Kael’s hands shook as he pressed them against her shoulders, willing her back to him. Lina’s chest rose in shallow, uneven breaths, but her eyes remained closed, lids flickering like a shutter refusing to open. The glow of the Chamber wrapped around them, not harsh, not warm—just alive, aware, omnipresent.“Stay with me,” he whispered, his voice cracking, the words barely audible over the pulse of light that thrummed beneath his fingertips. He tilted her head back slightly, brushing a strand of hair from her face. Her skin was impossibly cold, yet it carried a strange weightlessness, a pull that seemed to resist his grip.“Come on… please,” he muttered, his voice rough. Panic lanced through him as the glow intensified. The lines of the Chamber no longer followed her movements—they were converging, spiraling, responding to her very essence. It wasn’t just her body anymore. It was the code inside her. The part of her that made her… Lina.Her chest stuttered in rhythm with the spiraling

It had been three days…Kael sat on the edge of the crumbled parapet, the city sprawled below him like a map of failures. The wind carried no comfort—only the hollow echo of absence. He had thought grief would paralyze him, and it had. But now, beneath the numbness, a different heat was creeping through his veins, igniting every thought with an edge he hadn’t felt in years.He clenched his fists so tightly that his nails dug crescent moons into his palms. The memory of her face—the way Lina had looked at him when she trusted him—tormented him. She had given him everything she could: her hope, her small, defiant courage, the fragments of her own fragile self. And he had failed. He had promised to protect her, and she had slipped through his hands like smoke.A bitter laugh tore from his throat, ragged and sharp. The city seemed to recoil from it. “You fool,” he muttered to himself. “Every promise, every word—gone.”The grief that had gripped him was still there, but it had hardened, sh

Kael didn’t remember choosing the direction, only the rhythm of his feet pounding against stone, carrying him deeper into the veins of the city. The streets grew quieter here, narrower, and the air hung thicker with smoke. He knew this territory—not from memory but from instinct. The Syndicate always left scars where it touched, and Kael had learned to read them.The buildings here were hollow-eyed, their windows dark, their facades crumbling. Graffiti etched in hurried strokes warned of trespass, and yet shadows moved along the edges, watching. Syndicate ground. Not a fortress, not their heart, but a node—a place where their machinery fed on lives too small to resist.Kael’s stride slowed. His breath fogged faintly in the night air as he scanned the alley, gaze sharpening. He saw them then, two men in black coats stationed near a rusted doorway, their postures stiff with vigilance. Syndicate enforcers.A part of him expected fear to rise. Instead, something colder settled in. He adju

The Syndicate did not come quietly.Engines roared as black armored vehicles skidded into the street, tires screaming against cobblestones. Doors slammed open, boots thundered down, and the night lit up with the metallic snap of rifles being drawn. At least twenty of them, moving in practiced formation, their visors glowing faintly with blue light.Kael stood alone at the warehouse threshold, shoulders squared, knife dripping blood that glistened under the streetlamps. The air smelled of smoke, oil, and iron. Behind him, the cages yawned empty, the last freed prisoner vanishing into the city’s dark veins.This was his war now. His and his alone.The first wave opened fire. Bullets shrieked against the steel frame, ricocheting in sparks. Kael dropped low, rolled, and came up hard behind a broken crate. Splinters burst as rounds tore through the wood. He steadied his breath, the rage inside him sharpening to focus.When the firing lulled for a breath, he moved.He surged forward like a

Kael didn’t feel the blood dry on his skin. He didn’t feel the ache in his joints from the blows he’d dealt or the way his lungs burned with each ragged breath. What he felt was hollowness, stretching wide inside him, and only one way to fill it: more destruction.The Syndicate had nests scattered like tumors through the city. Some were known, some guessed, others hidden under the daily noise of life. Kael didn’t need maps anymore. Rage was his compass, tugging him forward, pulling him down darker and narrower streets until he found where the disease festered.The docklands reeked of oil and salt, of smoke drifting from the factories that coughed out their haze night after night. He walked through the industrial fog like it was an extension of himself, unflinching, eyes raw from sleeplessness and grief.That was when he saw it.A warehouse hunched near the edge of the wharf, a rust-red structure that should have been abandoned but wasn’t. Its corrugated steel sides bore painted emblem