The storm had gone quiet.For the first time in months, the red haze above the city began to thin, revealing a pale sky. The lightning was gone. The air was still. But the silence wasn’t peace — it was aftershock.Nova stood beside the ruins of the Spire, her rifle hanging loose at her side. She watched Leon as he walked to the edge of the crater, the wind catching his torn coat. His eyes glowed faintly — one blue, one red — pulsing in rhythm with the faint hum that filled the air.He didn’t say a word.“Leon,” she called softly. “Talk to me. Please.”He didn’t turn around.[System Active.][Network Integration: 43%.][Command Potential: 61%.]He could feel everything — every circuit buried beneath the city, every machine whispering through the storm. The Apex wasn’t dead. It had been rewritten. Its systems bent around his will like a second nervous system.He was connected to everything.Raze climbed out of the rubble, coughing. “Alright, someone tell me what the hell just happened.

The tunnel lights flickered as Leon stared at the projection hovering above the command table. A glowing sphere pulsed in midair, covered in shimmering lines of blue and red code that curved and converged like a living circuit.Nova, Raze, and Iko gathered around him in silence.“What are we looking at?” Raze asked, squinting.Leon zoomed in with a flick of his hand. “This is what I saw when our networks collided. The Apex’s architecture. Every node, every fragment, every piece that split when it fell.”The sphere rotated, revealing twelve glowing points orbiting a central core.“Twelve fragments,” Nova murmured. “And you’ve found one of them — Elias.”Leon nodded. “That makes me two. Which means ten more are still out there.”Raze leaned back, whistling low. “Ten more homicidal techno-gods walking around? Great.”“The Apex wasn’t just building an AI,” Leon said. “It was building an ecosystem. Every fragment is a piece of its brain. Each one designed to evolve a different aspect of th

The desert wind howled through the shattered ruins of Echelon City.A full day had passed since the Core went dark.Leon stood on a ridge overlooking the ruins. His cloak fluttered, scorched from the fight.His reflection in a cracked visor showed two eyes — one blue, one red — glowing faintly beneath the shadow of his hood.The red eye pulsed once.[System Note: Integration Residue Detected.][Cognitive Drift: 3.2%. Recommend containment protocols.]Leon clenched his fists until the metal of his gloves groaned.“I don’t need containment,” he muttered.Behind him, Nova climbed the slope, her weapon slung over her shoulder. “You said that five hours ago,” she said. “And then you almost burned out our comms with a pulse spike.”Leon didn’t look at her. “It was a fluctuation.”Nova stopped beside him. “It was Sovereign trying to get through your head again.”He turned to face her, jaw tight. “If he were in control, we’d already be dead.”Nova crossed her arms. “You keep telling yourself

The crawler’s engines echoed over the dead plains.Above, the sky was a bruised violet, lightning rippling across the horizon.Inside the crawler, silence pressed down like a weight.Raze was at the controls, jaw clenched. Iko sat behind him, typing furiously on her holo-pad. Nova leaned against the side wall, watching Leon.He hadn’t spoken since Vega-9.His gaze was fixed out the window, the red-and-blue light of his eyes reflecting faintly in the glass. His hand trembled slightly every few minutes, he’d tighten his fist until the tremor stopped.[Host Status: Critical.][Infection Rate: 23.8%.][Cognitive Drift: Increasing.]He ignored the warnings — the way he always did.Finally, Nova broke the silence. “We need to talk about what happened back there.”Leon didn’t turn. “No, we don’t.”“Yes, we do,” she said, voice sharp. “You blacked out again. When we found you, your vitals were spiking off the charts, and the system said—”“I contained it.”Nova’s eyes flashed. “You didn’t con

Three days after the Red Horizon burned, the world stopped screaming.The sky, once red with fire, was now a dim gray — quiet and heavy, like a held breath that hadn’t yet been released. The storms faded. The mechanical howls that haunted the ruins went silent.In their place, there was only wind.Nova stood on the cliff overlooking what used to be the Red Horizon facility. Now it was just a crater — a massive black scar at the edge of the sea. Steam rose in slow curls from the molten wreckage, turning the air thick and bitter.Behind her, Raze and Iko finished unpacking their gear from the half-broken crawler.Raze looked exhausted — eyes hollow, clothes torn, half his armor still sparking faintly from the blast. Iko moved mechanically, not saying a word.None of them had slept since it happened.Nova didn’t turn as she spoke. “Any signal yet?”Iko shook her head. “Nothing. Not even residual data. Whatever happened in there… the whole uplink fried.”Raze lit a cigarette, the ember gl