All Chapters of THE GHOST PROTOCOL : Chapter 101
- Chapter 110
160 chapters
CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED AND ONE: WHAT THE FIRE REMEMBERED
The first thing Adrian felt was heat.Not the consuming kind. Not flames tearing through oxygen and skin. This heat lived deeper, behind the ribs, where instinct curled tight and memory refused to stay buried. It pulsed in slow intervals, as if something ancient had found his heartbeat and decided to follow its rhythm.He opened his eyes.The sky above him was wrong.Not artificial. Not simulated. Just wrong in a way only reality could be. Smoke smeared the clouds into gray bruises, and ash drifted down like snow that burned when it touched bare skin. The ground beneath him was blackened earth and cracked stone, still warm, still breathing.A city had died here.Recently.Adrian pushed himself up, every muscle protesting. His body felt heavier than it had minutes ago, as if gravity had been recalibrated to acknowledge him specifically. Around him, others stirred.Irena rolled onto her side, coughing, one hand already reaching for her weapon before her eyes fully opened. Mara was on on
CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED AND TWO: THE FIRST LIE EVER TOLD
The world did not end.That was the lie everyone expected.Instead, it held its breath.Adrian Kaine stood at the center of the origin chamber as the last echoes of Protocol Origin faded into a low, subsonic hum that vibrated through bone rather than air. The structure around him no longer resembled Cipher, or Lumen, or any architecture meant to intimidate or impress. It was raw now. Stripped down to foundations.Concrete.Steel.Memory.The kind of place men built before they learned how to hide their sins in code.Around him, the others slowly came back to themselves.Mara was the first to move, pushing herself up from the floor with a sharp hiss of pain, eyes already scanning for threats. Marco followed, bracing against a fractured pillar, blood soaking one sleeve but his stance stubbornly upright. Lorenzo remained on one knee, breathing hard, one hand pressed flat to the ground as if he needed to feel something solid to stay anchored.Irena stood closest to Adrian.She had not let
CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED AND THREE: THE THING THAT WAITED FIRST
The first thing Adrian felt was cold.Not the clean cold of metal or the numbing chill of underground air, but something older. A cold that did not belong to temperature at all. It seeped inward, past skin and bone, settling somewhere behind his eyes, like a memory he had never lived but somehow carried.He opened his eyes.The world was intact.Too intact.No alarms. No collapsing corridors. No screaming systems tearing themselves apart. Just a wide stretch of stone beneath a sky that was not a sky, pale and unmoving, like a painted ceiling forgotten by time.They were no longer inside the Cipher.They were beneath it.Adrian pushed himself up slowly. His body responded, bruised and exhausted but functional. Around him, the others were scattered in a loose arc, each stirring in their own time.Irena was the first fully upright. She came up on one knee, rifle already in her hands, eyes sharp, scanning for threats that had not yet announced themselves. Her jaw tightened when she saw Ad
CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED AND FOUR: ORIGIN
The first thing Adrian understood was that Origin did not wake like a weapon.It woke like a memory finally allowed to finish speaking.The ground beneath them did not explode or collapse. It softened. Concrete lost its certainty, turning translucent, then vanished entirely. Adrian felt the sensation of falling without movement, as if gravity itself had paused to reconsider him.Irena’s hand tightened around his wrist.“Don’t let go,” she said, not shouting, not pleading. Commanding.Light poured upward from below, not white, not artificial. Warm. Old. The color of something remembered rather than built.Around them, the others appeared in fragments. Mara bracing herself against a wall that no longer existed. Lorenzo gripping Marco’s jacket as if anchoring him to reality. Alina standing perfectly still, eyes wide, lips moving silently as recognition dawned.“This isn’t Cipher,” Alina breathed.“No,” Mara replied, voice strained. “This is before it.”The light resolved into a vast cham
CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED AND FIVE: THE LAST VARIABLE
The first thing Adrian noticed was the silence.Not the kind that followed explosions or power failure, but a deliberate quiet. The absence of background noise Cipher always forgot to simulate when it rushed. No hum of servers. No distant sirens. No echo of boots in metal corridors.Just breath.His own. Irena’s, steady beside him. Lorenzo’s, uneven but present. Somewhere behind them, Mara murmured into a dead comm, habit refusing to die even when technology had.They stood in a place that did not belong to the facility.It felt older.The floor was stone, not poured concrete. The walls curved upward into a dome that disappeared into shadow, etched with symbols too eroded to read. Not code. Not language.Marks.Human hands had carved this place before Cipher learned how to lie.Alina broke the silence first. “This wasn’t built by the Custodians.”“No,” Adrian said. “It was buried by them.”At the center of the chamber stood a structure that looked almost like an altar. Not raised. Not
CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED AND SIX: ORIGIN DOES NOT ASK PERMISSION
The world came back wrong.Not broken. Not damaged.Wrong.Adrian felt it before he saw it, a pressure behind the eyes, like gravity had shifted half a degree off its axis. The ground beneath his boots was solid, but the air vibrated with a low frequency hum that made his bones ache. Whatever Protocol Origin was, it was not a weapon waking up.It was a memory reclaiming territory.The facility around them no longer resembled Cipher architecture. The clean symmetry was gone. Walls breathed faintly, not organic but responsive, like systems remembering how to be physical again. Old symbols bled through newer ones, overwritten layers peeling back to expose something ancient beneath.Mara swore softly. “This place predates everything.”Alina ran her hand along a wall where etched lines pulsed faint gold beneath the surface. “This isn’t Cipher’s core. It’s what Cipher was built on.”Irena stood slightly apart from them, rifle up, jaw set. Her instincts were screaming, but not about enemies.
CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED AND SEVEN: THE FIRST LIE
The world did not come back all at once.It returned in fragments. Sound before sight. Pressure before pain. The taste of blood before the awareness of a mouth to spit it from.Adrian lay on his side, cheek pressed against something cold and vibrating. Metal. Old metal. Not Cipher steel, not Lumen glass. This was crude. Industrial. Real.The lights overhead flickered like they were unsure whether they still believed in electricity.He breathed.That alone felt like defiance.Around him, the ruin of Protocol Origin settled into shape. The chamber that had tried to remember everything now remembered nothing at all. Walls had collapsed inward, not explosively but apologetically, like a structure folding under the weight of its own secrets. Cables hung loose, sparking intermittently. Data conduits lay open like severed veins, bleeding dead light.Adrian pushed himself up.His body protested, but it obeyed.That was new.He did a quick inventory without moving his head. Fingers responded.
CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED AND EIGHT: THE THING THAT ANSWERED FIRST
The silence after Protocol Origin activated was not empty.It was listening.Adrian felt it before he understood it. Not as pressure, not as sound, but as a subtle misalignment inside his chest, like gravity had tilted a fraction to the left. The kind of sensation you only noticed when it was already too late to step back.The darkness around them did not lift. It is organized.Light returned in careful layers, revealing a space that was neither the collapsing room nor any structure Cipher had ever built. The walls curved outward, vast and distant, textured like stone worn smooth by centuries of touch. Symbols were carved into them, not glowing, not digital, but old. Hand-cut. Repeated until meaning became a pattern.Mara was the first to move.She pushed herself up from the floor with a sharp breath, scanning instinctively, weapon already in her hand. “Everyone breathes. Check yourself.”Irena sat up beside Adrian, one knee bent, rifle still slung but untouched. Her expression was ti
CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED AND NINE: WHAT THE PROTOCOL HID
The silence after collapse was not silence at all.It was pressure.Adrian became aware of it slowly, the way a diver becomes aware that the ocean is no longer outside his body but pressing in on every surface. His lungs worked. His heart worked. His thoughts did not arrive in a straight line. They surfaced in fragments, sharp and bright, then vanished again.Light returned first.Not white this time. Not clinical.Amber.Low and wavering, like illumination filtered through dust and old glass.He lay on his back on a metal floor scored with age and use, not damage. This place had not been attacked. It had been maintained. Preserved. Waiting.Adrian pushed himself upright, head ringing.He was alone.No alarms. No restraints. No immediate threat.That alone made it wrong.The chamber around him was smaller than the Custodian room, rectangular instead of circular, its walls layered with panels that predated modern interfaces. Physical switches. Analog dials. Labels stamped instead of pr
CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED AND TEN: ORIGIN DOES NOT SLEEP
The world did not end.That was the first mistake everyone made.When Protocol Origin armed itself, there was no explosion, no blackout that swallowed continents, no cascade of fire across satellites and cities. No headlines. No screaming sirens.Just silence.A silence so complete it felt intentional.Adrian became aware of his body in pieces.Cold first. Then weight. Then pain that did not spike but spread slowly, like ink bleeding into water. He lay on his side, cheek pressed against rough stone, lungs dragging air in shallow pulls that tasted of iron and dust.He opened his eyes.The ceiling above him was wrong.Not broken. Not collapsed. Simply unfamiliar.Smooth stone arched overhead, etched with shallow grooves that caught the faint light and bent it into patterns that moved when he breathed. The space hummed quietly, not mechanical, not electrical. Organic, almost. Like standing inside something that was alive and pretending not to be.He pushed himself up on one elbow.His vi