The city was wrapped in a storm, the kind that felt deliberate, as though the heavens themselves had conspired to keep people indoors. Nathan moved through the drenched streets with his coat drawn tightly, each step taking him deeper into the side of town where light never lasted. The alleys here were alive with whispers—voices that belonged neither to man nor beast. He had begun to recognize them, faint murmurs on the edge of hearing, like corrupted hymns trying to drag him further in. Tonight was not just about listening. Tonight was about pulling back the veil. The trail had started with a missing constable. Reports said he had been investigating a break-in at the church crypt, but he never returned. Days later, his boots were found at the threshold of an abandoned warehouse—boots still standing upright, as if the man had been plucked straight out of them. That was where Nathan was headed now. The building loomed ahead, its windows blackened, its doors chained. Nathan pressed hi

The storm had passed, but the air remained heavy, thick with the smell of charred stone and something else—something tainted. Nathan stood at the edge of the ruined chamber, his boots crunching over shattered tiles. He hadn’t needed to call for his power this time. It had come unbidden, rushing into his veins as if the corruption itself had provoked it into existence. And now, after the fight, he could still feel it under his skin, restless, like embers refusing to cool.Bodies lay scattered across the floor—those of the corrupted cultists who had once served the Syndicate, their features twisted grotesquely by the unnatural power they had courted. A faint shimmer still clung to their skin, black veins pulsing as if even in death the corruption tried to claim dominion. Nathan crouched beside one, studying the corpse. He had expected rot, decay, some physical manifestation of the foul energy, but instead, he saw only… hunger. Their faces looked hollow, their eyes empty sockets where fi

Nathan’s suspicions about the Syndicate had been circling for weeks, but when the encrypted servers inside the lower wing of Imperium suddenly went offline, he knew it wasn’t just a coincidence—it was war, and it had come inside his walls.The monitors in the operations room glowed red with cascading error codes. Harper slammed her palm against the desk. “Someone’s tunneled past three of our failsafes. This isn’t just probing, Nate—they’re inside.”Miko leaned closer to the screen, her eyes narrowing as she traced the packet flows. “Not Syndicate. Their style is usually brutal, heavy-handed. This is cleaner. Surgical. Whoever’s doing this is after something specific.”Nathan’s jaw tightened. He remembered the files they’d quarantined last month—evidence tying rogue elements in the Council to Syndicate fronts. If those were compromised, every step they’d taken in building the Sovereign alliance would collapse.“Seal the vault servers,” Nathan ordered. His voice was steady, but his hand

The horizon shivered with unstable light, faint violet streaks pulsing along the jagged plains where the spire had once stood. Nathan led the team forward, the ring’s glow fading but still tethered to his pulse. Each step carried weight—the knowledge that the fracture might awaken elsewhere, that the devourer’s essence was ancient, cunning, and patient. Harper scanned the surrounding energy signatures, her aura flaring in sharp bursts whenever the residual echoes of the rift stirred. “It’s not completely gone,” she said, voice tight. “I can feel… residue. Lingering distortion.” Miko swore under his breath, brushing dust from his clothes. “Residual chaos. It’s like the spire exhaled, and some of it just… stayed. I don’t know how stable it is. Could collapse at any moment.” Nathan didn’t answer immediately. He stepped forward, walking the ridge where the spire had anchored itself. He knelt, placing his hand over the cracked stone that had survived the final sealing pulse. The ring

The fire in the warehouse smoldered behind them, thick smoke curling into the night, but Nathan didn’t allow himself a second to watch. His boots hit the wet pavement as they raced back through the streets, Dante covering their flank while Roarke scanned for tailing forces. The northern lights above had grown jagged, like veins of electricity crawling across the sky—unnatural, and resonating with a pulse Nathan could feel in his bones. He pulled out the small data pad he always carried, fingers flying across the interface. Every compromised feed, every suspicious movement across the city, every anomaly the Syndicate had engineered: it was all converging toward one point. He keyed in a sequence and the screen lit up with a 3D map of the city, overlays blinking red. Syndicate hotspots. Safehouses. Extraction points. And the glowing symbol that made his stomach tighten: Miley’s position, moving slowly through the crowd, unaware. “She’s still in the café district,” Nathan said. “Two blo