A four-meter-long black marble table in the main conference room of Archon Tower had become the focal point for the fate of billions of lives.On one side, Matthew Thomas sat with a slightly pale face. However, his gaze was razor sharp. Beside him, Viviane sat with her back straight, her CEO mode fully active. She had refused evacuation. Across from them, the Envoy from the Galactic Core stood in silence. The hologram projected rows of numbers and complex diagrams floating in the air."Earth’s current status is ‘Prey Zone,’" the Envoy began. Its voice filled the room. "Your civilization has not yet reached a sufficient level of interstellar exploration. Under the laws of the Galactic Central Bank, planets with low intrinsic value may be forcibly acquired, their populations converted into contract labor for one thousand years."Viviane slammed her hand against the table, her eyes blazing with anger. "Contract labor? You mean slavery. You came here to threaten us?""This is not a threat

A cold winter wind swept across the glass surface of the former Archon building in the heart of Manhattan, New York. The overcast sky beyond the three-meter-high windows failed to dim the tension inside the 102nd-floor boardroom.This place had once been the temple of Julian Vance’s greed. Now, it was undergoing a complete transformation. The dark oak table was gone, replaced by a glowing white polymer round table.Matthew Thomas sat at the head of the table. His head throbbed violently. A fresh drop of blood slid from his left nostril, staining the collar of his white Tom Ford shirt.[ARC System Warning][Neural capacity at 92%.][Processing the merger of 400,000 Archon and Lane Corp asset entities in real time.][Risk of cerebral hemorrhage in 4 minutes.]Matthew wiped the blood away with the silk handkerchief he always carried, his expression unchanged.The price is always high, he thought. The more he reshaped the structure of the world, the more his body broke down.“You’re bleed

Matthew moved swiftly, intercepting Caleb near a massive marble pillar, far from the reach of prying ears.“Talk,” Matthew hissed without preamble.Caleb swallowed, looking at his boss with slightly widened eyes. “Sorry to interrupt your evening, Boss… but our early warning system just went off. My phone nearly exploded with encrypted alerts.”“How much?”“Five hundred million dollars,” Caleb whispered, his voice trembling as he fought to stay composed. “Thirty seconds ago. Gone from the Terran Alliance’s reserve sub-account.”Matthew’s eyes narrowed, sharp as a scalpel. “How does five hundred million move without retina authorization from me and Veronica?”“That’s the problem, Boss,” Caleb pressed, quickly pulling up a tablet screen hidden beneath his jacket. “The funds weren’t stolen from the outside. No firewall breach, no brute-force attack. The transfer used Alpha-level shadow authorization protocols. Someone used internal access codes.”“No one has Alpha codes except me, Veronic

Far from the noise and glitter of Manhattan, on an unregistered private island off the coast of the Aegean Sea, an underground facility hummed softly.The chamber was constructed with two-meter-thick concrete walls layered with lead, isolating whatever lay inside from the reach of military spy satellites.At the center of the frigid room, a cylindrical medical pod bathed in blue neon light stood like a modern altar.Inside it, the frail body of Julian Vance lay motionless. The Head Protector of Archon, a man who had once gripped the throat of the global economy, now looked like nothing more than a corpse preserved from decay by dozens of intravenous lines and electrode cables.Standing before a monitor displaying an almost flat heartbeat graph, Dr. Arisov wiped the cold sweat from his brow. Behind him, a tall, scarred man, Silas Romanov, stood with his arms crossed.It was Silas Romanov who had abducted Julian Vance from the hospital where he had been held in a comatose state after los

“Hold your line, Caleb. Isolate the remaining servers that haven’t been touched,” Matthew ordered quickly, then switched his call. “Vincent.”“Matthew! What the hell is this?” Vincent Chen’s baritone voice exploded through the speaker, filled with barely contained panic and fury. “The fusion reactor grid systems in Tokyo and Seoul just suffered a massive desynchronization. My secure communication channels with the ministers are completely down.”“Calm down, Vincent. Take a deep breath. Stay calm, relax,” Matthew replied, his voice flat as ice, masking the fact that he himself had only just grasped the scale of the attack.“Calm down? You’re telling me to calm down?” Vincent shouted. “You promised the Terran Alliance infrastructure was the most secure in the world. You promised me not a single state-sponsored hacker could touch this fifty-billion-dollar project. Thirty seconds, Matthew. For thirty seconds, someone had control of my primary reactor cooling systems. If they had shut it d