The city didn’t just sound different after the wave hit but it breathed differently. Luther felt it the second he and Celeste rounded the corner into East Marrow District. The air held a strange vibration, as if every sound had an echo hidden behind it. Every face on the street carried the same wild flicker of fear, the kind that came when your mind no longer trusted what your senses told you.A woman screamed two blocks away. Someone answered with a crash of metal. Sirens twisted into something less human and more mechanical. And beneath it all, Luther sensed probability bending in erratic waves, each one sharper than the last.Celeste walked close beside him, one hand pressed to the side of her neck where Revenant’s grip had left a bruise. “The surges are getting worse,” she said quietly.“They’ll keep getting worse,” Luther replied. “Victor released Phase Two without stabilizers in place. The whole city is basically a giant fault line.”Celeste took a breath that shook a little,

The tremor faded, leaving the underground hub humming like a beast waking from a long sleep. Dust drifted from the ceiling in lazy clouds. Luther pulled Celeste close as another small vibration rippled through the walls, but it passed quickly just an aftershock.“Ascension,” Luther muttered, staring at the last line on the darkened terminal. “Whatever that is… It’s starting now.” Because he wants to initiate phase three and phase four.Celeste swallowed hard, her eyes locked on the flickering red message. “Victor said even I wasn’t told about it. That means it’s worse than Phase Two and it will be much worse.”Luther exhaled through his teeth. “We need to move.”They left the server room, boots clanging against the grated walkway as they headed back down the tunnel. The emergency bulbs overhead dimmed intermittently, struggling to stay alive.As they reached the service ladder near the exit, Luther’s comm device buzzed in his pocket weak, static-filled, barely functioning through the

The fires of the last fallen safehouse still glowed in the distance when Luther stepped out of the armored van. Ash drifted across the ruined street like black snow. Celeste tightened her jacket against the cold wind, her eyes looking at the horizon as if expecting shadows to move again.Selene worked beside the van, a portable holo-screen flickering with corrupted lines of code. Every few seconds, a name flashed and then rewrote itself—birth dates, employment records, entire lineages erased and replaced.Phase Two wasn’t only targeting the present.It was rewriting the past and It was erasing every trace that they ever existed.“Another safehouse gone,” Marcus said as he jogged up, his voice ragged. “They’re not bombing them. They’re deleting them digitally and physically. The Syndicate’s entire history is disappearing.”Luther clenched his fists. “Victor wants to erase every place we could run to. Every identity we could use and anyone tied to us.”“He’s erasing resistance before it

The tunnels shook again, dust drifting down like falling ash. Luther steadied Owen with one hand while Marcus scanned the dark corridor ahead. Selene brought up the rear, her fingers flying across her portable console as she fought to decrypt the last portion of New Verdana’s corrupted frequency grid.“Victor’s not wasting time,” she muttered, watching the flickering map brighten. “He’s moving units across the city like he’s been preparing this for years.”“He has,” Luther said quietly. “Everything he’s doing now… he’s done before. On smaller scales in Controlled environments. I was just too young to understand what I was watching.”Owen looked up. “Why did he call that lady his daughter? She looked… different.”Luther’s jaw tightened. “Because she is his daughter. And she’s also the one I have to get back.”They reached a widened section of the tunnel where an old maintenance room had cracked open. Marcus motioned for them to stop. “Take five we need a new exit route. The one on 9t

The safehouse had gone silent in a way Luther didn’t like.Not the calm-before-action silence, this was heavier, pressurized, and the kind that crept in when everyone was thinking the same thought but no one wanted to say it out loud.Outside, Cain Guardian's boots scraped against the asphalt. The sound echoed through the narrow streets like a countdown.Inside, Selene sat hunched over her terminal, fingers flying faster than Luther had ever seen. Her jaw was clenched so tight it looked like it hurt.“Tell me you’ve got something,” Marcus said weakly from the cot. His voice was steadier than it should’ve been for someone who’d taken two bullets hours earlier.Selene didn’t look up. “I’ve got something,” she said. “I just don’t know yet if it’s going to save us or break everything.”Luther stepped closer. “Explain.”She exhaled sharply and pulled up a wall of encrypted files. Cain Global logos flashed and vanished as she peeled through layers of security.“I started tracing Phase Two,”