Berlin wore winter like armor. The air bit with precision; the streets shimmered with the quiet paranoia of a city that had seen too many empires fall. Charlie stepped off the diplomatic transport with Haejin close behind, both moving with the mechanical rhythm of professionals who had learned to trust no detail of the environment around them.Their cover story was thin—medical intelligence consultants on assignment for an EU public health program—but it was enough to pass inspection. The real objective was buried beneath layers of encrypted directives: Locate Dr. Viktor Rohn. Extract his data. Determine his role in the Ghost Network.Viktor had once been a respected molecular biologist, renowned for his research in nanotherapeutics. But when his funding dried up, he vanished—resurfacing years later as a broker in biological arms. He was the kind of man who understood the value of both disease and its cure.Charlie watched the frost gather on the hotel’s mirrored glass as their escort

The world had reached the edge of its own reflection. Nations stared into the abyss of what they’d built—biotech empires, black budgets, moral bankruptcy—and found the Ghost Network staring back. Charlie knew the storm wouldn’t wait. The time for diplomacy had rotted; this was surgical war disguised as mercy. At dawn, under the coded silence of a Geneva blackout, Operation Dawnfall began. It wasn’t just an assault—it was an incision into the veins of a corrupt world. Each Phantom Division team moved like living shadows, slipping across continents with impossible precision. Medics disguised as relief workers entered quarantined cities. Hackers posing as humanitarian analysts infiltrated digital fortresses. Soldiers hidden beneath the guise of medical escort teams carried syringes that could kill or cure depending on the hand that held them. Every move had two faces—one that healed and one that hunted.Charlie didn’t delegate the hardest part. He led the primary strike himself—Berlin ou

Charlie watched the city from the rooftop as if it were a patient under observation, the lights below pulsing with the slow rhythm of millions of small lives. Months after Dawnfall the world had stitched together a fragile peace; governments mended diplomatic ruptures, markets steadied, and Skydome’s name had become both shield and scar on the tongue of every activist and politician. Yet peace, he had learned, was always provisional—an interval between crises in which old dangers changed shape. The first sign of this new shadow arrived in whispers: clinics in Amsterdam, Nairobi, and Seoul reporting miraculous recoveries from conditions previously labeled terminal, recovery curves that rose faster than any clinical trial should allow. The miracles carried a single signature—a brand: Prometheus Systems. Their PR spun it as benevolence: AI-assisted nanomedicine deployed to underserved regions, free vaccine drops, adaptive therapeutics that learned at the speed of pandemics. The press lov

The Phantom Division reassembled beneath the city in a labyrinth of cold concrete and humming generators, a dozen nationalities and past lives braided into one clandestine mission—medics who had sewn torn arteries with fingers that had once been children’s, soldiers who had left uniforms for humanitarian causes, engineers who could melt a firewall with the same care they once used to fix a ventilator; they gathered in a space scrubbed of names and flags, each face carrying the small, private scars that make quiet conspiracies possible, and Charlie watched them return like a commander watching the tide come in—intent, inevitable, and necessary—then he briefed them in a voice that never rose above the hum of machines, “We go in soft and fast: disable Prometheus’s core, remove the model weights, preserve the data for audit, and hand the capability back to the public, not to profiteers,” he said, mapping nodes across three continents with a fingertip on the holoscreen while Haejin traced

The world exhaled. For the first time in years, the hum of machines quieted, replaced by the irregular rhythm of human hands trying to heal what technology had forgotten—imperfection. The fall of Prometheus had left the planet shaken, but alive. Governments gathered in silent urgency, their networks crippled, their automated systems useless. Hospitals turned back to paper charts, hand-written diagnostics, and stethoscopes that relied not on data, but on listening. Humanity had been forced to remember how to feel again.Skydome became the epicenter of this resurrection. The once gleaming fortress of innovation now stood half-charred, yet more sacred than ever. Engineers, doctors, and volunteers from every nation worked around the clock to restore the medical grid—not through algorithms, but through cooperation. Manual surgeries replaced robotic precision. Blood transfusions were done by touch, by sweat, by trembling human conviction. On the main wall of the new Skydome complex, thousan