All Chapters of Rise of the Masked King: Chapter 151
- Chapter 160
171 chapters
Chapter 149: The Ghost in the Machine
The air in the London Underground didn't just smell like old grease and stagnant water anymore; it smelled like an abandoned laboratory. As Anthony, Sloane, and Mark descended the emergency stairs of the Central Line near St. Paul’s, the transition from the chaotic, rain-soaked freedom of the surface to the oppressive silence of the deep felt like walking into a tomb.The "Rust" infection Anthony had unleashed in the cathedral was a surface-dweller. It traveled through airwaves and logic-loops, devouring the silver circuits of the "Common." But down here, in the air-gapped arteries of the city, the old world’s iron was still cold, and the new world’s secrets were still pristine."My scanners are picking up a localized thermal pocket about half a mile toward the Bank station," Mark whispered, his voice sounding thin in the vast, tiled emptiness of the tunnel. He held his modified rig close to his chest. "It’s not a human heat signature. It’s too steady. It’s a cooling manifold. Somethi
Chapter 1450: The First Market
The Great Paul didn’t ring today, but the city hummed with a different kind of frequency. It was the sound of a thousand hammers striking rusted nails, the rhythmic splash of buckets dipped into the Thames, and the low, urgent murmur of a people who had forgotten how to be silent.Anthony sat on the steps of St. Paul’s, his head resting in his hands. The "Inheritance" merger hadn't been a clean data transfer; it was a flood. Behind his eyes, a century of banking secrets, architectural blueprints, and high-level political stratagems swirled in a chaotic soup. He could see the structural integrity of the bridge across the river as a series of stress vectors, and simultaneously, he knew the private password to a Swiss vault that no longer had a power source."You’re doing it again," Sloane said, dropping a heavy canvas bag of scavenged tins beside him. She looked tired, her face smudged with soot, but her eyes were clearer than he had seen them in years. "You’re staring through the world
Chapter 151: The active shareholders.
The dawn that broke over the ruins of London was not the soft, hopeful pink of a new world, but a bruised, metallic violet that seemed to leak from the very clouds. Anthony sat on the cold marble steps, his fingers twitching in a rhythmic, involuntary pattern—the "Inheritance" inside him was trying to calculate the caloric density of the smoke rising from the scavenged fires in the square. His father’s voice, a persistent, silk-smooth murmur, wouldn’t stop highlighting the "inefficiencies" of the First Market. “You’re trading a woodcarver’s bowl for a solar torch, Anthony,” Julian’s ghost whispered in his mind. “In three days, the torch will be dead, the bowl will be burnt for warmth, and you will have zero net liquidity. You are subsidizing failure.” Anthony squeezed his eyes shut, trying to drown out the spectral accountant, but the internal pressure was like a physical weight behind his temples."He’s getting louder, isn't he?" Sloane’s voice cut through the fog of his thoughts. Sh
Chapter 152: The Siege of St. Paul’s
The hiss of the VTOL’s cooling vents was the only sound in the square for a long, agonizing minute. Silas Vane did not move. He stood on the ramp of his craft, his tailored coat shimmering with a hydrophobic coating that made the London rain bead and roll off like liquid mercury. He looked at Anthony, not with the anger of a man being threatened, but with the weary disappointment of a professor watching a star pupil intentionally fail an exam. Behind Anthony, the two hundred survivors—the "Gifted" and the "Un-Gifted" alike—held their breath, a collective organism of shivering flesh and flickering memories. The threat of "Universal Liquidation" hung in the ionized air like a guillotine blade. To the engineers and doctors, it was a threat to the very voices in their heads that gave them purpose; to the Shareholders, it was the destruction of the only remaining currency that mattered."A liquidation, Anthony?" Vane finally spoke, his voice calm, projected with that same eerie clarity. "Y
Chapter 153: Trojan audit
The smoke from the shattered tripods didn’t drift away; it hung in the pressurized air like a physical bruise, smelling of ozone and burnt silicon. Anthony lay on the wet cobblestones, his back arched and his fingers clawing at the grit, while the silver light in his eyes pulsed in a jagged, terrifying rhythm. He wasn't just a man anymore; he was a high-speed data conduit, a bridge of flesh and bone that the Shareholders had unwittingly stabilized. When Silas Vane had attempted to map Anthony’s neural architecture to steal the Master Key, he hadn't realized that Anthony was running a recursive "Trojan Audit"—a sequence of logic so toxic and self-annihilating that it treated every connection as a liability to be liquidated. Inside the VTOL, the sophisticated holographic displays weren't showing the "Gifted" anymore; they were a chaotic mess of falling red numbers, a digital bloodbath that was jumping from the craft’s short-range scanners into its long-range uplink.Silas Vane was no lo
