The tide of public opinion had turned to ice. Amelia moved through the streets of Oakhaven like a ghost, the whispers a chilling fog around her. Plague-bringer. Grave-robber. The Prophet’s lies were a poison in the water supply of the city’s soul, and no amount of logical argument from Ethan’s articles or Kincaid’s terse bulletins could purge it. The Grey Breath continued its slow, suffocating work, and with every blue-faced victim, the accusation against her seemed to solidify.Hope was a currency that had been devalued to worthlessness. Until Amelia, desperate and ostracized, decided to stop fighting the current plague and start digging for its historical shadow.She remembered Professor Hale’s old adage, spoken during a late-night study session on epidemiological history: “The answer to the next pandemic is often buried in the archives of the last one. We just forget to look.”The Oakhaven University archives were a ruin, but the military had secured a digital backup server in a ha

The riot had shattered the city’s fragile façade, and the government’s response was not repentance, but a descent into pure, unvarnished brutality. The “Parade of Strength” had exposed the state’s weakness, and now, like a cornered animal, it bared its teeth.The new policy was announced not by Chancellor Lysandra, but through cold, impersonal bulletins from the National Health Directorate. The language was sterile, bureaucratic, and all the more horrifying for it.“Directive 7: Mandatory Relocation of High-Transmission Risk Individuals.”Amelia first learned of it when the heavy, grinding sounds of large vehicles and the shriek of protesting metal replaced the usual morning sounds of distant sirens and cries. From the command post’s window, she watched a convoy of massive, windowless trucks, flanked by squads of soldiers in full combat gear, roll into a residential sector known to be a hotbed of the Grey Breath.“What are they doing?” she asked, her voice hollow.Kincaid stood beside

The victory was ash. The doctors were freed, the cages were broken, but the cost was a city tearing itself apart. The riots had devolved into a hundred smaller, uglier conflicts. Looting, score-settling, and the desperate, brutal logic of survival had replaced the initial, righteous fury. The state’s authority had collapsed, but nothing had risen to take its place except chaos. And through it all, the plagues—the Ash-Fever, the Grey Breath—continued their work, unimpeded by the political drama.Amelia felt it all. Every act of kindness, a flicker of warmth in the Obelisk’s cold expanse. Every act of cruelty, a shard of ice. But the balance was breaking. The scales were tipping, and the weight was not that of disease, but of deliberate, human malice.It was the children that broke it.A report, passed through Ethan’s network, was more horrific than any bio-weapon. In the anarchy, a fringe group, calling themselves the “Purifiers,” had decided the only way to save the uninfected was to