The lights flickered once. Not a warning. Not a gradual fade. Just a sharp stutter, like the city had blinked.Across Crest, towers of glass and steel shuddered with sudden shadow. Street panels dimmed, surged, then dimmed again. A ripple of confusion moved through traffic lanes as autonomous vehicles slowed at once, their guidance grids hesitating.Inside the Central Arcology, the ceiling lights snapped off row by row. Emergency power should have engaged within half a second. It didn’t.A woman in a transit hub looked up, phone raised, waiting for the glow to return. It stayed dark. Her screen went black in her hand. Around her, hundreds of people froze, staring at dead displays, their reflections faint in the glass walls. Then the city went dark. Not dim. Not reduced. Gone. Crest lost its light in one breath. The sky above the city, once stained with constant glow, turned deep and empty. Stars appeared, sharp, unfamiliar points that no living resident had ever seen from the groun

Last Updated : 2026-01-07

Chapter 221. Ashes of Crest

The city woke to boots. Heavy ones. Armored. Marching in uneven rhythm along streets that had never heard them before.Dawn came gray and weak over Crest. The sun rose, but the light did not bounce. It fell flat on metal, broken glass, and silent towers. Emergency generators coughed to life in scattered pockets, feeding power to barricades, loudspeakers, and surveillance rigs bolted onto corners overnight.Curfew sirens wailed. Not the old automated tone. These were manual horns, rough and too loud, echoing down corridors and between buildings.“Stay inside.” The words came from speakers mounted on troop carriers crawling through intersections.“Remain in your residences.”“Unauthorized movement will be detained.”In District Twelve, a woman cracked her door open and froze. Two armored patrols moved past her building, rifles angled down but ready. Their visors were dark. No faces. No insignia beyond the provisional crest painted in white on black plates.She shut the door without a s

Last Updated : 2026-01-08

Chapter 222. The Silence After Victory

The city rang with cheers. Crest had never sounded like this. Horns, sirens, bells from long-unused towers. Flags hung from every railing, every balcony. Screens looped the same edited footage of Kai’s collapse, the phrase “Confirmed Neutralized” scrolling beneath his frozen silhouette. Public squares were crowded. People clapped. Some wept. Others shouted slogans in unison.Rhea stayed inside her apartment. The shutters were drawn tight. A single emergency lamp hummed low on the floor. She moved quietly across the room, stepping around a scattered array of monitors, cables, and half-assembled data probes. She didn’t look at the window. She didn’t need to. She could hear the celebration from three floors up.A knock at the door startled her. “Rhea? Everyone’s waiting,” a voice said from the other side. Official, but tense.She didn’t answer. “Rhea, you can’t stay in there. The council wants you at the memorial.”“I said no,” she replied, her voice calm but hard.There was a pause.

Last Updated : 2026-01-09

Chapter 223. Smugglers of the Unseen

The alley smelled of damp metal and diesel. Rain dripped from broken panels, pooling in shallow rivulets across cracked pavement.Eren crouched in the shadows, hood pulled low, scanning the street. Digital overlays blinked on his portable terminal, false IDs, projected itineraries, simulated medical records. Everything pointed to a man who didn’t exist. A man who had to move without trace.A convoy waited at the far end: trucks, buses, and old passenger carriers patched with metal plates, their engines quiet beneath tarp coverings. Citizens shuffled in, faces pale and wary. Children clutched makeshift bags, some crying quietly, others staring with blank, calculated calm. Eren moved through them like a ghost, checking manifests, verifying holographic tags, and adjusting one by one.Kai lay beneath a tarp in the last bus, barely stirring. His arm was bandaged, a thick, dark stain running through the cloth. His breathing was shallow but steady. Every so often, he twitched, eyes flicker

Last Updated : 2026-01-10

Chapter 224. The World Without Hands

The man called himself Rowan now. He answered to it when spoken aloud. He signed it on ration logs. He let it settle into his posture, his walk, his way of standing slightly off-center in any room. Rowan was forgettable. That was the point.Kai cut his hair short with a dull blade in a communal washroom two days after leaving the convoy. He shaved unevenly, then let stubble grow back wrong. He burned his old jacket and traded it for a patched coat that smelled of oil and rain. When he caught his reflection in a cracked mirror, he tilted his head, adjusted his shoulders, and nodded once.The face would pass. The settlement outside the dead zone called itself Haven Ridge. It was neither haven nor ridge. It was a sprawl of stacked shipping containers, collapsed prefab housing, and tents stretched between old highway pylons. Smoke drifted from cook fires. People moved constantly, but without flow. No rhythm. No timing.Kai walked in with a sack over his shoulder and nothing else. At th

