The operations wing of the Griffin Empire never slept. Rows of screens lit up the dim room in a cold blue glow, filled with data moving faster than the eye could follow. Men sat in silence, their fingers moving across keyboards with quiet precision. They were searching through layers of encrypted information, hunting for something that didn't want to be found.For a long time, the only sound was the light tapping of keys. Then, one of the technicians spoke up without even raising his voice.“Sir… we might have something.”An operative stepped over to the station. “Confirm it.”The technician nodded, his eyes locked on the shifting lines of data as he isolated a specific point. “It’s a transfer routed through a bunch of ghost accounts. It’s the same signature we flagged a week ago.”The second man leaned in, his expression hardening. “That one disappeared.”“It did,” the tech replied. “But it’s back. It just surfaced again.”On the screen, a pattern started to emerge— clean, deliberat

The ocean was a flat, endless sheet of black, reflecting a moon that was nothing more than a cold, distant sliver, the water looked like oil. There were no ships on the horizon, no lights from the coast, and no sound. Just a dead, heavy silence.Then, the air started to tremble.It started as a low hum you felt in your teeth before you heard it. A second later, the rhythmic thumping of rotor blades cut through the dark. One, then two, then a whole line of them. They were sleek, black, and moved with a kind of mechanical precision that felt unnatural. They kept their lights off, trying to stay invisible, but there was nothing subtle about the way they dominated the sky.Inside the lead chopper, nobody was talking. The men sat in two rows, geared up for a war they’d been waiting for. In the center of the cabin, Jack wasn't sitting down. He stood with one hand gripping a ceiling rail, his body absorbing the vibration of the engine without a flinch. He stared out the darkened glass, his