All Chapters of The Beggar’s Throne: Chapter 191
- Chapter 200
630 chapters
Chapter One Hundred and Ninety-One
The city breathed again—quietly, uncertainly, like a patient waking after years in a coma.Lights flickered back to life in patches, uneven and hesitant. Doors unlocked with sluggish clicks. Far above, drones drifted through the dawn mist, scanning, not for targets this time, but for survivors.Jake stood at the balcony of the Council Tower, watching sunlight spill across the ruins. The skyline shimmered—broken, burned, yet strangely beautiful.Behind him, Elena was testing the reactivated systems, fingers flying across the keyboard. The hum of machinery filled the chamber like the return of a heartbeat.“It’s stabilizing,” she said quietly. “Power grid at forty percent capacity. Communication towers are rebooting, one by one. The network’s rebuilding itself—under your directive.”Jake nodded but didn’t look back. “No more control nodes. No hierarchy. Just access and balance. That was the deal.”Elena smiled faintly. “And the system’s listening. It’s rewriting itself to match that com
Chapter One Hundred and Ninety-Two
The first rain in weeks came with a hush so deep, it felt like a benediction.It swept across the rooftops, rolling through the broken towers and streets, washing away ash, dust, and the residue of ruin. The water glimmered faintly in the city’s newborn light, turning gutters into rivers and cracked pavements into mirrors.Jake stood beneath the overhang of what used to be a monorail station, head tilted toward the sky. For the first time in as long as he could remember, the rain wasn’t acid. It didn’t sting. It was clean.Lina came running through the downpour, her jacket soaked, a grin lighting her face. “You’re not gonna believe this!”Jake turned, amused. “You’re drenched.”She laughed. “We rigged one of the northern turbines—it’s working again! Real power. Clean. The kind the Council never let anyone touch.”Behind her, Reeva and a small crew of engineers jogged up, equally soaked and triumphant. Reeva raised a fist. “Hydrocell turbines, offline for twenty years—now they’re ours.
Chapter One Hundred and Ninety-Three
The dawn broke like a whispered promise.Mist rolled low over the city, wrapping the new towers and rebuilt streets in a veil of silver. The scent of rain still lingered, mingling with the smoke of morning fires and the distant hum of machines coming to life. The world was stirring again—slowly, carefully, as if afraid to wake from a fragile dream.Jake stood on the eastern ridge overlooking the settlement, his jacket fluttering in the cold wind. He could see the grid lines flickering faintly across the valley—thin blue threads connecting wind farms, water channels, and data hubs. A living network. A breathing organism of power and trust.Behind him, footsteps approached. Elena’s voice was soft but firm.“You didn’t sleep again.”Jake smirked faintly without turning. “Didn’t need to. There’s work to finish.”“Work never ends,” she said, coming to stand beside him. “That’s what worries me.”He looked over at her. Her hair was tied back, her sleeves rolled up, her eyes dark with exhaust
Chapter One Hundred and Ninety-Four
The road stretched for miles—empty, cracked, and washed pale by the morning sun.Jake drove in silence, the hum of the truck’s old engine the only sound for hours. The horizon shimmered in a heat haze, and beyond it, faint silhouettes of wind farms turned lazily in the distance. The world was no longer dead, just… waiting. Waiting to remember what living meant.He had no map. Only Elena’s compass pulsing softly in his jacket pocket, syncing to the rhythm of the rebuilt network. It didn’t point north or south—it pointed toward connection, toward life.He followed it without question.At midday, he stopped near the remnants of an overpass where ivy had climbed over twisted metal. He got out, stretched, and listened. The world was quiet—but not silent. Birds. Running water. Wind through leaves. Things the old cities had forgotten how to make space for.He sat on the hood, eating from a ration tin, watching a pair of drones pass overhead. They weren’t Council drones—too slow, too quiet. T
Chapter One Hundred and Ninety-Five
The desert stretched before him like an endless sea of rust and gold.For three days, Jake drove across it—his truck a lonely streak of motion cutting through a landscape of silence and wind. The sun was merciless, the horizon a wavering mirage. Sometimes he saw shadows moving in the distance—coyotes, drones, maybe both—but nothing came close. Nothing dared.At night, he camped beneath the stars, sleeping in short bursts with his hand on the sidearm beneath his coat. Old habits. Old ghosts.The compass pulsed faintly beside him, always pointing east—toward something just beyond reach.By the fourth day, the land began to change. The sand hardened into salt plains, cracked and white like shattered bone. Ruins jutted from the earth—towers, half-swallowed by time. Once, they’d been part of a great coastal city. Now, they were gravestones for the world that used to be.Jake stopped the truck near a cluster of rusted pylons and stepped out. The wind carried the faint smell of ocean—brine a
