Acid rain fell in a fine drizzle, forming shallow puddles that reflected the dim yellow glow of half-dead streetlights.The Steam Rail Station of Sector Two stood like the rotting skeleton of a giant whale in the middle of the city. Its glass roof had long since shattered. The steel tracks were rusted, buried beneath thorny weeds and heaps of derelict train cars that no longer had wheels. This place was the graveyard of Saint-Bastian’s past transportation system, far from the eyes of the law.Across the street, exactly ninety meters from the station’s pitch-black entrance, Elias’s armored van sat in silence. The engine was off. The headlights were dark. It blended seamlessly into the shadow of the old factory building beside it.Inside the van, Elias leaned back in his new wheelchair. The ventilator on its back hissed softly, feeding him oxygen. His eyes were closed. The Ghost Rot veins along his neck and left eye pulsed slowly, priming themselves to fire."I’ve deployed the drone, El

BAMMMM, KRAAAAK!The red brick wall on the eastern side of the old steam train station exploded inward.Sloane’s two-ton armored van tore through it like a meteor striking earth. Its reinforced steel nose crushed the rotting bricks, blasting red dust into the air before slamming hard onto the station platform with a high-pitched scream of strained suspension. Debris scattered, clanging against the van’s armored body.Inside, Elias was violently shaken in his wheelchair. The safety straps kept his broken body from being thrown free. His breathing came fast behind the oxygen mask. Blood from the earlier necrotic backlash still dripped from his chin. His red eyes stared in a mix of horror and awe at what Sloane had just done.Outside, the Black Dog commander, who had been seconds from executing Kael Thorne, spun around. He and his four remaining men froze, stunned by the metal beast bearing a “Pipe Cleaning Service” decal crashing through the station wall.Ren had not lied. The Ghost’s v

At three in the morning, the acid rain outside had stopped, but the air inside the underground bunker felt suffocatingly thick.Kael Thorne stood before the holographic map table. His steel zip ties had been cut by Sloane. With his index finger, he slid the display, marking several points across the Upper Sector.“Gideon doesn’t store his weapons in some rundown warehouse. Too easy to raid,” Kael explained, glancing at Sloane and Elias. “Ammo, RPGs, flamethrowers, everything moves in disguised convoys once a week. They come in through the port, then take underground routes to his headquarters in Sector Four. If we intercept those logistics, his militia runs dry in two days.”Sloane nodded, arms folded. “Cut off the supply line before we take the head. Makes sense. You’ve got the routes?”“I still have backdoor access to street cams through the police system, at least until they fully purge my credentials. I can predict tomorrow night’s route,” Kael replied.In the corner of the room,

Kael Thorne slipped out through the maintenance door behind the restroom just as the invisible necrotic wave struck the room.On the VIP restroom’s tiled floor, Sergeant Miller’s stiff corpse twitched faintly. The deep garrote wound around his neck stopped bleeding. His rigid spine jerked upright. The dead police aide rose in broken, unnatural motions. The panic that once filled his eyes had vanished, replaced by empty white voids, the pure emptiness of the death hacker controlling him.Inside the armored van, Elias smiled.A familiar chill wrapped around his brain. Eighty meters was his comfort zone. He wasn’t forcing the signal. He controlled this corpse casually, like a maestro returning to the keys of his favorite piano.Elias guided Miller’s body toward the restroom mirror. Using the corpse’s hands, he straightened the collar of the police uniform, hiding the deep wire marks around the neck. Then he grabbed Miller’s sling bag, now carrying Sloane’s nerve gas canister, and walked

A light acid rain drizzled over the shattered rooftops of Sector Three. The water did not feel cold. The raindrops that night felt warm, almost like fresh blood, because the wind carried an unbearable wave of heat from the western horizon.Elias sat silently in his tactical wheelchair at the edge of the rooftop. A clear oxygen tube rested beneath his nose, hissing in rhythm with his heavy breathing. His left eye, fractured by the black veins of Ghost Rot, stared straight toward the horizon. The sky above Saint-Bastian was no longer stained with dirty gray. Tonight, it was blood red.In the distance, nearly five kilometers from their position, three apartment blocks burned violently. Towering flames clawed at the clouds, creating pillars of black smoke that swallowed half the city. Fire truck sirens echoed faintly through the night, but none of them could get close.Beside Elias, Kael Thorne gripped the concrete railing so tightly his fingers turned pale white. The former detective sta