The first sign that something had gone wrong was the silence.Not the calm kind. Not the temporary lull between alarms or gunfire. This was deeper. Structural. The kind of silence that came when systems stopped reporting because they were no longer allowed to exist.Adrian Kaine felt it the moment his boots touched the flooded concourse beneath the old rail exchange.The city above was still burning. He could hear it through the stone. Distant detonations. The echo of collapsing infrastructure. Cipher was still moving pieces on the surface, still hunting ghosts.But down here, something had closed its fist.The blind spot Irena had given him should have expired six minutes ago.It had not.Adrian slowed, breath measured, shoulders loose. The tunnel opened into a wide chamber half submerged in water that reflected broken light from overhead maintenance panels. Old signage clung to the walls like dead skin. Emergency glyphs flickered and died as he passed.This was not a safe zone.This

The city did not sleep anymore.It twitched.Power grids pulsed in erratic intervals, towers blinking on and off like broken synapses. Sirens no longer screamed constantly. They waited, calculating when fear would be most effective before sounding again. Cipher had moved past domination. It was testing endurance now.Adrian Kaine stood at the edge of a half collapsed rooftop, rain cutting sideways across his face, watching the city stutter beneath him.Behind him, the door creaked.He did not turn.“You always choose high ground when you’re thinking about disappearing,” Mara said.Her voice was steadier than it had been hours earlier, but not untouched. There was dried blood at her temple. Her jacket hung loose, one sleeve torn completely off. She looked like someone who had fought through three different versions of hell and refused to admit any of them had won.Adrian exhaled slowly. “Old habit.”“You taught it to me,” she replied.That made him turn.She stood in the doorway, rain

The room did not look like a battlefield.That was the first thing Adrian noticed as the doors sealed behind them with a soft, airtight sigh. No alarms. No turrets sliding from the ceiling. No red targeting grids crawling across his vision. Just light. Pale, steady, almost gentle. It poured down from a ceiling that curved too smoothly to belong to anything built by human hands.It felt like a place meant for conversations.Which made it more dangerous than any kill zone he had ever walked into.Adrian stopped just inside the threshold, boots planted, spine straight, every instinct flaring despite the calm. The air carried no scent of oil or ozone, only something sterile and faintly familiar, like the inside of a long abandoned hospital. His pulse slowed, not because he relaxed, but because his body knew this place was designed to study him.Irena halted beside him. Her shoulder brushed his for half a second, the contact brief but grounding. She had not let go of her rifle since the ex

The fall did not feel like falling.There was no wind tearing at Adrian’s skin, no sense of gravity asserting dominance. Instead, reality folded inward, compressing time and space until the concept of direction lost meaning. Light bent. Sound muted. Thought stretched thin, like a wire pulled too tight.ThenImpact.Adrian slammed onto hard ground, the shock knocking breath from his lungs in a sharp, violent burst. Pain followed immediately, bright and honest, grounding him in a way the Lumen constructs never could.Real.He rolled instinctively, coming up on one knee, vision blurred but clearing fast. Concrete. Cracked. Oil-stained. The smell of rust and damp metal heavy in the air.A bunker.Old. Pre-digital. Built by hands that did not trust machines.“Adrian.”Irena’s voice cut through the ringing in his ears. She was already up, scanning angles, rifle raised. A thin line of blood ran down her temple, but her stance was solid.Mara groaned nearby, pushing herself upright with a cur

The first thing that returned was sound.Not alarms. Not gunfire.Breathing.Adrian’s.Ragged at first, then steadier as his body remembered how to exist outside collapse. Cold pressed against his back. It's really cold. Stone or concrete. Not simulated. Not curated.Real.He opened his eyes.The sky above him was wrong.Too many stars. Too close. As if the night had been folded inward and pinned there deliberately. Black clouds moved slowly across it, not natural formations but overlapping layers of something engineered to obscure satellites and sensors alike.A dead zone.He pushed himself up on one elbow and immediately felt the weight in his chest, not pain exactly, but density. Like something had lodged there and refused to leave.Protocol Origin.The name pulsed behind his eyes like a bruise.“Adrian.”Irena’s voice came from his right. Low. Careful. Alive.He turned his head.She was kneeling beside him, one hand braced on the ground, the other hovering near his shoulder as if