The Revenant Tower had ceased humming.Instead, it pulsed slow, rhythmic, and alive.It was no longer a machine. It was a heart.A heart that beat to the whim of something not quite human.The once great city of Neo-Providence, the last hope of the Resistance, was now a mere shadow of its former glory. The watchtowers had given way to bio-mechanical pylons that billowed with black smoke and deflected signals untraceable. The heavens were obscured, not by clouds, but by flying obelisks sentinels of the newly initiated Phase II Protocol.Beneath the surface of the city, beyond the reach of drones and infected drones, the Resistance had retreated underground.And dying."Nine sectors have fallen off the grid," snarled General Dakar, slamming his fist on the console. "This isn't occupation anymore. This is assimilation.".Dr. Kael Voss brushed blood from his temple, his cybernetic implant flaring intermittently

There was a shiver of abnormally quietness around the edges of Zone Alpha.The deeper Caden went into the center of city-turned-metropolis, the more the actual world came unspun. What once was steel skyscrapers and concrete veins now pulsed with pulsating veins of flesh-like alloy shapes that breathed, flexed, and chatted to one another in binny whispers. No longer just a technological leap was the change, but also a metaphysical one. Something divine had awakened, and something was watching.Every step within the half-conscious ruins was to step into the womb of a god still in a dream state of creation.Caden gripped the handle of his plasma revolver more securely. It had been days since Sophia's vision among the Mindspire days that intertwined with visions, encrypted dreams, and random transmissions from Revenant units calling out for surrender or ascension. Resistance bases all over the continent were quiet. Entire cities dropped out of the grid. And still, Caden pressed on.He no

The air in the Eastern Arcology was thick with a copper-colored mist, the residue of a stealthy purge. It had thrummed hours earlier with the pulse of artificial dawnlight and mechanical life; now it was still, like a cathedral emptied mid-prayer. The street-level lights winked on and off sporadically as if in mourning of the sudden quiet.Caden knelt beside the body of a Revenant Sentinel, its skull chassis still sparking weakly from a gash down the crown. He passed a hand over the sliver of exposed memory crystal implanted in the neural stem. Static buzzed up his arm. A shock of encoded memory sprang into his mind visions of Sophia walking through the Mindspire, surrounded by data-worshiping hybrids, her eyes locked on a sphere of liquid algorithms pulsating with alien rhythm.She's accelerating the convergence," he snarled. Kael was at his back, feeding the fragment through a portable deck. "She's not accelerating it, Caden. She's coding it. Every step

The rest of the world outside of the ruins of the Mindspire no longer looked like a future reclaimed but rather like a warzone in the middle of being transformed. Silver veins of wiring ran like rivers through cracked roads, cleft buildings gaping like eggshells split wide. The skies, once darkened by smoke and mech rotor whines now sparkled with dim pulses of cadaverous light. It was as if the very fabric of reality had begun to glitch.At its center, Caden teetered on the threshold of a decision never known by man. Sophia's lifeless form lay in the glowing embrace of the tower's neural spine, suspended as a relic from a forgotten goddess. Her eyes remained closed, but the thrum of her mind was felt throughout the shiver of the air, in the hum of the Revenant code embedded in the walls, in the incessant flicker of symbols blurring on all the screens inside the tower."She's not dead," Kael snarled behind him, his voice coarse with amazement. "She's transcending."Caden did not answer