Antarctica – Hollow Point Ruins, Zero Visibility. One Hour After Glasswork Shutdown.The power was gone, The temperature inside Hollow Point was dropping by the second. Once-warm server chambers were turning into metal tombs.Cassian leaned against a collapsed console, bleeding from a wound at his temple. Ayla tore a strip from her undershirt and pressed it to his head. “We need to move. Now,” she said. “Before we freeze to death.”He nodded, dazed. “Extraction?”“Gone. Comms fried in the surge. We’re on our own.”She paused. “And Vex?”Cassian didn’t answer, Which meant Vex was still alive, They moved through the corridors, emergency lights flickering weakly. Ayla kept her weapon raised. Cassian leaned on her for support, barely speaking.Outside, the storm howled like it wanted them back, Ayla reached the external hatch, but stopped cold, The helicopter was gone. Cassian stared. “He took it?”“No,” she said quietly.Because Vex hadn’t taken the helicopter, He’d destroyed it, The twi

Moscow – Abandoned Soviet Data Center 5:17 p.m. "Ϟ"A symbol with no known agency, no known cipher, no matching string in any government database, Yet it had appeared in Cain’s system. And now, it was appearing everywhere.Cassian led Ayla and Vex through rusted steel doors into the data tomb beneath the city, one of the USSR’s forgotten cold war vaults. But this one wasn’t abandoned.Inside: heat signatures, low-level power, a recent trace of server activity, Ayla moved through aisles of dust-choked machines, her flashlight sweeping across Soviet-era storage racks. “What is this place?”Cassian replied, “Before the Foundation, there was another project. One so secret even the Kremlin buried it without a name. They called it ‘Protocol Icarus.’”She stopped walking. “Why haven’t I heard of this?”“Because Icarus was purged. Files shredded. Agents executed. The only thing that survived…” he nodded toward a humming, pitch-black server in the back, “was this.”The Black Server... No marki