The burning Starlight extraction helicopter teetered on the very edge of the collapsing helipad. The freezing hurricane wind pushed violently against the wrecked chassis.Ares sprinted across the concrete, ignoring the screaming alarms and the massive fires. He grabbed the twisted metal of the side door and ripped it completely off its hinges."Elias!" Ares roared, looking into the smoke-filled cabin. "Sound off!""We are alive!" Elias coughed, kicking a jammed seat out of the way. Blood poured down the side of his face. He was dragging an unconscious Julian by the tactical vest."Clara?!" Ares demanded, his heart stopping."I am here," Clara gasped, crawling out from under the crushed co-pilot seat. Her face was pale, and she was clutching her ribs, but she was alive.Ares grabbed her hand and pulled her out of the burning wreckage. He held her tight for a fraction of a second. "Are you hurt?""I am fine," Clara coughed, gripping his black armor. "Ares, the nuclear timer! We have les

The escape pod breached the surface of the Pacific Ocean with a violent, heavy splash."Altitude zero. Surface impact confirmed," the submarine's AI stated mechanically. "Buoyancy systems engaged.""Open the main hatch," Ares ordered, his voice raw and exhausted."Negative," the AI replied. "Exterior atmospheric sensors detect high levels of electromagnetic interference and residual thermal radiation. Staying inside the sealed cabin is advised.""I said, open the hatch," Ares growled, slamming his working right hand against the manual release lever.The heavy glass canopy hissed and forcefully popped open. The freezing hurricane rain instantly poured into the small cabin. Ares ignored the cold. He reached up and tapped his helmet comms."Starlight Command, this is General Thorne. Do you read me?"Static."Elias. Julian. Anyone on that destroyer. Respond.""Gen... eral..." a broken, heavily distorted voice crackled through the earpiece."Elias!" Ares shouted, sitting up straight. Blind

The medical bay of the Starlight destroyer smelled of antiseptic and ozone. Ares sat shirtless on the stainless-steel examination table. A team of combat medics worked frantically to detach the melted, ruined remains of his left cybernetic arm from his shoulder socket.He refused the painkillers."General, your neural link is severely burned," the lead medic said, wiping sweat from his forehead. "If we disconnect the primary servo without anesthesia, the feedback loop will shock your nervous system.""Do it," Ares grunted, gripping the edge of the metal table with his right hand."Sir, I highly recommend—""I said do it," Ares commanded.The medic swallowed hard and clamped the heavy surgical pliers onto the main synthetic nerve cable. He pulled.Ares’s jaw clenched tight. His cybernetic right eye flared bright red. The metal table groaned as his right hand crushed the steel edge, but he did not make a single sound. The dead mechanical arm fell onto the floor with a heavy, metallic cl

The freezing wind howled against the reinforced glass of the penthouse safehouse in Geneva. Below them, the city lights flickered in the dark.Ares stood by the window. His left shoulder was fitted with a new, brutalist cybernetic arm—stripped of synthetic skin, displaying raw, matte-black titanium and exposed hydraulic cables. It was a temporary fix from the Starlight engineers, built entirely for war."They are here, General," Elias said, stepping out of the elevator into the dark living room.Ares turned around. Three men and one woman walked into the room. They wore plain civilian clothes, but their posture gave them away instantly. They were military intelligence. Top tier."Commander Thorne," the lead agent, a tall man with a scarred jaw named Cross, nodded. "Or is it General now?""Titles do not matter tonight, Cross," Ares said, walking over to the large tactical holotable in the center of the room. "Are you clean?""We dropped our agency trackers in the Atlantic," the female

The Geneva safehouse was dead silent except for the frantic clicking of keys.Clara stood over the central holotable, her fingers moving across the holographic projections at a blinding pace. Rows of encrypted binary code, firewall architectures, and satellite traces scrolled upward in a continuous green cascade.Ares stood beside her, his titanium left arm resting on the edge of the table. His jaw was locked tight."The encryption wrapper wasn't standard Architect tech," Clara said, her voice sharp and focused. "Marcus tried to make it look like his signature, but he was sloppy. He used a secondary proxy to route the signal through a civilian relay in Berlin.""So Marcus didn't send the message," Ares stated, his tone flat and heavy."No," Clara replied, tapping the holotable. The green code vanished, replaced by a complex cryptographic key shaped like a multi-layered geometric loop. "Whoever sent this bypassed Marcus's firewalls completely. They didn't hack the system from the outsi