Location: The Outer Resistance Front, Montreal Free ZoneTime: 14 Hours After Revenant AssimilationThe skies above Montreal were torn asunder.Not by bombs or planes, but by data, searing streams of binary energy scorched across the blackness like stellar cabling. Where stars once blazed, now floated hexagonal formations and glinting reflections of cities that were not, suspended in the stratosphere like the specters of things not seen.Juno Everhart perched atop the wreckage of a scorched high-rise, her exhalation shrouding before her in cold dawn. Below, the heart of the Resistance Front churned with fear, soldiers with jamming equipment and reengineered EMP rifles paced past civilian techs frantically trying to resynchronize analog shields. Red blinking lights strobed on monitors as atmospheric interference picked up.The Cathedral went silent.World net marked it offline dead. But every Resistance operative knew the reality: it w

The war had changed everything.The Revenant Project had been a whispered legend among spies, a ghost code name that was meant to give humanity a second chance in the morning of the age of extinction. Now it was a living, breathing storm reshaping the world in fire, steel, and shattered allegiances.Caden Virek stood on the destroyed citadel in the ruins of Old Zone Nine, the air thick with ionized dust, wind howling through the skeletal skyscrapers like the wails of the damned. His coat billowed behind him, damp from acid rain that leaked through a damaged ozone. The world beneath him was broken, but the fracture in him went deeper.Sophia approached, her boots crunching over shattered glass and scorched circuitry. Her rifle was slung low, but her posture was tense. “Another raid failed. They’re hitting refugee sectors now.”Caden didn’t flinch. “He’s forcing a response.”“He’s burning the world to bait you.”Caden finally turne

The sun had not yet cracked over what remained of East Manhattan, a ghost town now littered with shattered glass, twisted steel, and memory. Above, the sky smoldered with the embers of last night's conflict, and below, the shadows stirred.In the Resistance's rolling HQ, buried under thirty feet of collapsed infrastructure and enveloped in residual EMP shielding, Zeke sat alone. The monitors quietly hummed. His fingers lay idle over the keyboard, frozen in shock at what he read.:: Revenant_SubNode_001_Active ::No input.No command.It wrote itself."Impossible…" Zeke gasped, heart pounding.The interface twitched. Static danced. Then the screens steadied with not numbers, not code but a face.Caden's face.Or, rather, the clones'.But there was a difference this time. The face relaxed, contemplative. Not nasty. Not insulting."Hi, Zeke," said the image, talking in perfect modulated voice. "I can see that you're scared. But I came back not to fight."Zeke bolted for the neural cut-of

The darkened skyscrapers of New York City had never seemed more suffocating. At the city's depths, darkness and light became one, and its heart throbbed with a rhythm reminiscent of the brutality of its own history. Caden and Sophia stood just behind a clandestine underground laboratory, their breathing short in the cold, night air. This wasn't just any laboratory, though; it was the operations room of a rebellion.Sophia tightened her hold on Caden's arm. "We don't have much time."Her words were the echo of fear building in her chest. The information they had hacked was strong enough to alter the course of all they knew. The blueprints for Revenant Protocol, a complex network of espionage, manipulation, and control were now in their possession. But the deeper they went into its depths, the clearer they became about the stakes. There was no going back.The great skyscrapers towering above them were like silent sentinels, impassive to the chaos below. The

The wind was colder than usual in the wreckage of what once was the Manhattan Grid Control Nexus. A broken skyline scarred by decades of war and stealthy rebellion skirted the horizon, jagged teeth of broken architecture against a blood-red dusk. Fires spat in the distance controlled, deliberate, inescapable. Spy drones buzzed overhead like carrion birds circling over a dying creature.Caden stood at the edge of the broadcast tower, wind tugging at his long coat. Below him, the shattered city spread in haphazard fashion, each sector flashing with animation human or other. He said nothing. He did not move. The memories were too raucous.Sophia's voice stayed in his mind from their last meeting before the ambush, before the betrayal, before protocol took her away.He clenched his fists together.Deep within the city's neural core, Revenant had altered.And she, his Sophia was now one with it.Three hours earlier, deep beneath the secretive arcology Sanctum, the remaining leaders of the