her image flicker briefly across the failing rebel network days ago—bruised, restrained, injected with something unnatural. Marcus hadn’t just taken her back; he was changing her. Weaponizing her.The idea clawed at him.Across the room, the children sat huddled together, silent. The oldest boy—Rael—watched Kian with a gaze that felt older than time. He knew something. They all did. These children weren’t normal. Marcus had ensured that.Selene entered from the back room, her face tense. “Leo’s stable. But whatever they did t

The safe house walls trembled faintly from the aftershock of the explosion that had shattered Leo’s escape pod only moments before. Smoke coiled through the corridor, and Kian’s heart thundered as he kicked down the last bulkhead door. He stepped into the emergency chamber—charred metal, flickering lights… and Leo. Coughing violently, Leo was slumped against the far wall, blood matting his temple. “Elena,” he rasped. “They took her. Again.” Kian knelt beside him, gripping his brother’s shoulders. “What happened? You said she escaped. You said she was on her way.” Leo’s eyes were fevered, haunted. “She never made it to the rendezvous. It was a decoy. They planted a clone—a mimic. I didn’t know until it was too late.” Kian froze, realization crashing into him like a tidal wave. “The Elena who reached us… the one I protected…” “Wasn’t her,” Leo whispered. A silence stretched between them, thick with betrayal. Kian felt the floor tilt beneath him. The moments—the lingering stares,

The cold night wrapped around Leo like a shroud as he darted through the ruined alleyways, every breath sharp in his lungs. The city was a labyrinth of broken glass and flickering neon, shadows swallowing whole blocks where the Federation’s patrols no longer dared to tread. But Leo knew better than to trust the darkness. It held dangers beyond the patrols—traitors, informants, and worse.He paused briefly behind a shattered storefront, heart pounding, and checked the small data pad clutched in his hand. The message was simple but chilling:“Elena’s been taken. We lost her in the purge. We don’t know where.”Leo swallowed hard, pressing his back against the cold brick wall.His mind raced back to the moment it happened—the raid on the safehouse. One minute they had the cover of silence, the next a flood of Federation troops smashed through their defenses like a tidal wave. Marcus’s betrayal had been swift and brutal. Elena was gone before he could even react.He clenched his fists, his