The phone rang eleven times. The President held it to his ear, his face draining of color with each unanswered tone, until the automated message clicked on. *"The number you have reached is not available. Please try your call again."He lowered the phone slowly, his hand trembling, and looked at Julian with the hollow, haunted expression of a man who had just realized he was alone."The Joint Chiefs don't answer," the President whispered. "The Secretary of Defense doesn't answer. My Chief of Staff doesn't answer." He swallowed hard, his Adam's apple bobbing. "She has them. All of them. She's been in the Situation Room for an hour, and she has my entire command structure sitting around that table like it's a goddamn board meeting."Julian's System overlay flickered again, the holographic display stuttering like a bad signal. The thermal map of the White House above them distorted, the heat signatures bleeding into one another, and for two seconds, Julian was blind. He blinked hard, an

Julian opened his eyes, and the world went white. The System's backdoor didn't activate with a chime or a notification. It detonated inside his skull like a grenade made of light, a searing, blinding flash that tore through every neural pathway in his brain and rewired them in real time. He screamed. Not a controlled, stoic grunt. A raw, animalistic howl that ripped from his throat and echoed off the Situation Room's steel walls, making the generals flinch and the Vice President stumble backward in his chair.His body locked. Every muscle seized simultaneously, his spine arching, his hands clawing at the air. The holographic overlay in his vision shattered into a thousand fragments, each shard displaying a different skill, a different diagnostic, a different interface, all of them collapsing and rebuilding at the same time. His God-Level Medical Skills dissolved and reformed. His Cyber Warfare interface melted and hardened. His Combat protocols broke apart and fused into something

The first bullet hit the SUV's rear windshield at seventy miles per hour, punching through the glass with a sharp, crystalline *CRACK* that showered the backseat in a spray of safety glass. Evelyn screamed and ducked, her hands flying over her head, while Cole wrenched the steering wheel hard to the left. The SUV fishtailed across the two-lane mountain road, tires shrieking against the wet asphalt, and Julian grabbed the door handle to keep from being thrown against the window."Contact rear!" Cole shouted, his eyes locked on the rearview mirror. "Two vehicles. Blacked-out trucks. No plates. They've been pacing us for six miles, and I just spotted the muzzle flash from the lead truck's passenger window."Julian spun in his seat, looking through the shattered rear glass. Two matte-black pickups were tearing up the mountain road behind them, their headlights off, their silhouettes barely visible against the dark tree line. The lead truck's passenger window was down, and a man in a tact

The cabin door swung open, and the cold mountain air hit Julian's face like a slap. Sergeant Kofi Mensah stood on the porch, a tall Ghanaian man in his fifties with a shaved head, a weathered face, and eyes that had seen too many wars to still be surprised by anything. He wore a plain dark jacket over a tactical vest, and his hands were raised, empty, palms out. Behind him, twelve Interpol officers fanned out in a loose semicircle, their weapons holstered, their faces watchful but not aggressive."Easy, Mr. Cross," Mensah said, his accent thick and measured. "I'm not here to put you in a cage. I'm here because your father made me promise."Julian didn't lower his guard. His needle kit was in his left hand, three silver needles between his fingers. Cole was behind him with the shotgun. Evelyn stood at the back of the cabin, her pistol aimed at the floor but ready. "My father has been dead for six years," Julian said. "And you just showed up at a cabin that doesn't exist on any map, s

The Nevada desert hit Julian like a wall of dry heat the moment he stepped out of the rusted pickup truck. The sun was a white disc nailed to a bleached sky, and the air shimmered above the cracked earth in thick, wavering lines. He stood at the edge of a dirt road that ended at a chain-link fence, beyond which sat a concrete building half-buried in sand, its windows boarded, its walls tagged with faded graffiti. The coordinates his father had written on the yellowed paper led here. To nothing. To a ruin in the middle of nowhere.Julian checked the gold overlay. The System mapped the building's footprint, scanning for power signatures, structural integrity, hidden sub-levels. The readout came back clean. No electricity. No heat signatures. No movement. Just concrete and sand and silence. But the overlay stuttered on the return, the holographic edges fraying for a half-second before snapping back. Julian blinked. The stabilizer was holding the architecture, but the skills themselves