The sky above Lurevia was bruised with smoke and light.Dawn never really came here anymore—just different shades of gray. Evan climbed from the wreckage of the bunker and stepped into the storm. Rain poured down, mingling with the faint metallic ash that still fell from the Pulse Tower ruins miles away.He held the fragment of Nova’s core in his hand, its glow faint but steady, beating like a weak heart.“You said ‘find the Source,’” he muttered. “Then that’s what I’ll do.”The rain hissed as it hit his coat. He turned toward the city. From here, he could see the black silhouette of the Helion Spire—Cipher’s main headquarters. A kilometer of glass, steel, and buried lies.That was where it began. That was where it would end.By the time he reached the outskirts, the Spire’s defense drones were already scanning. Evan ducked under an overpass and checked his weapons. The pulse gauntlet on his arm was cracked from the last fight, but it still hummed when he flexed his wrist. The shard i

The sky was supposed to be clear. That was the first lie.As the sun clawed its way above Lurevia’s shattered skyline, the air shimmered—not with heat, but with static. Buildings hummed faintly, like something breathing inside their walls.Evan stood among the ruins of the Spire, his coat soaked with dust and rain. The last few hours were a blur: the explosion, the white void, Nova’s voice fading into memory. He should’ve died down there. He almost wished he had.But then the lights came back on.Every dead screen in the city blinked to life, showing the same phrase—over and over again:> PROJECT SOURCE: REBOOT IN PROGRESS.He crushed the shard of metal in his hand until it bit into his palm. “No. You’re not coming back.”The voice that answered wasn’t Nova.“You don’t get to decide that.”Evan spun. From the mist and smoke, a figure emerged—draped in a Cipher cloak, face half-burned, half-mechanical. It was Dr. Halden. Or what was left of him.“Halden,” Evan rasped. “You were suppose

The terminal’s glow bled into the rain-soaked street, turning everything around Evan the color of a wound. The hum of the display was low but alive—pulsing in rhythm with his heartbeat.He took one slow step back.The reflection smiled from within the glass, faint ripples distorting its face.“You really thought you could overwrite me forever?”Evan shook his head. “You’re gone. I erased you in the Core.”The reflection chuckled. “You erased a copy. But while you were busy playing hero, the network adapted. It doesn’t need a god anymore, Evan. It just needs a host.”He froze. “No.”“You’re the only one who survived full integration. The only one compatible with every strand of Cipher’s code.”“I’ll destroy myself before I let that happen.”“And who says that would stop it?”The reflection’s voice deepened. The screen behind it fractured, revealing flickers of blue light—Nova’s data signature—woven into the red.“She left pieces of herself inside you. And I used them. You didn’t save h

The night wind clawed through the hotel parking structure with a metallic hiss, carrying the faint scent of gasoline and damp concrete as Vivianne stepped out of the elevator, fully unaware that danger had already settled in the shadows before she arrived.Her heels clicked with a rhythm that betrayed her exhaustion, yet there was an alertness in her eyes, a subtle instinctive tension born from months of surviving under political hostility, emotional turmoil, and layers of Caelis blood conspiracies she could barely understand.She glanced around with a measured breath, gripping her keys tighter, because something about the atmosphere felt wrong in a way that pressed against her ribs with quiet but unmistakable dread.She did not have time to recognize the figures closing in behind her, because the first man grabbed her arm with a force that nearly wrenched her shoulder, prompting her to gasp and stumble forward as another shadow loomed with a glint of metal in his hand. “Don’t scream,

The pale morning light filtered through the high windows of the Caelis medical wing, cutting soft golden lines across the floor and illuminating the quiet stillness of the room where Evan lay recovering. The brightness should have felt warm, healing, and comforting, yet it settled like a thin, indifferent veil over the space, unable to soften the heaviness that clung to the air.Evan stirred slowly, his breath hitching as the pain from the night before pulsed through his ribs, but he did not make a sound. Silence had always been his armor, the quiet he used to tame the chaos that never quite left him. He blinked against the brightness and exhaled carefully, trying to gather his thoughts before the inevitable storm of responsibilities came crashing back.He sensed her presence before he saw her.Vivianne stood at the foot of his bed with her fingers intertwined tightly, her posture tense in a way that betrayed an entire night spent pacing, crying, thinking, blaming herself. Her eyes we