Chapter One Hundred and Ninety-Six
They were three hours from the coast and two weeks since the council’s hearings had begun to unravel the old order. Hassan’s arrest had lit the fuse; now the explosions came in paperwork, resignations, and televised confessions. But victory had grown teeth, and Jake could feel its bite every mile farther from the safehouse.He wasn’t supposed to be on the road again. He’d promised Elena rest, promised Reeva he’d stay long enough to heal. But rest never sat well with him, not when the reports kept surfacing — pockets of resistance, caches buried beneath empty warehouses, children press-ganged into carrying ammunition through the sewers. He’d left before dawn, scrawling a note that said back soon, don’t wait up.By sunrise, Lina had caught up to him.“You didn’t think you’d run off without a tail, did you?” she’d said, climbing into the passenger seat with a grin that was all exhaustion and defiance.Now, as the road curved toward the abandoned steelworks that marked the next settlement
Chapter One Hundred and Ninety-Seven
The rain came before dawn, slicing through the haze with a relentless hiss. Jake woke to the sound of it hammering against the tarp above their heads, each drop sharp as glass. Lina was already awake, sitting cross-legged beside the dim lantern, her hair damp and eyes fixed on the map spread across her knees.“He’s alive,” she said quietly, as if saying it louder might make it untrue.Jake nodded, rubbing the sleep from his eyes. “You heard what I did. Same name. Same voice.”“Rylan Voss,” she whispered. The name tasted like rust.Years ago, Rylan had been one of them — strategist, idealist, a believer in the cause before the cause turned bloody. He’d disappeared after the Eastern Massacre, presumed dead in the blast that took half the unit. If he was alive now — and working with the remnants of Hassan’s network — it meant something darker was rising behind the smoke.Jake pushed himself to his feet. “We move at first light. Tomas can’t risk this camp being found.”Lina folded the map
Chapter One Hundred and Ninety-Eight
The cliffs rose from the mist like the spine of some ancient beast, their jagged edges cutting through the dawn light. Jake guided the truck up the narrow dirt road, the tires slipping in the wet earth, engine growling with effort. Behind him, Lina pressed a cloth against Rylan’s shoulder, trying to stanch the bleeding. He was half-conscious now, mumbling fragments of words — plans, names, places that no longer existed.“Hold on,” she murmured. “We’re almost there.”The relay tower came into view — a skeletal structure of rust and silence perched on the edge of the world. It had once transmitted government broadcasts across the northern region, but now it stood abandoned, its dishes tilted toward a sky that no longer listened.Jake parked under the shadow of the tower and killed the engine. For a moment, the world was still. The only sound was the sea crashing below and Rylan’s uneven breathing.Lina looked at Jake. “We can’t move him much more.”Jake nodded. “Then this is where we ma
Chapter One Hundred and Ninety-Nine
Elena stood before the cracked glass window, arms folded, staring at the glow of the lower sectors. Behind her, the council chamber lay empty. Abandoned mid-session, papers still scattered across the polished table. She’d ended the meeting herself—too many half-truths, too many faces refusing to meet her eyes.Reeva’s encrypted message had arrived two hours ago. No sender tag, no timestamp, just a single burst of data that cracked the city’s network like lightning. When Elena opened it, she found the proof she had feared but never spoken aloud: half her council had been feeding Hassan’s remnants. The rest had been protecting something far worse.The Ascendant Protocol.She leaned on the sill, jaw tight. “Jake,” she murmured. “What did you find out there?”Behind her, the door slid open. Reeva entered, hair damp from the rain, tablet in hand. “The signal burned through six ghost nodes before I could even trace it,” she said. “You were right—it came from the northern relay. They didn’t
Chapter Two Hundred
The wind over the northern ridge carried the scent of iron and salt. Jake Frost crouched by the cliff’s edge, watching the ocean churn far below—black waves slamming against the jagged rocks. The storm had rolled in fast, swallowing the horizon in sheets of gray. It wasn’t just weather; it was warning.Behind him, the settlement fires flickered against the dark. Makeshift tents of scavenged cloth, old solar panels angled like prayer flags. These people—miners, refugees, the forgotten—had built their homes from the bones of machines. And now they looked to him as if he were something more than a man.He wasn’t.He was just tired.Jake brushed wet hair from his face as Lira, the young mechanic who’d become his reluctant shadow, climbed the ridge. “We got the transmitters patched,” she said, shivering beneath a patched coat. “But the network’s pulsing again. The frequencies keep shifting.”Jake’s jaw tensed. “It’s searching.”“For what?”He turned toward the sea. Lightning cracked the sk