All Chapters of The Price of Resurrection: Chapter 1
- Chapter 10
10 chapters
Chapter 1: The Awakening
The air was thick with smoke and panic. Sirens blared in the distance, the kind that made your stomach twist , not because of the sound, but because of what always came after.“Move! Everyone, move!” shouted a guard as people flooded out of the shattered metro tunnel.Bruce Miller stumbled forward, clutching his bleeding side. His shirt was soaked crimson. The concrete ceiling above him groaned like a dying beast.Somewhere behind, the sound of screeching metal ripped through the chaos. “Bruce, get up!” a voice yelled.He turned, dazed, to see David Foreman, tall, calm, perfectly unhurt, standing amid the carnage, eyes blazing with that same superiority Bruce had hated since their academy days.“Leave me,” Bruce gasped. “You’ve got people to save.”David’s jaw tightened. “You were never built for this, Bruce. I told you to quit before someone got killed.”Bruce forced a bitter smile. “Guess you were right.”The tunnel shook violently. A creature emerged from the shadows, skeletal, arm
Chapter 2 – The Hunt Begins
The Fiend’s new body crackled with blue fire. The same energy pulsed in Bruce’s veins, mirroring every surge from the creature like a heartbeat gone wrong. David stepped between them, sword raised. “Stay behind me.”Bruce shook his head. “You can’t kill it again, David. It’s tied to me somehow.”“I don’t care if it’s your long-lost twin,” David snapped. “Move!”The monster screamed, not with sound, but with vibration. Windows exploded. Cars along the street shifted an inch off the ground. Then it lunged.David met it head-on. His blade cut clean through its torso, but instead of falling apart, the wound sealed instantly with blue fire. “What ?” David stumbled back, stunned.“It’s absorbing my energy!” Bruce shouted. “Every second it’s alive, it gets stronger!”David spun, eyes cold. “Then stop feeding it.”“You think I’m doing this on purpose?”The Fiend’s arm lashed out, smashing a police car. The explosion lit up the street, throwing both men into shadow and flame.Bruce crawled to
Chapter 3: The Shadow Protocol
The first thing David noticed was the silence. Not the comforting kind, this was the sterile hush of a room that had heard too many confessions.He was seated in a metal chair, wrists clamped to the arms. A faint blue glow traced the cuffs. The walls around him pulsed with the same light, like the room itself was breathing. A door hissed open.Two people entered: a woman in a white tactical coat and a man in black armor marked with the insignia of a broken circle. “Major David Foreman,” the woman said evenly. “Welcome to Genesis Command.”David squinted against the lights. “Welcome? Funny way to say ‘kidnapped.’ ”“You were unconscious,” she replied. “Extraction, not abduction.”“Extraction from what? My own life?”The armored man snorted. “Still got jokes.”“Still got a pulse,” David shot back. “Where’s my sword?”The woman ignored him, sliding a tablet across the table. On it, footage from the night before. Blue fire tearing through the street. Cars lifted like toys. A silhouette at
Chapter 4 – The Run Through Ash
The world came back in fragments, smoke, sirens, the hiss of burning steel. David forced his eyes open. The clinic was gone, replaced by a crater of ash and shattered glass. Every breath stung like fire. “Rho?”A groan answered from beneath a collapsed beam. He staggered over, hauling it off with shaking arms. She coughed, eyes flickering open. “You alive?” he asked.“Mostly,” she rasped. “What… what was that?”“Bruce.”She blinked at him, dazed. “That was no human.”“He wasn’t supposed to be,” David said quietly.Rho sat up, blood trickling down her temple. “Containment team?”He looked around. “Dead or running.”She pressed a trembling hand to her earpiece. “Kane’s going to want a full report.”“I’ll give him one,” David muttered. “After we get out of here.”He reached for her arm, but she pulled away. “You’re bleeding.”“Yeah,” he said. “So is everyone else.”Sirens wailed closer. Drones hummed overhead, searchlights slicing through the haze. Rho tried to stand. “Protocol says we s
Chapter 5 – Echoes in the Static
The blast should have killed him. Instead, David woke to the slow drip of water and the hiss of cooling metal.His ears rang. The tunnel had collapsed into a jagged cavern of stone and twisted rail. Every surface pulsed faintly blue, as if the explosion had burned color into the air.He tried to move. Pain flared down his side; his left arm hung useless. “Rho?”Only the echo answered. “Rho!”Nothing, then a faint click through the comm still jammed in his ear. “vid—static—zone breached”Her voice. Broken, distant. Then silence. “Hold on, I’m coming,” he muttered, dragging himself upright.Something sparked near his boot, his sidearm, half-melted. He holstered it anyway. Above him, the ceiling groaned. Dust rained down. He stumbled toward the faint glow of an exit sign still flickering in the distance.That’s when the static changed. “…not Genesis…repeat…not Genesis…”He froze. The voice was crisp, deliberate, too calm for emergency chatter. “Identify yourself,” he said.No reply. Then
