Weeks had passed since the memorial at Skydome. The world had moved on in its usual rhythm of gratitude and forgetfulness, polishing statues of heroes while quietly erasing the ones who refused to kneel to power. Charlie walked through the outskirts of the city, the air thick with rain and distant sirens. The skyline, once powered by AETHER’s pulse, now shimmered under human hands again—flawed, imperfect, alive. He should have felt peace. Instead, there was only the quiet ache of purpose unspent.He’d returned to the shadows where he’d always belonged. The old warehouse he turned into a clinic barely held together—peeling paint, flickering lights, and the faint hum of solar batteries scavenged from old drones. A fading sign at the entrance read: Free Treatment – No Questions Asked. Every day, wounded workers from the reconstruction sites came limping through his door—men with shattered bones, women coughing from chemical dust, children carrying infections too small for the new hospita

The night over Skyvale sat heavy as a held breath, neon halos bleeding into the wet gutters, washing the city in a pale, electric sorrow. Charlie had been awake for hours; sleep had the same cowardice it always did around him now—an indulgence the world could not afford. He sat before a dozen encrypted servers that glowed dim and patient like the eyes of some sleeping beast, their fans whispering the only hymn in the concrete cellar. Each terminal displayed a lattice of code, packet traces, and routing paths; each decryption he pried open peeled back another layer of the city’s veneer—dead biotech shell companies reanimated as data routers, defunct military satellites repurposed as dark nodes, medical boards trading signatures like favors. He traced one signal after another in the blue light and watched them braid toward a single heart of shadow: a network that had no public face, a ghost cartel that sewed together science, capital, and force. On his screen the symbol blinked into bei

Two hours before dawn, the storm rolled in over the mountains like a living thing, its clouds swollen and bruised, dragging sheets of rain across the jagged skyline. The Prometheus complex loomed beneath it—a black monolith of glass and steel carved into the mountain’s edge, veins of blue light running through its frame like liquid electricity. Lightning ripped across the sky, briefly illuminating the fortress’s defense turrets and drones that patrolled the perimeter with mechanical precision. Every surface glistened under the storm’s lash, reflecting the pulse of a civilization that thought itself immortal. Inside a silent stealth transport descending through the mist, Charlie’s team prepared for insertion. The air was thick with static and tension, the kind that hums before a war no one will write about. Raiden sat opposite him, armor patched with old scars of conflict, running final checks on his weapon’s magnetic coils. “Systems green,” Raiden muttered, his deep voice steady as gr