Ten Years Later The summer heat made everything blur the world had reset after the Architects fell, but some things still pulsed beneath the surface. Damon Bell walked across campus in Venice a part of Italy, sweat dripping down his back, laptop slung over one shoulder. It was supposed to be a calm semester with just two classes, iced coffee, and lazy afternoons but things hadn’t felt right. It started with the dreams that were static in his head whispers in code a voice calling him it was Mindfire. At first, Damon thought he was losing his mind. Then, one night his phone froze and flickered then came back to life with a single line: [“Transfer to Cybersecurity. Trust the signal.”] He had been studying Neurology he was obsessed with brain patterns, consciousness, thought loops. But something deeper had called him something old and buried in machines so mid-semester he switched. His first day in cybersecurity felt strange as he sat at the back of the class, surrounded by a sea

The Rome skyline burned gold beneath the setting sun, but Damon’s mind was elsewhere it was always elsewhere. As he was back in his hotel leaning against the narrow hotel balcony, shirt clinging to his skin, Cassandra’s lipstick still on his neck, as he was in the villa last time he saw her there and they kissed. He should’ve walked away but he hadn’t and couldn’t. The elites were already using Cassandra to distract Damon in Rome.Surprisingly Cassandra followed him back to the hotel and she had planned to sleepover. She had that voice with that sadness that had a secret hunger that mirrored his own. But tonight something was off she’d been quiet afterward. No tears with no kisses just silence as she dressed in front of the mirror like a stranger. “You’re still playing both sides,” Damon said finally, voice low. Cassandra paused, applying her lipstick slowly. “I never said I wasn’t.” Damon narrowed his eyes. “Your husband’s watching you.” “He always watches,” she whispered, meetin

After the incident they continued towards the catacombs under Rome which weren’t listed on any tour maps these were older deep tunnels carved beneath the Vatican centuries ago, used by excommunicated priests and secret orders. Now, they were alive with something else: machines humming low, cold servers blinking in the dark like artificial stars. Damon and Zia moved through the narrow corridors silently. His eyes glowed faintly in the dark now too much time connected to the signal, too much of him rewritten. He could sense power lines, hidden fiber cables, and encrypted broadcasts pulsing like veins under the stone. “We’re close,” Damon whispered. Zia scanned behind them, her pistol raised. “You sure this Neri guy’s network is in here?” “No,” he said. “But something older is.”They reached a massive metal door embedded in ancient stone. Damon placed his hand on it circuits inside the wall it lit up blue. “Can you open it?” Zia asked. “I can ask nicely.” He closed his eyes inside

Before they were warriors in the ruins of Rome before they got entangled in the midst of Neural Rebellion team as they returned to Tokyo later on. Rei Nakamura and Kaito Sera were ghosts in their own golden cages. Rei was born in the Kyoto she is the daughter of Admiral Takashi Nakamura and Dr. Hanae Mizuki. Two names etched in both the defense contracts of the pan pacific syndicate and the black budget projects of the early robots weaponization initiative. Her father was a warlord in a suit controlling orbital drone fleets with a nod. Her mother built cognitive warfare algorithms before the world knew what they were. Rei had grown up beneath security towers and inside smartglass walls, trained from childhood in cryptology and power hierarchy. But it wasn’t until age fifteen that she saw what her parents did which they funded an Architect vault beneath the Dead Sea, where synthetic minds screamed behind reinforced obsidian she never forgave them. Kaito Sera came from Seoul’s elite

The catacombs beneath Rome groaned with old data and older bones. Rei ducked under a crumbling archway, her boots slipping against ancient cobblestones still slick from last night’s storm of looking for Damon. Her pulse thundered in her ears, but she kept moving, flashlight bouncing against the stone walls lined with decayed inscriptions and faded Architect glyphs. Behind her, Kaito moved like a shadow, silent but tense, his hand held a scanner glowing blue with every step.“We’re getting close,” he muttered. “The signal spike is constant Damon’s being moved, but... not fully conscious.”Rei swallowed hard. “They’re forcing a merge.”“Rootstream?”She nodded. “And worse. Mindfire’s presence is still flickering. But faint. Like they’ve buried him inside him.”They rounded the final corner before them stood a vault door fused with layers of old world steel and quantum encryption. A digital lock tied to biometric imprinting, retinal scans, and mental pattern recognition but Rei didn’t fl