The city breathed in uneasy rhythms. Neon lights flickered faintly, power grids hummed softly, and the streets seemed deceptively calm. Lina, Kael, and Vale moved cautiously through Sector Eleven, their senses alert.Vale tapped her wrist console, eyes scanning rapidly. “I’m seeing irregular activity in multiple sectors simultaneously. Not fragments, not nodes, he’s orchestrating subtle manipulations, distributing influence across the city. I think… this is the First Resurgence.”Kael’s blue energy pulsed faintly along his veins. “Resurgence… meaning he’s trying to regain a Core indirectly, without drawing attention.”Lina frowned. “So he’s back in stealth mode, testing, probing… planning.”Vale nodded. “Exactly. He’s not attacking directly yet, he’s planting seeds, probing vulnerabilities. Psychological triggers, minor system glitches… small enough to be dismissed by anyone else, but coordinated enough to rebuild him over time.”Kael’s jaw tightened. “Then we have to intercept. Find

The rain had stopped, but Echo City hadn’t found its silence.Somewhere in the distance, a siren looped endlessly, stuck in a fragment of code, unable to end.Inside a dim apartment overlooking the river, Lina stared at the wall. She wasn’t sure when she’d stopped blinking.Kael’s reflection flickered in the cracked windowpane behind her. “You haven’t slept,” he said quietly. “I don’t trust what I see when I close my eyes.”He crossed the room, boots silent on the old wood. “You think he’s still in there?”She nodded, barely. “Every night it feels like my memories... rearrange themselves. Things out of order. My father’s voice where Vale’s should be. My training replayed like a recording I didn’t press play on.”Kael frowned. “Residual psychic code.”“That’s what Vale calls it.”“And you don’t believe her.”“I do. I just think it’s worse.”Vale’s voice broke through the comm on the table, calm but strained. “Both of you downstairs. Now.”When they entered the safehouse basement, they

Rain pressed against the safe-house windows, slow and deliberate, as if the city itself were breathing.Lina sat by the cracked glass, fingers tracing the condensation. Her reflection looked pale, slightly out of sync with her movements. She didn’t mention it. Not yet.Kael shuffled through a pile of burnt circuit boards on the table. “Vale’s stabilizer’s fried,” he muttered. “Half her code backups too. If she wakes and sees this mess, she’ll kill me.”Lina’s voice was flat. “You should let her sleep. We all need the illusion of recovery.”He looked up. “You really think that was an illusion?”“Everything since the Network has felt like one.”The power flickered. Just once. But the lights didn’t come back exactly as they were, one bulb near the corner hummed at a different pitch, its glow pulsing faintly with Lina’s heartbeat.Kael frowned. “You see that?”She exhaled slowly. “No. Pretend it’s normal.”He crossed to the window beside her. The street below was empty except for the shee

Light. Motion. Pulse.Echo City unfolded beneath Frost like a living circuit board, streets threaded with veins of code, buildings breathing in timed rhythm. Every window flickered with captured memories: people laughing, crying, running. He watched them repeat in perfect sync, an orchestra of controlled chaos.“Phase Two online,” murmured a voice that was both inside and outside him.He smiled. “Stability ratio?” “Seventy-one percent and rising.” “Good,” Frost said softly. “The city is learning.”He stepped forward. Pavement rippled under his boots, glass skyscrapers bending toward him as if in reverence. When he passed, their reflections rearranged into faces, scientists, soldiers, and one woman with silver eyes.Lina.The system pulsed harder when her image appeared. For a moment, Frost felt the ghost of a heartbeat he no longer owned.“She resists,” the voice whispered.“She remembers,” Frost corrected. “Resistance is only data waiting to be processed.”He reached out. The skylin

The skyline pulsed like a heartbeat.Each flicker in the neon veins across the buildings felt deliberate, rhythmic, almost alive. The air was thin, electric, humming with unseen static.Kael checked his wristband for coordinates, but the display just blinked gibberish. “My map’s fried.”“Not just yours,” Lina said, tapping her neural interface. It sputtered, failed, then flared briefly with Frost’s insignia, a three-ringed sigil pulsing cold light. “He’s hijacked local systems. Anything running on grid power belongs to him now.”Vale crouched beside a man frozen mid-step on the sidewalk. His skin shimmered faintly with under-skin circuitry. When she touched his wrist, it was warm, pulsing like something half alive, half broadcast.“He’s syncing them,” she whispered. “Neural signals turned into network nodes. The whole population’s becoming part of his consciousness.”Kael looked around, dozens of motionless bodies in shop windows, bus stops, cars that still idled though no one drove t