Last Updated : 2026-01-12

Chapter 225. The Empire of Tenebris

The banners went up before sunrise. They were black, thick cloth reinforced with fiber, heavy enough to hang straight even in the wind. Crews worked in silence, fastening them to towers, bridges, and the skeletal remains of old Crest infrastructure. Floodlights came online one by one, turning the banners into flat silhouettes against pale concrete.By the time the sun crested the horizon, the city center no longer belonged to Crest. It belonged to Tenebris.Armored formations assembled across the Grand Axis Plaza. Rows of soldiers locked into position, boots aligned, rifles angled down. No insignia marked rank. Only the Tenebris symbol burned white on their chest plates.Civilians gathered at a distance first, then closer. Word had spread during the night. Power was returning. Water pumps had restarted in three districts. Food convoys had crossed borders without being attacked. People came because things were working again.They stood shoulder to shoulder, quiet, watching the platf

Last Updated : 2026-01-13

Chapter 226. The Shattered Vault

The Vault died in pieces. Not in one purge. Not with a broadcast or a final stand. It broke quietly, node by node, person by person, until no one could say where it ended or what it had ever been.Kai learned this by walking. He moved under a new name again. The alias changed with each region. Clothes changed too. What stayed the same was his pace. Slow. Observant. Never first to speak.The first rumor reached him in a rail-yard settlement built from overturned freight cars.Two men argued beside a barrel fire. “You hear about the Vault people?” one asked.The other spat into the dirt. “Which ones?”“The ones who ran the deep code. Before the blackout.”“Yeah,” the second man said. “They’re gone. Or sold out.”Kai kept walking. That night, he slept in a maintenance tunnel with water dripping through cracked concrete. He wrote by lantern light, pencil scratching steady lines across paper. “Vault no longer cohesive. Names traded like currency.”He closed the journal and hid it under h

Last Updated : 2026-01-14

Chapter 226. The Shattered Vault

The Vault died in pieces. Not in one purge. Not with a broadcast or a final stand. It broke quietly, node by node, person by person, until no one could say where it ended or what it had ever been.Kai learned this by walking. He moved under a new name again. The alias changed with each region. Clothes changed too. What stayed the same was his pace. Slow. Observant. Never first to speak.The first rumor reached him in a rail-yard settlement built from overturned freight cars.Two men argued beside a barrel fire. “You hear about the Vault people?” one asked.The other spat into the dirt. “Which ones?”“The ones who ran the deep code. Before the blackout.”“Yeah,” the second man said. “They’re gone. Or sold out.”Kai kept walking. That night, he slept in a maintenance tunnel with water dripping through cracked concrete. He wrote by lantern light, pencil scratching steady lines across paper. “Vault no longer cohesive. Names traded like currency.”He closed the journal and hid it under h

Last Updated : 2026-01-14

Chapter 227. The Analog Sanctum

The storm came without warning. It rolled across the dead plain in a hard gray wall, sand cutting sideways, wind tearing at anything not bolted down. The outer colonies had no warning systems left. No satellites. No alerts. You learned storms by feeling the air change.Kai felt it as he tightened the last bolt on the solar mast. He climbed down from the rusted scaffold as the first gust hit, boots slipping on cracked concrete. He pulled a tarp over the exposed panels and locked it down with steel hooks. The wind howled harder, slamming into the skeletal remains of the old facility.The structure had once been a weather research hub. Pre-digital. Built before full automation. Thick walls. Manual controls. It had survived because no one thought it mattered anymore.Kai shoved the door closed and sealed the latch. The storm battered the building. The lights inside did not flicker.A single generator hummed, steady and low. Kai stood in the center of the room and waited until the sound

Last Updated : 2026-01-15

Chapter 228. The False Resurrection

The static hit first. Kai was crouched behind the collapsed wall of a former comm tower. His hands were greasy from repairing the analog relay he had scavenged, trying to pull a weak signal from a dead network. The receiver buzzed and clicked, struggling to stay on a single frequency. Then the image appeared. It was him.The Kai on the screen was perfect. Standing in a restored command room that didn’t exist. His hair exactly as it had been before he disappeared, clothes immaculate, posture precise. The voice, tonal, steady, perfectly modulated, cut through the small speakers, clear enough to sound live.“Citizens of the world,” the broadcast began. “I return to guide you. The new Grid will restore order. Submit, and you will be safe.”Kai froze. He didn’t move a muscle. The words weren’t his. The pauses were too neat. The intonation lacked hesitation, lacked friction, lacked thought. The cadence was too smooth.He turned the dial on the receiver, trying to catch a second frequenc

Last Updated : 2026-01-16