Chapter 6 – The Tower Signal
The ceiling above the bunker cracked like thunder. Dust rained over flickering emergency lamps. Cipher snapped her wrist-com open. “Surface teams are breaching two levels up. We’ve got sixty seconds.”David tightened the straps on a borrowed tactical vest. “How do we get out?”“Same way we got in, through the drains.”“Romantic.”“Efficient,” she corrected. “Move.”They sprinted down the corridor, boots splashing through ankle-deep water. Sirens wailed somewhere overhead. “You said you could jam their scanners,” David shouted.“I said I could try.”“That’s comforting.”A wall section ahead exploded inward. Genesis troops poured through the smoke, visors glowing red. Cipher slammed a disc to the floor. “Flash!”Light detonated white. The soldiers reeled; David dragged her past them into the next passage. He glanced back. “You just blinded half your team.”“They’ll live. You won’t if you keep slowing down.”They burst into a service tunnel filled with cables and dripping pipes. The air
Chapter 7 – The Tower’s Heart
Rain hammered the asphalt like static come alive. David moved through the ruins with the Tower pulsing ahead, its light cutting the skyline like a wound.Every few seconds, the pulse throbbed outward. Each wave made the back of his skull ache. “Bruce,” he whispered. “If you can hear me… keep talking.” Only the hum replied.He reached a checkpoint, two Genesis sentries at a barricade, half-distracted by their drones. David slid behind a burned-out car, drew his sidearm, and tossed a shard of glass down the opposite alley.The sound made them turn. Two silenced shots later, they dropped. He moved quick, stripped one of their access bands, and pressed it against the scanner. The gate hissed open.Inside, the Tower’s base was a labyrinth of mirrored corridors and humming generators. The air shimmered faintly, carrying a metallic tang that made his teeth buzz. He touched the wall, it vibrated, alive.A voice cut through the comm: “Foreman. You shouldn’t have come.”David froze. “Kane.”“Yo
Chapter 8 – The Pulse Within
The world reassembled in silence. David floated in nothingness, weightless, surrounded by an endless field of shifting light.Each ripple moved like thought, not matter, colors bleeding through one another, forming fleeting shapes that dissolved before his eyes.He tried to speak, but no sound carried. Only the echo of his own heartbeat, louder than it should’ve been. Then came a whisper. “You shouldn’t be here.”“Bruce?”A figure stepped out of the light, half familiar, half fractured. Bruce’s face, but his eyes were pale mirrors, reflecting every color around them. “You opened the link,” Bruce said quietly. “Now it’s open both ways.”David steadied himself, as if ground might appear beneath his feet. “Where is this?”“The Tower’s core isn’t physical. It’s thought rendered real. Genesis used it to shape the Pulse into commands.”“And you’re stuck in it?”Bruce nodded once. “Along with everything it ever touched.”“What does that mean?”Bruce didn’t answer. His gaze shifted past David
Chapter 9 – Resonance Break
The first thing David heard was the siren, low, broken, distant. Then came breath. His own.He opened his eyes to see the Tower’s core in ruin. Glass panels lay shattered, walls bleeding sparks. The hum of the energy field had shifted, slower, deeper, like a heartbeat syncing with his own.Bruce was gone. Rho lay a few meters away, unconscious but breathing. Kane’s body was nowhere in sight.David pushed himself upright. His hands shook, not from weakness, but from vibration. Blue light pulsed beneath his skin, tracing veins like circuitry. He whispered, “What did you do to me…”The Tower answered. Every remaining light in the chamber flickered once, then steadied, matching the rhythm of his pulse. “No,” he said softly. “No, that’s not”“You are the conduit now.”The voice was inside his head, smooth as static, impossible to shut out. David clenched his jaw. “Get out.”“You opened the channel. It cannot be closed.”He stumbled toward Rho, half dragging, half crawling, his reflection f
Chapter 10 – The Fractured Signal
The world came back as silence. David’s breath hitched; air felt heavier now, static clinging to it like dust. He opened his eyes. Everything glowed faintly blue.The Tower was gone. All that remained was a glass crater stretching for miles, its center pulsing like a dying heart. Rho knelt beside him, face smeared with ash. “You’re alive.”He blinked, dazed. “Barely.”“Don’t move yet.” She checked his pulse, then froze as her fingers brushed his wrist, tiny sparks leapt between their skin. “You’re still charged.”“I told you… it’s the link,” he muttered. “It’s not gone.”Rho looked around. The sky itself shimmered, thin trails of light drifting like auroras. The air hummed faintly, resonating with their heartbeats. “David,” she said slowly, “what did you do?”“I broke the Tower’s core,” he answered. “I thought that would kill the signal.”“Yeah, well, you didn’t kill it. You spread it.”He followed her gaze. Figures moved along the crater’s edge, Genesis soldiers staggering from wreck