Chapter 72: The Architect of the Crossfire"You think we came here without a relay?" Arga’s voice was steady, a stark contrast to the tremors racking his body. He held up his wrist, where the interface tether had been retracted into his sleeve. "The dead zone wasn't a prison. It was a Faraday cage I helped you build. We didn't need to break out to send the data; we only needed to bait you into thinking you were stopping us while the signal bled through your own maintenance conduits."The lead operative—Vane’s own second-in-command, a man known only as Kestrel—froze. The laser sight on his rifle dipped, just for a fraction of a second. That was all Mira needed. She stepped forward, her shadow stretching long and menacing against the blood-stained tiles of the medical facility."Check your local network, Kestrel," Mira challenged, her voice dripping with a mix of exhaustion and triumph. "Check the emergency broadcast frequencies. The ones your own commanders use to keep their secrets un

Chapter 74: The Sanctuary of Echoes"Are you really going to waste your last clean clip on us, Kestrel?" Arga asked, his voice cutting through the frantic static of the operative's comms like a razor. "Or are you going to run? Because from the sound of that director, he’s not looking for a scapegoat anymore. He’s looking for a head to put on a spike."Kestrel’s face, a roadmap of jagged scars and hardened cynicism, contorted. He looked from Arga to the flickering terminal, then back to his squad. His men were confused, their weapons wavering as the reality of the broadcast sank in. The "public sectors" meant the very people the paramilitary had been using as test subjects—the people who had just realized exactly what had been injected into their veins."Shut it off!" Kestrel roared, finally snapping out of his paralysis. He didn't point the rifle at Arga anymore; he spun it toward the ceiling, firing a short, thunderous burst into the junction box. Sparks showered the room, the scent

Chapter 76: The Neutrality of Iron"Dead," Kestrel breathed, the word sounding like a death sentence whispered in a tomb. He stared at the severed comms wire dangling from his earbud. The silence that filled the room was no longer the silence of impending combat; it was the hollow, terrifying quiet of a man who had suddenly realized he was standing on a bridge that had been ignited at both ends.Arga stepped forward, his boots clicking with rhythmic, terrifying confidence against the concrete. Behind him, the glow of the store’s inventory interface pulsed with a soft, steady blue light, contrasting sharply with the gloom of the trashed lab. "Your director is already sanitizing his own house, Kestrel. You’re just the trash he’s currently sweeping into the incinerator. If you pull that trigger, you’re not a soldier doing his duty anymore. You’re just a suicide note written in lead."Kestrel’s squad shifted, the men eyeing each other, their rifles drooping toward the floor. They weren't

Chapter 78: The Toll of the Shattered Shelf"I’m not here to shop, Arga," Kapten Vane rasped, his face a mask of jagged scars and suppressed fury. He gestured with a gloved hand, and his troopers stepped into the light of the shop’s flickering terminal, their rifles leveling directly at Arga’s chest. "I’m here to settle a debt. A debt written in the data your little pet project just leaked to the entire district."Mira stepped forward, her hand slipping toward the hidden holster at her thigh. "You’re about three minutes too late, Vane. The data is already circulating. Even if you kill us, you’re just proving the allegations true."Vane ignored her, his eyes locked on Arga. "The truth is a commodity, Merchant. Just like your batteries, your water, and your precious, overpriced scrap. And right now, the value of your life is plummeting toward zero."A sudden, sharp crack echoed through the room as a stray bullet from a skirmish outside pierced the thin, rotting wooden wall behind the co

Chapter 80: The Ledger of Echoes"Am I?" Arga repeated, his voice devoid of tremor. He didn't just tap the interface; he drove his fingertip into the blue-light projection, sliding a series of cascading command windows across the field of vision shared by every soul in the shop.The air suddenly thrummed with a low-frequency hum, a sound that vibrated not in the ears, but deep within the marrow of the soldiers’ bones. Above the counter, the holographic emitters—normally reserved for displaying product specs—screeched into life. They projected a towering, distortion-riddled image of a tactical map of the entire district, bleeding red icons of every active squad in the street outside, overlaid with the live audio feeds Arga had been silently harvesting since the fighting began."What is this?" Vane hissed, his confidence faltering for the first time as his own voice, recorded from an encrypted channel only moments ago, boomed back at him from the walls of the shop, amplified tenfold.“.