Chapter 191They reached the elevator but the doors were sealed shut, completely dead. Adrian didn't press the button. He placed his hand flat against the brushed steel doors. [ MACRO-KINETIC DISPLACEMENT. ]The doors didn't pry open; they were violently ripped apart, folding outward like tin foil. Adrian stepped into the empty shaft, grabbed Joe by the collar of his tactical vest, and looked straight up the pitch-black, mile-high vertical tunnel. "Going up," Adrian announced. With a surge of localized anti-gravity, they launched upward. The wind shrieked past them as they bypassed one hundred and nineteen floors in four seconds. Adrian halted them with jarring precision directly in front of the 120th-floor doors, effortlessly tearing them open and stepping out into the penthouse corridor. The air up here was different. "Boss," Joe whispered, his pulse rifle raised. He was shivering. "Something's wrong. The hallway... it’s too long."Adrian looked down the corridor leading to

Chapter 193 If there was one thing Adrian Black hated more than interdimensional debt collectors and megalomaniacal shadow governments, it was paperwork. The command bridge of the hovering dreadnought had been transformed into the most terrifying, high-stakes accounting firm in the history of the solar system. Millions of holographic documents, city charters, property deeds, birth records, tax ledgers, and encrypted Vanguard operational logs, swirled through the air like a localized blizzard of glowing blue data. In the center of the storm, suspended three feet off the metal deck in a meditative lotus position, was Adrian. His shifting, dark-matter suit absorbed the harsh light of the holograms. His eyes, burning with that terrifying, swirling cosmic mixture of gold and crimson, were darting back and forth at speeds that would have liquefied a normal human optic nerve. He wasn't just reading the data, the Sovereign core in his chest was allowing him to process the entire bureaucr

Chapter 195 He channeled all his cosmic energy into the large volume and the words on the page literally peeled off the paper, dissolving into cosmic static. "NO!" the Archivist shrieked. As the Founding Charter burned with cosmic fire, the entity tied to its existence began to shatter. The Archivist's impeccably tailored silver suit frayed into pixels and the bowler hat dissolved into dust. The mirror-face cracked, spider-webbing with hundreds of fractures. "You're fired," Adrian said coldly. The Archivist reached out, trying to grab the burning book, but his hand turned into white static before it could touch the pedestal. With a final, echoing scream of dial-up static, the cognitive blind spot was permanently deleted from reality. The Archivist vanished, leaving behind only a faint smell of burnt books and ink. The vault fell dead silent. The leather book on the pedestal crumbled into a pile of gray ash. "Bloody hell," Joe breathed, lowering his rifle as he wiped a bea

Chapter 197Adrian threw up a wall of condensed dark matter. The ice needles slammed into the shield like a barrage of machine-gun fire, shattering into dust. The kinetic force pushed Adrian back, his boots leaving long, deep scratches in the black marble floor. "Joe! Cora! Get out of here!" Adrian roared over the sound of shattering ice. "You can't fight him! The elevator shaft is open—climb!""I'm not leaving you!" Joe yelled, dropping his useless rifle and pulling a heavy combat knife from his boot. "Joe, don't be an idiot!" Cora grabbed his shoulder with her one good, biological hand. "He can turn off our tech! We're liabilities down here! We have to get to the dreadnought and tell Lena!"Kaelen ignored the sidekicks. He walked slowly toward Adrian’s dark-matter shield, his mirrored eyes reflecting the golden-crimson sparks of the impact. "They can run," Kaelen’s voice echoed telepathically, bypassing the noise. "But they cannot hide. The city belongs to me now. Every camera, e

Chapter 200The Dreadnought - Medical BayAdrian bolted upright on the bio-bed, ripping the neural cable out of his neck with a ragged, desperate gasp for air. He collapsed forward, coughing violently, his hands gripping the edges of the metal table so hard the steel buckled. The sickly silver light under his skin was gone. The erratic glitching of his dark-matter suit smoothed out, returning to its flawless, bespoke obsidian perfection. "Boss!" Joe rushed forward, hovering anxiously. "Are you back? Are you you?"Adrian slowly raised his head. He opened his eyes. The golden light of the Earth’s Foundation Nodes was completely gone. Instead, his irises were a pure, swirling vortex of deep cosmic crimson and void-black, illuminated by the sheer, unadulterated power of the Sovereign core. He wasn't tied to the city anymore. He was entirely, horrifyingly untethered. He was running purely on the stolen battery of an interdimensional harvester. "I'm here," Adrian said. His voice had lo