Chapter 154: The Weight of the Zero
The silence that followed the collapse of the sonic field was not a peaceful one; it was a heavy, ringing vacuum that made the ears ache and the mind scramble for something to hold onto. Anthony lay flat on the cold, slick cobblestones, his lungs burning as they tried to remember how to draw a breath that wasn't laden with the static of a global data-dump. The silver glow behind his eyelids had finally retreated, leaving behind a dull, throbbing ache that felt like a hot needle being driven into the base of his skull. Above him, the gray London sky seemed to press down with newfound gravity, no longer distorted by the Shareholders' arrogance but raw and indifferent. He could feel Sloane’s hands on his shoulders—real, warm, and trembling—and for a moment, that physical touch was the only thing keeping him from drifting back into the digital abyss where the "Trojan Audit" was still eating its way through the world’s hidden ledgers.Mark was already moving, his boots splashing through th
Chapter 155: The Unbound Horizon
The heavy-lift Aegis transport didn’t so much fly as it fought the air into submission. Inside the cargo bay, the atmosphere was a thick, vibrating cocktail of recycled oxygen, the smell of damp wool, and the electric tang of ozone that still clung to Anthony’s skin. The interior of the craft was a cathedral of brushed titanium and carbon fiber, designed for the sterile transit of Tier-Zero executives, but now it was packed with the mud-stained reality of the First Market. Two hundred people were squeezed into a space meant for fifty, sitting on the floor, leaning against the cold bulkheads, or clutching the rows of high-tensile netting that held their scavenged supplies.Anthony sat near the open ramp as it finally hissed shut, the hydraulic whine sounding like a weary groan. He watched the last sliver of the London rain disappear behind the steel curtain, leaving him in the dim, amber glow of the emergency lights. His head felt hollow—not the painful emptiness of a wound, but the va
Chapter 156: The Liturgy of the Machine
The transition from the golden sanctuary of the upper atmosphere back into the suffocating gray of the northern landscape felt like a physical descent into a fever dream. As the Aegis transport banked hard over the Humber Estuary, the clouds beneath them curdled from a pristine white to a bruised, sulfurous yellow. Anthony pressed his forehead against the cold titanium hull, watching the ground rise to meet them. Below, the sprawling infrastructure of the old world looked like the shed skin of a great serpent—roads that led nowhere, power lines that hummed with phantom currents, and the skeletons of industrial parks reclaimed by the aggressive, rust-colored flora of the Red Decay.Mark’s hands were a blur over the flight console, his eyes reflecting the rapid-fire scroll of crimson error messages. The "Trojan Audit" was still echoing through the ship’s systems, a rhythmic pulse that made the internal lights flicker in time with Anthony’s own heartbeat. The craft groaned as the landing
Chapter 157: The Bastion of the Silent Seed
The air inside the Aegis transport turned brittle as they crossed the invisible border into the Highlands. It wasn’t just the drop in temperature that seeped through the titanium hull; it was a shift in the very texture of the world. In London, the air had felt heavy with the ghosts of a billion lives, and in York, it had been sharp with the scent of ancient stone and fresh oil. But here, as the peaks of the Grampians rose like jagged, obsidian teeth through the sulfurous cloud layer, the atmosphere felt sanitized, purged of human noise. The "Trojan Audit" was still humming in Anthony’s marrow, but the signal was meeting a new kind of resistance—not a firewall, but a silence so profound it felt like a physical weight. Anthony sat by the small, frosted porthole, his breath blooming in white clouds against the glass. He could feel the Shareholders’ reach here; it was in the way the frost formed in perfect, geometric fractals on the metal, and in the way the clouds seemed to part with a
Chapter 158: The Final Tally
The door didn't just open; it exhaled. As the massive triangular slab of white stone receded into the belly of Ben Macdui, a rush of humid, pressurized air collided with the Highland chill, creating a ghostly fog that swirled around Anthony’s knees. This air didn't smell like the sterile, metallic tang of the London vaults; it smelled of damp earth, blooming jasmine, and the heavy, sweet rot of a rainforest. It was the scent of a world that hadn't been allowed to die, preserved behind air-gapped logic and three meters of reinforced granite.Anthony stepped over the threshold, his boots leaving muddy smears on a floor of polished obsidian that was so clean it felt like an insult to the two hundred shivering souls behind him. Sloane followed close, her hand still resting on the hilt of her blade, though her eyes were darting toward the ceiling. Above them, a network of artificial suns—massive LED arrays—pulsed with a soft, golden light that mimicked a perfect Mediterranean noon. It was